Re: Poets, linguists and countrymen. Lend me your ears...

--- In cybalist@egroups.com, "stefan" <stefan@...> wrote:

> Yes it did. . I did not take part in discussion though I noted with
> some surprise that the Balto-Slavic thunder-god Perkunas (Lith) or
> Perun (Slav) wasn't mentioned.
> But, perhaps, you are talking about a somewhat different word. There
> are various hypotheses about Perkunas.
>
> It may be derived from PIE "per(k)" (Ivanov 1974, Toporov1985) or
> "per+g(a,) (Muehlenbach 1904, Endrelins 1951) and there three
> possible explanations of the name:
> (a) god of thunder and rain (b) god of height, mountain
> (Gothic "fairguni") (c) god of oaks (perk-us cf Lat. quercus)
> Take your pick.
>

Ivanov of 1974 and Toporov of 1985 both were high-class professionals (the last being the author of one of two Prussian etymological dictionaries), but I've always looked at their Balto-Slavic enthusiasm prudently, not to say sceptically. If Proto-Slavic has *PerunU and Lith. has Perku_'nas (Latv. Perkons), it's easy to leverage magic parentheses to explain perk-:*per- alternation, but it explains nothing. Again, Slavic *u (normally < *o(:)u or a(:)u) is not a direct counterpart of Lith. u_ (< u:). Possessives like Slavic *Peryn'I 'of PerunU'(<*peru_n-i-) look like vrddhization of **PerUnU, not PerunU. In my opinion, this deity (at least his name) was rather borrowed by Slavs from Balts than constitute their common IE inheritage.

As for per+g(a,), supported by Endrelins (Endzelins ?) in 1951, I can hardly understand what this mysterious a, means and how this -g(a,) components could be interpreted.

Lat. quercus is nice, but as Piotr (?) has already noted, Baltic languages know only *ong^o:l- as designation of an oak. A sorta problem.

Sergei