On 2010-06-24 18:45, megalith6 wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> Can anyone please give me the *earliest* root for this word including
> its meaning and the grammatical profile of the root.
The _root_ is *djeu- 'shine' (itself probably an "extension" of *dei-,
cf. *deih2-, with a similar meaning, reflected in Gk. and Ved., but such
derivatives seem to belong to some pre-PIE stratum). The name of the Sky
God (literally 'he who shines', an agent noun) is a typical root noun,
with a lengthened-vowel nominative *die:u-s (variably mono- or
disyllabic, i.e phonetically with initial [dj-] or [di(j)-]) and with
zero-grade "weak cases" such as the genitive *diw-ós. The accusative was
originally *dieu-m, but in this phonetic environment the diphthong was
smoothed out already in the protolanguage, yielding *die:m, hence the
somewhat irregular declension in the daughter languages. The term "root
noun" means that the stem of the noun was simply the bare root without
any stem-forming suffixes attached. The inflectional endings were added
directly to it.
Nobody can give you the *earliest* form of any prehistoric morpheme,
unless you mean "the earliest *reconstructable* form".
Best regards,
Piotr