Re: Odp: The Gender of the Sun.

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1718
Date: 2000-02-28

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Sergejus Tarasovas
To: cybalist@eGroups.com
Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2000 9:00 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: The Gender of the Sun.

"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.
Judging from its heteroclitic behaviour, the SUN stem may well have been an original neuter which could become animate (and adapted accordingly) when personified. BTW it's neuter throughout Slavic, but its form (especially the accentuation) suggests *sul-n-iko- or *sl:n-iko (the comparative evidence favours the former), rather than a short syllabic liquid (if that's what *s@... amounts to). Something like *seHwl-/*sHwel-/*s(H)ul- seems to be a reasonable bottom-line reconstruction. If you feel so inclined you may browse through our early postings to find some more comments on the SUN word; the one you cite was not the only one.
 
Piotr