Re: [TIED] Sister

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

From: Marc Verhaegen

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Sunday, June 18, 2000 9:33 AM

Subject: Re: [TIED] cousin

> Here's a little etymological game for all Cybalist members: The English words COUSIN and SISTER are ultimately related within Indo-European. How?    (solution tomorrow)    Piotr

 

cousin < Lat. consobrinus "mother's sister's child" < conswesrinos < -swesor-

 

Good! With vowel length marked, the Latin word is con-so:bri:nus. But how is so:br- derived from *swesr-? That's the really interesting part. Marc has shown the correct path but the game goes on.

 

Another question: is the -ter of sister the same as the -ter/-ther of father, brother, mother, daughter? (meaning something like "family member"?)

 

There is no etymological *-ter in sister. The original paradigm was *sweso:r (N.sg.)/*swesrós (Gen.sg.). In Germanic *sr > *str (cf. Greek rheuma : English stream), and the excrescent *t of *swistr- (in the oblique cases) was introduced in the nominative as well. The analogy of *duxt(a)r- certainly helped to interpret the *-tr- as a family-term suffix.

 

It is very likely that the consonantal stem *swesor- should be analysed as *swe-sor- with *swe- meaning 'one's own' and *-sor- being a very archaic feminising suffix -- older, in fact, than the feminine gender itself. Alternative proposals (such as Pisani's *su-esxr- 'one's own blood' or Szemerényi's *su(:)-esor- 'family-woman', with a different reconstruction of the feminising element) are less attractive because of various formal difficulties they lead to.

 

The insertion of *t in *sr occurred also in Balto-Slavic. Lithuanian still has the consonantal noun sesuő (< *seso:r, with a trivial simplification of the initial cluster), but in Slavic the word was "regularised" by attaching the normal feminine ending *-a: to the oblique stem: *sesr-a: > *sestra: (Russian sestra, Polish siostra).

 

Piotr