Re: Odp: The Gender of the Sun.

----- Original Message -----

From: Christopher Gwinn

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Thursday, December 02, 1999 8:41 PM

Subject: [cybalist] Re: The Gender of the Sun.

We have several parallels to the Vedic figures Surya and Surya' (long -A- - a feminine ending): The feminine Surya' is notable for being involved with divine twins and horsemen, the Asvins.

 

In Baltic myth, you have Saule - who is  a masculine sun - and "Saule's daughter" who is involved with the  twin "Sons of God" (Dievas Deli)

who seem to be cognate with the Vedic Asvins.

 

In Celtic we have two Solar figures - there is the masculine Sonno(s) known from the calendar of Coligny (though, no inscriptions yet discovered attest to Sonnos' divinity) and we have the feminine Sulis - who is glossed as Minerva - and is the patron of the healing waters at Bath, England. Sonno is from Suelnos and Sulis is from SauelieH (equivalent of Vedic Surya' - the daughter of Surya). The Celtic Minerva is normally paired with the Celtic Apollo - who has a solar nature (cf. Belenos Apollo "shining one" et al.)

 

Even Greece has a probable femine match to Helios - Helen of Troy, sister to the twins Kastor and Polydeukes.

 

There exist in Germanic languages two words for the sun: Sol- and Sonn-/Sun-. This seems to parallel the Celtic forms (Sonno(s) and Sulis) - so perhaps there were masculine and feminine aspects of the sun. In traditional Germanic folklore, we have a feminine sun who is opposed to a masculine moon (cf the English "Man in the Moon"). I believe that there were likely originally masculine and feminine aspects to both the moon and the sun.

----- Original Message -----

From: Mark Odegard

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Thursday, December 02, 1999 1:59 PM

Subject: [cybalist] The Gender of the Sun.

The PIE word for sun is something like *sawel (the transcriptions from authority to authority vary greatly). A laryngeal of some sort closes the first syllable. The word is very very old indeed; it's often compared to a remarkably similar word appearing in Semitic (is there a Uralic cognate?), and shows up in just about all the daughter languages. English sun and Greek helios are cognates.

What I find interesting is what grammatical gender it takes in the daughter languages. In Germanic, it's feminine, and  she  is personified as a goddess; compare this to Greek and  Latin-Romance where it's masculine and  he  is personified as a god. Indo-Iranian has mixed evidence; it's either neuter or masculine. In Old Church Slavonic, it's neuter; I don't know about the other Slavic languages, but suspect this is the case too. My source (EIEC at this instant) does not explicitly state the gender in Baltic, but  she is a goddess, and I would presume Balto-Slavic had it in the feminine too -- which makes for an interesting shift when we encounter Slavic. The evidence in Celtic is a little harder; the feminine-gender word survives in Old Irish as a term for 'eye'. Presumably, Hittite has it in the animate gender (does it?).

I wonder. Can we speak of an isogloss here? Balto-Slavic, Germanic and Celtic opposed to the other daughters?

My sources are less explicit about the moon, but in Germanic it's masculine as I recall. I don't remember if there is a Germanic moon-god, however.

All of this leads to some interesting comparative Indo-European mythology, but I'll reserve these thoughts for later.

Mark.
 

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Given its ablaut pattern the SUN word must be one of those elemental terms (like FIRE, EARTH, DAWN, possibly also SKY and WATER) that were primarily neuters but could also be personified (e.g. as the name of a deity) and transferred to the animate gender. The animate variant was formally identical with the neuter collective (augmentative? -- with a shift of stress to the final syllable) and has in some cases replaced the original neuter in the daughter languages. E.g. only Hittite preserves the neuter form of the EARTH word, though WATER and FIRE are commonly attested as neuters. The animate forms yield non-Anatolian feminines or masculines -- variably and not always consistently, e.g. OE sunne is feminine and mo:na is masculine, with a reversal of the Latin pattern (sol m., luna f.).

 

I'd reconstruct the 'sun' word as *sax-wl ~ *sx-wo:l (phonetically *suwo:l, cf. Aryan *s(u)wa:r). Greek he:lios is from the vrddhied adjective *saxwe:l-(i)jos. The unstressed variant of *sx-wo:l developed into *sul- /*su:l- plus various derivational suffixes. Germanic *sunn-en- (a nasal stem) probably contains assimilated *sul-n-, similar to Slavic *su:l-n-iko (with a diminutive suffix which turned a consonantal stem into a thematic neuter; Russian solnce).

 

For a root with a very similar segmental make-up, cf. *pax-wr ~ *px-wo:r ~ *pxur- ~ *pxu:r- 'fire', with some extra heteroclitic forms based on *pax-wen-. Hittite has pahhur (archaic pahhuwar), Gen. pahhuenas etc.

 

Piotr