Re: Odp: Glen acknowledges Agricola as masculine, Mea culpa

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1054
Date: 2000-01-22

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Glen Gordon
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Friday, January 21, 2000 10:27 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: Glen acknowledges Agricola as masculine, Mea culpa

Hmm, wouldn't *kWol- be properly "turn" rather than "attend" since it is 
found in the word for "wheel". Thus "turning (the soil of) the field" or 
"tilling the field"?
It's the same root as in *kWe-kWl-o- 'wheel', but *kWel- meant 'go round in circles', not 'turn' in the sense you suggest. With so many languages at your fingertips you should know that Latin colare means 'cultivate, tend, attend to'. It may also mean 'till', but the original sense was 'go about/around sth'. 
I'm going to think about this suffix. So... a suffix -h (*-H2) could be used 
for both animate and inanimate in IE? May I ask what the plural would have 
been for *kWolah?
Wait for my posting on IE gender. The attested plural is everywhere the same as for feminines:
 
Latin agricol-a   :  agricol-ae 'farmer'
Greek toksót-e:s ( < *-a:+s)   :  toksót-ai 'archer'
Old Polish wojewod-a  :  wojewod-y (< *-a:s), 'chief officer of a duke'
 
The Latin and Greek plurals in question happen to be innovated (like those of ordinary thematic masculines; the pluralising *-i is taken from the pronoun system). The IE plural was *-ax-es (the normal N.pl. of consonantal stems in the animate class), contracted to *-a:s after the loss of the laryngeal. BTW all the case endings are the same for *a:-masculines and *a:-feminines.
 
Piotr