Re: The Gender of the Sun.

----- Original Message -----

From: Sergejus Tarasovas

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, February 29, 2000 9:36 AM

Subject: [cybalist] Re: Odp: The Gender of the Sun.

I promised Sergei to explain the matter of Slavic accentual evidence for an originally long vowel in *su(:)ln-iko- 'sun'. I hope the diacritics are visible in UTF-8 encoding.

My hesitation was caused by the fact that the accentuation of standard Serbian (sûnce) and Slovene (sôlnce) seems to indicate a historically light nucleus (cf. vûk, vôlk ‘wolf’ < *wlk^wos as opposed e.g. to S-Cr. dűg ‘long’ <*dlHg^hos with a short falling accent representing a shortened PSl acute; all South Slavic speakers on the list please excuse my crude substitutes for the correct accent marks). Also in Czech we have slunce as opposed to dlouhý ‘long’. However, words like sôlnce and vôlk can’t be compared directly, as the former contained a medial yer which could affect the intonation of the accented vowel (producing a lengthened ‘neo-circumflex’ in place of an old acute). In fact, the standard forms are ambiguous and don’t provide conclusive evidence either way. According to some Slavicists (e.g. Vaillant) it is the dialectal material that tips the scale in favour of *su:ln-; they arrive at such a reconstruction directly by analysing forms like Čakavian súnce or the rare Štokavian genitive sűnācā

as indicating a historical acute: *sÚln-Ice (U, I = yers) < *súln-iko < *su:ln-iko(m). I wouldn’t call this VERY strong evidence, but perhaps it makes *su:ln- marginally more likely than *suln-.

If the SUN word was a typical consonantal neuter, the original declension paradigm have included forms like the N/A sg. *saHwl, Gen (heteroclitic) *sHwlnós (perhaps beside *sH(u)wenos, *sH(u)welnos, the latter visible in Indo-Iranian derivatives). According to my own view on how neuters were transformed into animates, the ‘personified SUN’ word would have been *sHuwo:l, Gen *sHu(:)lós; expected derivatives would include such divine names as *sHu(:)ljos (> Sūrya-) and the vrddhied *saHwe:lijos (> Helios). Slavic seems to preserve traces of the heteroclitic oblique stem (> *su(:)ln-) of the original neuter, and Baltic the N/A of the same (> *sa:ul-) plus a feminising ending.

Piotr