From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1217
Date: 2000-01-28
----- Original Message -----From: Christopher GwinnSent: Thursday, January 27, 2000 11:23 PMSubject: [cybalist] Re: Odp: The Wends and the VenediAs far as I have learned, Uindo- "white" is from PIE *Uedi- "see" with an infixed nasal, thus "seen/appeared."
You mean PIE *weid-. This is groping in the darkness. The problem is that the nasal infix is not something that can be added at will to get the desired effect. It's a device for deriving the present tense stem in certain verb classes. The form *wind(-e)- is rather shakily attested (only Sanskrit has vind-a-ti 'find' [root vid-] as far as I know); what we normally find in IE is the unembellished *weid- for 'see, notice' and the unreduplicated perfect *woid-xa etc. for 'know'. The former has been replaced in Celtic, the latter occurs in Welsh gwybod 'know(ledge)' < *woid-+*bhu-ta:-. Old Irish has fiss < *wid-tu- 'knowledge'.I don't think verbal *wind- has ever existed in Celtic, but even if it had, a deverbal adjective related to it would be unlikely to contain a nasal infix anyway (cf. Latin vinco but victus, tango but tactus). For hypothetical 'seen' or 'apparent' one would expect someting like the Latin pp. vi:sus < *wid-to-. Other derived adjectives and nouns are also possible, such as *weid-o-s 'appearance, view', which occurs in Baltic and Slavic, but here we find no infixed nasal either. I still think Celtic *wind-o- 'white' is an enigmatic word without secure cognates (I'm saying this with due respect, as we may be discussing your surname ;-)).Piotr