Re: The Gender of the Sun.

From: Sergejus Tarasovas
Message: 1759
Date: 2000-03-03

Piotr, thank you for your explanation. I've happened to read about different reflexes of *{e,o,a}{r,l} and *{e:,o:,a:}{r,l}, where qaulity is affected in anlaut (like in your example with *orb- and *ordl-) and stress (and partly quality) affected in inlaut (like in Russian vorona/voron and Lithuanian varna(falling intonation,open a)/varnas (raising intonation, closed a)), but your explanation on different reflexes of *{i,u}{r,l} and *{i:,u:}{r,l} is the first I got. Thank you very much again, may be this could be helpful: what about Russian pósolon' (посолонь) 'in the sun's direction, east to west', where stress is retracted to the preposition and which reflects *posъlnь not in a very straightforward manner.
 
One more question: what do you think about my suggestion that LIthuanian kentėti 'to suffer', 'kęsti' 'to suffer from pain' are one of that cognates of Greek kent-  you asked the members of the group to provide you with?
 
Sergei
 -----Original Message-----
From: Piotr Gasiorowski [mailto:gpiotr@...]
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2000 3:23 PM
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Subject: [cybalist] Re: The Gender of the Sun.

 
----- Original Message -----
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’ < *wlkwos as opposed e.g. to S-Cr. dűg ‘long’ <*dlHghos 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
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