On 2006-08-21 17:56, Daniel J. Milton wrote:
> The IE root for "sun" always struck me as surprisingly complex, at
> least in the disyllabic form, such as Watkins' *sawel-.
> Does seeing it as *sah2wl- change the situation?
It must have been morphologically complex once, and the most likely
morphological segmentation is *//seh2-wel-//, where the second morpheme
may be a variant of *-w(e)n/r-, forming heteroclitic deverbal nouns;
note the consonant alternation in *sáh2-wl., obl. *s(h2)-wén-, an
original neuter noun with the animate (personified?) byform *s(h2)wó:l,
obl. *sh2ul-. Formally, it's parallel to *páh2-wr./*ph2-wén-,
*ph2wó:r/*ph2ur- 'fire'.
Piotr