Re: Odp: The Earth Goddess.

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 543
Date: 1999-12-11

junk
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Odegard
To: cybalist@eGroups.com
Sent: Saturday, December 11, 1999 7:28 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: The Earth Goddess.

 

Sabine writes:
 
We have in Crete a recurring number of placenames of the pre-Greek kind ending in '-inthos', the Anatolian suffix meaning 'belonging to'.
Mark comments:

Someone clarify this for me. I remember reading some time ago that the suffix -inth is non-Indo-European (tacking on an -os, of course, makes it a nice Greek noun).
 
I should also add that 'Semele' is borrowed into Greek via Thracian and/or Phyrgian. This accords rather well with the 'Asiatic' origin for Dionysus.
 
Sabine, Mark:
 
If there is an Anatolian possessive suffix similar to -inthos, I've never come across it. The closest Hittite matches I can think of are -ant and -want, but we'd run into insurmountable problems if we tried to equate them with -inthos. On the other hand, the theory that it is non-IE is based on negative evidence: it does not seem to have obvious IE cognates, though, on the other hand, it has no non-IE cognates either. If we propose that it was borrowed from an unknown non-IE source, we're explaining ignotum per ignotum. I prefer to remain agnostic about the origin of -inthos until someone comes up with a more interesting proposal.
 
Semele is an adaptation of zemel- a satemic Thracian reflex of *ghem-el-. Phrygian was IMO non-satemic. It has a palatal reflex of *gh before front vowels (as in many kentum languages including English) but not elsewhere; and the reflex in question was spelt with the Greek zeta, not sigma (I suppose it was something similar to the sound of English j). The Phrygian term for 'Mother Earth' is Gdan Ma (< *ghdho:m metathesised from *dhgho:m, as in Greek). Some member of this group may disagree, but I think both ancient Macedonian and Phrygian should be included in the Hellenic branch -- Macedonian as a close cousin of Greek and Phrygian as a more distant relative. I can't see any real evidence for a "Thraco-Phrygian" cluster.
 
Piotr