Re: [tied] Re: hades

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 20814
Date: 2003-04-06

----- Original Message -----
From: "george knysh" <gknysh@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 06, 2003 3:44 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: hades


> *****GK: Good opportunity to ask. Baltic Perkunas is usually identified with Slavic Perun and with one of the alternative appellatives of the Indic Indra. But whence the "k" in Perkunas? ******

There was a long discussion of this long, long ago, in Middle Cybalist times. Plague upon Yahoo groups and the "search archives" restrictions.

There must have been some confusion between the PIE Rock/Thunder God whose name or epithet was based on *per- (or *perg-) 'strike, pierce' (*perwo:n and the like), and a (North European?) deity associated with oaks and/or other tall trees (and whose functions had to do with life and fertility), *perkWu-h1(o)n-. To aggravate matters, there were several *per- roots in PIE, especially the ones meaning 'pass, lead, bring across' and 'forward, through' (quite possibly some of them were ultimately members of the same polysemous etymon). Their homonymy facilitated various folk-etymological associations and secondary identifications, at the same time obscuring the actual etymology of various "Per-" theonyms.

Piotr