Re: [tied] gwen etymology

From: Eris
Message: 4920
Date: 2000-12-03

At 21:29 12/3/00 +0100, you wrote:
>
>Bulgarian/Polish/Slovak/Serbo-Croatian/Slovene/Cze
>ch/Ukrainian/Russian
> z'ena  woman
>Sorbian (Wendish)  z'ona  woman

Polish is <z.ona> too.

z.ona too as in it's z.ena as well, or just z.ona?  Also, is the z./z' supposed to be a "zh" sound?  If not, what is the marking for?

But the oblique form gunaik- is already in Cl.Greek.

Oh yeah, forgot to include that.  Thx for reminding me.

>Armenian  kin/gin  woman/wife

(With oblique form kanay-).

Does that mean the kin (or gin?) form is in the nominative and kanay- is another case(s)?  Sorry for being dense, but I guess I'm just not that far into ling yet.

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).

Hmmm... very interesting.  That would've never occurred to me.

What's PDE?  Proletarian Democratic English?  Post-Darwinian English?

LOL, sorry.  I meant "Present-Day English"... i.e., Modern English.

Were you looking in a dictionary/wordlist arranged by Devnagri order?
If so, J comes between CH and JH (or Ñ, more likely).

I have no idea what kind of order they were in, but the dicts I was looking in had G, then a couple letters, then GH, then a couple letters, then G and GH again, or something of the sort.  I didn't see one J in any of it, nor could I figure out why there were multiple entries of some letters - I was in a bit of a hurry, so I didn't check whether the graphemes were the same or not.  (Obviously I don't know all that much about Sanskrit.)

<Jáni-> means "wife".  It has irregular N. <jáni:> (besides <jánih.>)

What do you mean by "irregular N"?

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>.
Palatalization: probably ge > g^e > dz^e/dz^a > z^a > za for Persian (or maybe ge > g^e > d^e > dza > za).

Thank you very much for all the information... very interesting... and I now understand how that all came about.