From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 9066
Date: 2001-09-05
--- In cybalist@..., "Sergejus Tarasovas" <S.Tarasovas@...> wrote:
> As I can conclude from this and some previous posts, you seem to be
a
> Winterian - a one who assumes Winter's law. But this law has never
> been universally acknowledged, I would give him a status of
tentative
> guess. How do you account for, eg, *voda and a lot of other
examples?
Actually, Winter's Law is quite well substantiated, and accounts
better than any other proposal for such items as *e^d- 'eat', *se^d-
'sit', *nagU 'naked', *a^zU 'I', ablUko 'apple', vydra 'otter' and
many more, traditionally explained by proposing arbitrary vrddhi not
found in other branches. Exceptions are not many, and some are
explicable, though there is a really troublesome residue too, the
existence of *voda being probably the main reason why some IEists
hesitate to accept Winter's Law. Apparently, either there is another,
still unrecognised, complicating factor at play (like Verner's Law
after Grimm's), or Slavic *voda is not such a straightforward reflex
of *wod(r)- as it might seem to be. Ranko Matasovic' (a silent member
of our list) has published an article trying to pin down the exact
conditioning of Winter's Law. I don't agree with his conclusions but
share his interest in that topic.
> I can add *sUmIrtI 'death' < 'proper death' to your collection (<
su-
> * 'good' < 'proper' < 'suus, belonging to our tribe etc' + *mrt-i-
> 'death (in general)'), cf. Lith. sa`vo mirtimi` mir~ti 'to die a
> natural death, lit. to die one's death' and Slavic *svojo,
> sUmIrtIjo, -mIrti 'the same'.
A good idea, thanks.
> As for *dus-dju-, with all my respect to Trubetskoi, unnaturalness
of
> this reconstruction has always made me laugh. A rain is bonum
> agricolae, rather than malum. I would rather bet on *dUz^d^z^I <
> *dUzgjI < *duzg-j-o- 'patterer', of expressive, if not slangish,
> origin, cf. Lith. duzge.'ti 'to whirr; to patter'.
No need to laugh, *dus-dju- is parallelled in other branches, e.g.
Skt. dur-divas-a- and dur-din-a- 'rainy day' (this is my whole
point). For more examples of *dus-diw/n- 'rainy day' and *h1su-diw/n-
'nice day, fair weather' in Indo-European, see Msge #2837.
> As for *sUdorvU, I don't see any reason to egage Indo-Iranian: I
see
> no problems in Slavic etymology < '(like a) healthy tree'.
But where's Slavic *doru- or *dorv-o-? All that we have is the
derivatives *derv-o- and *dr(U)v-a. Also, *su- is extremely
productive in Indo-Iranian but at best marginal in Slavic. But
Sanskrit has *su-da:ru 'good wood/timber' < *h1su-doru, as well as
da:rva- < *do:rw-o- (with adjectival vrddhi) 'wooden'.
Piotr