Re: [tied] Scythian Cognates

>I don't know the etymology of Latin battu-/ba:tu-; the dictionaries
>I have consulted do not specify the Celtic source.

I believe it is ascribed to Gaulish - at least in P. Billy's
Thesaurus Linguae Gallicae battuere is given as Gallo-Latin (note
Gaulish andebata "gladiator", which should mean something like "great
striker" or perhaps "strikes down").

>There are similar words meaning 'stick, bat' in Goidelic, Old French
> and Middle English, but it's hard to tell who borrowed what, when,
>and from whom; the tendency of /b/ to occur in 'heavy blow'
>onomatopoeia
>(e.g. English boom, bang) only confounds the issue. MacBain
>reconstructs a Celtic root *ba:- 'hit, slay', referring Old Irish
>bás 'death' there, but I wonder if the latter is not a euphemistic
>derivative of *gWah2- 'go' ('going away'). We should really ask a
>specialist in Celtic -- Chris Gwinn could help us out, perhaps.

I will need to do some more research on this - off the top of my
head, I think that it either derives from a PIE *bha:t- "to hit" (or
perhaps even from *gwosd- "nail/penis", with the sense of something
that pierces? I am not sure about these roots).

- Chris Gwinn