"christopher gwinn" <
sonno-@...> wrote:
original article:
http://www.egroups.com/group/cybalist/?start=388
> junkWe 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.
Saule by no means is masculine just because it's ending, e: (e with a
dot in Lithuanian script)<*ia:, indicates the feminine gender. Maybe
your source provided you with an incorrect spelling?
> 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.
The cause of such a neutrality in OChS (as well as in other Slavic
languages as well) is an innovation - an old word of the stem *soln-
was suffixed with an -ik-o to form a diminutive of the neuter gender
(and the root was weakened to *s@...). It seemes the gender of the
original word is not known.