From: Tommy Tyrberg
Message: 425
Date: 1999-12-05
----- 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
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