Terminology (Re: Piotr-)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tolgs001" <george.st@...> wrote:

> >>Can "*dentu" in your opinion interpreted as
> >>an equivalent of Lat. "gens"? If so, why?
> >
> >I don't know what *dentu- is extracted from, so I can't comment

on

> >that aspect. As to the phonetics, I'm surmising a development as

in

> >Albanian, g^ > ð, though it could also be an affricate; [_]
> >
> >Richard.
>
> I was asking only because of the word "dentu"
> written (probably in the 12th c.) by the
> Hungarian chronicler "anonymus P.", a king
> Béla's notary.
>
> Namely in this syntagm: <dentumoger>. In the
> sense the people who were the nucleus of the
> Magyar nation. The chronicler maintains this
> was the ethnonym when they lived in "Scythia"
> (i.e. in what's today Russia and Ukraine).
>
> AFAIK, this <dentu> has no meaning and usage in
> Hungarian, nor in other neighboring languages.
> And I gather that the author must've found the
> term in the internal materials/traditions of
> the Hung. royal dynasty (which are lost). Now...
> what if this term is some PIE linguistic
> relic? (Unless there's some other explanation,
> in some Turkic or Iranic idiom which I'm not
> aware of.)
>
> One example:
>
> <<Gens itaque hungarorum fortissima et bellorum
> laboribus potentissima, ut superius diximus, __de
> gente scithica, que per ydioma suum proprium
> dentumoger dicitur__ (,) duxit originem.
>
> George

************
I think that PIE *g^enH1- derives in Alb. <dhen> 'sheep', through an
intermediate stage *dzan-i, because <dhen> I believe is singularized
plural of <dhani>, where /i/ caused Umlaut or metaphony of the first
syllable. Otherwise, *dent- (*/en/ > /ân/ in Gegë and /ën/ in Toskë
dialect, cf. also *g^enter 'dhândër/dhëndër' from the same root), to
my opinion, is proto-from of Alb. participle dhânë/dhënë 'given,
produced' of the verb _dha_ < *do- 'to give', which is suppletive
form of the verb _jap_ < *H2ep-, oldest form of the root *op- 'to
produce'.

Konushevci