From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2897
Date: 2000-07-28
----- Original Message -----
From: "Danny Wier" <dawier@...>
To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Friday, July 28, 2000 5:33 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: The English Language....
Lotsa questions :). I'm not qualified to handle the one
about divine names in other familes, but I'll try to answer
the rest.
Germanic *guda- is clearly of adjectival origin; Gothic guT
was still neuter when meaning '(heathen) deity' (pl. guda)
but masculine when meaning '(Christian) God'. It has some
interesting derivatives, such as *gudjan- (Goth. gudja,
Runic gudija, OIcelandic goDi, guDi) 'priest' and an
adjective meaning 'possessed', hence 'mad, frenzied' (OE
gydig > Moder English giddy [!]). The most widely accepted
pre-Germanic reconstruction is *gHu-tó-, a garden-variety
form of *gHux-tó- 'called, summoned, invited' (cf. Sanskrit
hu:tá-). The root *gHeux- 'invoke, summon' has a host of
derivatives in Indo-Iranian and Slavic, but traces of it can
be found elsewhere, and the religious connotations of the
lonely Germanic reflex match the semantics of the
Indo-Iranian terms very well.
Slavic bog, bóg, boh < *bogU- < *bHogH-o-, originally
meaning 'wealth, prosperity' (that meaning is still visible
in old derivatives like Polish bogaty 'rich' (...aty means
'having ...') ubogi 'poor', zboZe 'crop, corn'. The
religious meaning of *bHogHo- is parallel to the semantic
developments of the Iranian cognate *baga-. There are
further parallels between the two branches, e.g. Slavic
boZnica < *bHogH-in-(+ -ik-a:) 'temple' has a cognate in
Sogdian BGn [bagin-] and in Aramaean bagin 'temple, altar'
(a Parthian loanword). There is much more evidence of
Iranian impact on Slavic religion. The dualist opposition
baga- : daiva- is reflected in Slavic *bog- : *div- (*deiwo-
was functionally replaced by *bHogHo- and shifted its
meaning to 'demon, monster', hence *divU 'something strange
or unnatural', *divokU 'wild' etc.)
Armenian astuac is difficult to etymologise, but seems to be
of Iranian origin (cf. Astvat-@...@ta, the last of the three
sons of Zarathushtra, Middle Persian Astwiha:d, a death
spirit).
"S mobile" is a root-initial *s- which sometimes is there
and sometimes ain't in PIE reconstructions. Its found mostly
in verb roots (*teg-/*steg- 'cover', *pek-/*spek- 'watch',
*ker-/*sker- 'shear, flay', *wed-/*swed- 'wet, sweat'). Its
original status is unclear; it is often supposed to have
been some kind of intensifying element or a prefix
functionally similar to Germanic *ga- (German & OE ge-).
Gamkrelidze & Ivanov's triad is an ad hoc construct
(together with their uvulars and labialised dentals): the
comparative evidence simply doesn't justify such a
proliferation of phonemes. If one tries to eliminate every
little wrinkle in the comparative data by proposing a new
phoneme, the cure is usually worse than the ilness. Other
linguists have played similar games with laryngeals, ending
up with a system of ten or more aitches with all sorts of
diacritic appendages -- hardly a satisfactory "explanation"
of things.
The "IE thorn" (and its voiced counterpart) were originally
proposed to account for sporadic correspondences like
Sanskrit kS : Greek kt or Sanskrit kS : Greek khth, phth.
Another popular interpretation involved "sigmatised" or
"affricated" dorsal phonemes (*kS, *gZH, *gWZH). The
extremely limited lexical and phonotactic distribution of
the "thorny" phonemes is what makes them difficult to
accept. It is now generally assumed that the correspondences
in question reflect the development of some rare consonant
clusters (*tk, *dHgH, *gHs), so that the 'bear (animal)'
word, formerly *rkTos, is now reconstructed as *xrtkos (cf.
Hittite hartaga-) and *gHDo:m 'earth' has given way to
dHgHo:m (cf. Hittite tekan, Tocharian A tkaM). Marginal
problems remain, e.g. how should we interpret the rather
common root *tekT- 'work with wood, carpenter, fit
together'? But again, proposing a new phoneme to account for
two or three difficult correspondences is hardly a
commendable solution and I'd rather look for a less
expensive one.
Piotr
> A couple questions.
>
> First, I am aware of the widely-accepted *dyeus for "god".
Is there a
> solid reconstruction of the Germanic word (god, Gott, gud,
guð), and
> also the Slavonic (bog, bóg, boh, bu°h) and Armenian
(astvach)?
>
> And how bout the words for God in other language families
(especially
> ?lh from Semitic)?
>
> Now the other question. What exactly is a "s mobile" and
the proposed
> s/s^/sw triad? And what is the apologia for the
less-accepted IE
> phonemes, like /theta/ (or of course þ) and the "back
velars" q/qw?
>
> 117.
>
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