Re: *ka/unt- etc, new conquests, a whole bundle of them

From: Torsten
Message: 65235
Date: 2009-10-14

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "andythewiros" <anjarrette@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Torsten" <tgpedersen@> wrote:
> ><snip>
> > Bundle (sort of).
>
> So was the idea of 'ten' 'a bundle of fingers', or was a 'hand' 'a
> bundle of fingers', or 'the bundled fingers (fist)', or something
> else?

See below.

>
> >
> > And the really interesting bundles:
> > *k^mtóm and de-k^mto- (too large in Pokorny for a quote).
>
> Where are these in Pokorny? I looked for *k^em- and *k^m(t)- but
> could not find them. Under *de-k^mto- I only found the following
> note:

That's where my OCR'ed paper Pokorny has them too.

>

> > And the answer to Andrew's question about the "ten" word:
> >
> > Russian (and other Slavic languages, AFAIK) has
> > dvenadtsat', trinadtsat' etc lit.
> > "two on ten", "three on ten" etc meaning
> > "twelve", "thirteen" etc.
> >
> > Suppose PIE had 'dwó do komt', 'trí do komt' vel sim. (cf. the
> > Lat. -gint-, Gk. -kont- for decades), then by false division
> >*dé-komt- "ten". Voilà!
> >
> Great, but did *komt- mean "bundle of fingers" or "bundle of hands"
> or something else?

More like "handful".

> Why not just "hand", and then go along with Pokorny in making
> *dek^mt- a reduced form of *dwe/dwo k^mt (or *k^omt)?

I like my proposal better. The *kom-t- thing means "ten" in Volga-Finnic and "hundred" and "decade" in IE. Nowhere does it mean "five". Obviously it must mean "group" (of something) in in a field where decadic numbers were preferred. And that was in the field of military venture / hunting.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/65159


> Maybe Gmc 'hand' was originally a consonant stem, and then became
> an u-stem because of the accusative endings -um and -uns, like
> Gothic <fo:tus>?

Note the section names
'Die maskulinen u-Stämme mit grammatischem Wechsel'
and
'U-stämmige Adjektiva mit grammatischem Wechsel'
in
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/62159
That list contains several I know to be loans (eg. plough) and I suspect they all are, which would mean that Proto-Proto-Germanic had no mobile-accent nouns (but did have mobile-accent verbs). One might therefore suspect the -ú- to be not IE, and further an adjective-forming suffix in the donor language, so that *hanðu- (< ** kantú-) was originally an adjective to **kant-.


Torsten