Re: *Nemes-

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 487
Date: 1999-12-08

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Gwydionash@...
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 1999 9:23 AM
Subject: [cybalist] *Nemes-

The EIEC lists the following:   "*nemes- "(sacred) grove."  OIr neimed 
"sacred grove, sanctuary," Lat nemus "wood with pasture land for cattle, 
sacred grove," OSax nimidas "sacred grove," Grk nemos, "wooded pasture, 
glade."...The distrubution of solid cognates indicates a word of the west and 
center of the IE world."

Could someone provide further information on the root *nemes, more 
specifically if the root changes in the oblique cases, if the nominative 
would be *nemes, what declension it belongs to?  The way the form is cited is 
confusing me for some reason because of the hyphen after the "s", and the 
only form I can think of offhand that is cited in a similar manner is *yewes- 
"law", where I thought the root changed to *yewer- in the oblique cases 
(based on the Latin oblique stem iur-, but I think I may be wrong).  Based on 
the Old Irish and Old Saxon evidence, as well as the Gaulish nemeton, I 
thought the root might change to a dental voiced or unvoiced stop (either *t 
or *d).  

Chad Brown
 
The hyphen AFTER the "s" is OK. It means that the root is best attested as an *es-stem. Such stems were NEUTERS despite their final *-os in the N. sg. That *-os was the ending of the stem, not an inflection; cf. Lat. opus, opera or tempus, tempora (from *-os, *-os-a through Latin "rhotacism" affecting intervocalic *s). The *es-neuter paradigm was highly productive in PIE. There are some traces of an older, irregular mobile-stress pattern from which it had developed, but by the end of the common IE period the paradigm had been regularised and vowel alternations in *es-neuters were restricted to the stem-final *-es-/*-os. The declension looked like this:
 
N./Acc. sg. nemos            N./Acc. pl. nemes-ax
Gen. sg. nemes-os or nemes-es            Gen. pl. nemes-om
Dat. sg. nemes-ei
Los. sg. nemes-i
etc.
 
Well-known examples include *gen(h)os 'family, clan, kind' (Latin genus, Gk. genos, Skt. janas), *nebhos '(cloudy?)sky; cloud, mist' (Russian nebo [pl. nebesa], Gk. nephos, Skt. nabhas, Hittite nepis), *klewos 'fame' (Russian slovo 'word', Gk. kleos, Skt. śravas). Es/os was frequently added to verbal roots (e.g. *klewos is derived from *kleu- 'listen' and *genhos from *genh- 'beget'), but sometimes the base is unattested or doubtful. If you refer back to our discussion of PIE quasi-infinitives, the neuter-forming *-(e)s was one of the formations mentioned in that context. *Nem- is clearly deverbative (cf. the related stem *nem-eto- and Gk. nemein, nomad-), though the verb is less well attested than the noun. It must have meant something like 'go herding', hence 'a clearing or glade used as a pasture'. The religious meaning is secondary, and its occurrence in Germanic is probably due to the cultural influence of the Celts.
 
Latin ius ~ iuris is from *jeus- (with rhotacism in the oblique cases), an archaic *s-neuter; os 'mouth' is a similar case.
 
Old English still had some residual neuters of this type, declined like cild ~ cildru 'child ~ children' or lomb ~ lombru 'lamb, lambs'. Like Latin, OE had been affected by rhotacism affecting some of the inherited s's (PIE *-esax > PGmc. *-izo: > OE -ru). The only surviving example is children (a "double plural" from Middle English child-er plus an extra plural suffix borrowed from the ox ~ oxen type).
 
Piotr