06-09-03 05:23, Daniel J. Milton wrote:
> It's Latin 'cometes' from Greek '(aster) kometes' "hairy star".
> 'Kome' "hair" is one of those Greek words with no apparent cognates
> in other languages.
> (Unless the Greeks, during the out-of-India dispersion of the
> Indo-Europeans, brought it along from the Telugu, and forgot it
> meant "horn", not "hair"?)
> Dan
The etymology of <kóme:> is unclear, but it would be premature to write
it off it as "one of those Greek words". Since it means 'long head hair'
and nearly always functions as a mass noun, it can be analysed as
etymologically a collective in *-ah2 of hypothetical *kómos (which would
account for the accent: o-grade feminine derivatives of verb roots were
oxytone, so <kóme:> can't belong to that category). One possible cognate
is Russ. kom (< *komU < *komos) meaning 'lump, clod' and usually
assigned to the IE root *kem(H)- 'press together, squeeze, confine'.
*kóm(H)-ah2 might therefore have meant 'bundle (of locks, strands)'.
Piotr