From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2837
Date: 2000-07-11
----- Original Message -----From: Håkan LindgrenTo: CybalistSent: Sunday, July 09, 2000 4:35 PMSubject: [TIED] Re: Etymological riddlesThe phonetic similarity of Tuesday [t(j)u:zdeI] and dUZdI proves that IE homeland should be sought in a place where it always rains on Tuesday ;)
Håkan is of course right about the etymology of Tuesday, which is OE Tiwes dæg, the day of Tiw (Tiu = Scandinavian Tyr, the son of Woden/Odin, to whom Wednesday was dedicated). Although demoted to the position of a lesser god in Germanic mythology, Tiw is etymologically a descendant of the IE Sky God *die:us (> Zeus, Dyaus, Iuppiter, etc.). The god’s name was also a common noun meaning ‘daylight, clear sky, day’. (BTW the English word day is completely unrelated.)
Polish deszcz [deStS] is older [deZdZ] with final devoicing. The old oblique cases of this word were based on the stem-form dżdż- [dZdZ] (with a double affricate word-initially!) . Now we have Gen. deszczu, etc. with the paradigm levelled out. Traces of the old form survive, as usual, in derived words like dżdżysty ‘rainy’ or dżdżownica ‘earthworm’ (they appear in great numbers if the rain floods their burrows). The Slavic prototype of this family of words (and also of Russian doZd’, OCS dUZdI, etc.) is *dUzdjI < *duzdju-. Vaillant brilliantly interpreted this as an old compound *dus-dju-. The meaning ‘angry Zeus’ is sometimes suggested, but I think ‘bad day’ might do just as well. Cf. Greek eudia ‘fair weather’, eudios ‘fair, calm; gracious’ < *esu-diwo-, and Old Indic durdinam < *dus-dino- ‘bad day, rough weather’, sudinam< *su-dino- ‘clear/auspicious day’, sudivam < *su-diwó- ‘fine day’.
The element *din(o)-, visible in Sanskrit (and in the normal Slavic word for ‘day’, *dInI < *din-i-, and hieroglyphic Luwian tina- ‘god’), is distantly related to *die:us; both are extensions of the same root *dei- ‘shine, be bright’.
Piotr
Piotr asked - how is Tuesday related to the Polish word for rain?I would definitely like to hear the answer to this! I haven't got very far myself. Tuesday got its name from the god whose (modern) Swedish name is Tyr. In Old English he was Tiw and the Old English name of this day was Tiwesdaeg (ae should be a ligature). The idea of naming the days of the week after gods was borrowed from Latin (sez the small dictionary where I found this), where this was the day of the warrior god: Martis dies, and Latin borrowed it from Greek: hemera Areos. The Old Germanic (I'm not too sure about the proper terminology in English) name of Tiw was *Tiuz, which is related to IE *dieus: "god" or "heaven".But what's all this got to do with rain? The Polish word for Tuesday, wtorek, gives no clue. It is obviously linked to the numeral wtory, second. Perhaps deszcz, the Polish word for rain, is related to *dieus? From "heaven" to "rain"? But it seems far fetched.Hakan