From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
Message: 4918
Date: 2000-12-03
On Sun, 03 Dec 2000 19:05:11 -0000, "Eris " <eris@...> wrote:
[...]
>
>Bulgarian/Polish/Slovak/Serbo-Croatian/Slovene/Cze
>ch/Ukrainian/Russian
> z'ena woman
>Sorbian (Wendish) z'ona woman
Polish is <z.ona> too.
>Old Greek gunh- woman (from *gwn-a-)
>Modern Greek gunaik- woman/wife (from gunh-)
But the oblique form gunaik- is already in Cl.Greek.
>Armenian kin/gin woman/wife
(With oblique form kanay-).
>The problems I'm having: In some reference materials I've looked in,
>it says that in Sanskrit, "gana" means "woman", in some it says
>"gna",
>and in others it says "gani" - and in with the latter two, it often
>says "gana" means either "song" or "cast".
I believe the form is written <gna:> ("Goetterweib; divine woman").
Pokorny remarks: "zum Teil zweisilbig *g(a)na:", with asterisk, which
I take to mean that sometimes the word occurs where the Vedic metre
requires two syllables (I'm not versed enough in Vedic metres to know
why it should be *ga-na: and not *g-na-a).
>Also, I couldn't find the J letter/grapheme in the dictionaries anywhere
>- I thought Sanskrit had
>a J and pronounced it the same as PDE?
What's PDE? Proletarian Democratic English? Post-Darwinian English?
Were you looking in a dictionary/wordlist arranged by Devnagri order?
If so, J comes between CH and JH (or Ñ, more likely).
>At any rate, I couldn't find
>any information on "jani", so I don't know if that's supposed to mean
>"wife" or not. Could someone please explain any of that to me, and
>how, if "g*n*" and "jani" are related, why they differ so?
<Jáni-> means "wife". It has irregular N. <jáni:> (besides <jánih.>)
and G. <jányur>. <Gná:> comes from zero-grade *gwn-éh2, while <jáni->
comes from e-grade *gwén-i-. The *e caused palatalization of the /g/
< *gw, as it did in e.g. Slavic <z^ena>.
>Further, could someone explain to me certain sound changes that
>occurred from the "gw" onset in IE - to, say, the "z" in Persian, the
>"s" in the Tocharian langs/dialects. I can somewhat see how "gw"
>changed to "b" and so on, but even though I don't know many of the IE
>sound-change laws, the s/z thing just seems strange to me.
Palatalization: probably ge > g^e > dz^e/dz^a > z^a > za for Persian
(or maybe ge > g^e > d^e > dza > za).
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...