Re: Words versus Roots

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>"
<tgpedersen@...> wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham
> <richard.wordingham@...>" <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "P&G" <petegray@...> wrote:
> >
> > A word that came up yesterday, in the context of Sanskrit
> > putra 'son', is the whole family of forms related to

English 'son';

> > looking at Pokorny, PIE seems to have had a collection of stems,
> > namely *su:nu-, *sunu-, *suto-, *suyu- 'son' and possibly even
> *suka:
> > > Welsh hogen 'maiden'. I suppose one solution is to suggest

that

> > these 'son' stems are independently derived (or moved from poetic
> to
> > normal usage) from the verb *sew 'to bear (a child)' and are not
> PIE
> > at all.
>
> Or *sw- "our side" again. I have played before with the idea that

it

> goes back to a society divided into two halves (moieties,

phratries)

> on both side of a river, as in Austronesian. Thus 'son', 'sister'

and

> the various in-laws (German Schwäger, etc) is from this
> side, 'brother' from the far side.
>
> Even odder: 'sow', 'swine' is from this side, 'boar', German 'Eber'
> from the far side.
>
> In order to include the "give birth" idea: *sw- means "of our

stock"?

>

from
Émile Benveniste:
Indo-European Language & Society
2:1 The Vocabulary of kinship
"
... The position of the sistyer is defined by reference to a social
unit, the <swe>, in the bosom of the 'Grossfamilie', where the
masculine members have their place. Later on, at the apprpriate time,
we shall study more closely the sense of <swe>.
Unlike te word for "sister" we heave no means of analysing the name
for "brother", apart from isolating the final <-ter> itself, as in
the case of "mother" and "father". But we can offer no explanation
for the root *bHra:-. It is useless to connect it with the root *bHer-
of Lat. <fero:> because we know of no use of the forms of this root
which would lead to the sense of "brother". We are not in a position
to interpret *bHra:ter any more than we any more than we can *p&ter
and *ma:ter
"
You should have read Austronesian, Émile!

> Torsten