Piotr:
>It puzzles me too. PIE *leudH- (or *h1leudH- if Greek eleutheros and >Latin
>li:ber are related) contains *dH as a root element -- cf. >Proto-Germanic
>*liudo: < *leudHa: (OE le:od, German Leute).
Sergei:
>I am not into your way of reasoning, so I wonder what developement
>would you propose for *lawos-dxn�us>.?.>(Lith.) lia'udis (-i-stem,
>f.) 'folk', Common Slavic *ljudI etc.?
Boy oh boy, it's Critics' Night at the cybalist :) First of all, I should
have said IndoTyrrhenian *lewe-t:exan (not *lawe-) and IE *lewos-dxn�us. Mea
culpa, I have to revise my website some more.
Second, I should have gone into more detail. When I mentioned an IE phrase
*lewos-dxn�us, I was just illustrating one possible "phrasal" reflex of
"People of the Rivers" as opposed to the fossilized word *leudhos whose
original components had been totally forgotten at this stage by IE-speakers.
This dual-path idea is attested elsewhere as with English "goodbye" (< "God
be wi' ye") surviving as a totally corrupted artifact alongside its phrasal
twin, "May God be with you".
So, in the same vein, I envision two pathes of the one IndoTyrrhenian phrase
*lewe-t:exan. One is the ethnonymic concept or imagery itself. We might
replace the words in IE *lewos-dxn�us with any other synonyms we want but
the meaning of this phrase itself should have survived into IE alongside the
corrupted *leudhos. The latter was formed along a second path, also
producing the regularly formed cognate Etruscan /lautn/ "family". Thus, the
ancient phrase is squished into a single word for convenience and effortless
speech. No big whoop.
Now to explain the IE phonetics which are somewhat incredible, I know. The
ethnonym would have survived as a phrase up to Late MidIE (c.5500 and later)
when the final vowels were dropped, producing *l(e)u-t:�xr (note *-n > *-r).
At this point, the phrase was understood as a single word *l(e)ut:�xr with
the regular stress accent on the second-to-last syllable.
Since the word was used for a people, the word was of animate gender but
this conflicted with the apparent inanimate ending *-r, which was the ending
originally applied to the "river" word of the phrase. As is typical of the
Early Late IE period, many words were revised with new grammatical tricks.
So for aesthetics' sake the inanimate-looking, animate ethnonym *l(e)ut:�xr
was given a more "animated" look by dropping the heteroclitic termination,
adding a thematic vowel and giving it an initial accent, producing
*l�ut:x-o-s (later *leudxos).
Finally, quite irregularly I admit, as if my explanation isn't undesirably
irregular enough :), the term became *leudhos at a point when the original
meaning of the word was entirely lost and the possibility of corruption with
homophonic words was greatest. The American Heritage site defines a verb
*leudh- as "to mount, to grow" and I wonder whether this is truely the root
of *leudhos or whether this verb is the reason behind the corruption. At any
rate, the Germanic version *leudhax and the Lithuanian i-stem must both
derive from *leudhos.
That's my latest theory anyway. I'm open to other ideas and death threats.
As for the phonetics on the Etruscan side, everything is gloriously regular
according to my current conclusions on Etruscan reflexes. IndoTyrrhenian
*lewe-t:exan should become ProtoTyrrhenian *lewetten with an automatic
initial accent and loss of all mediofinal laryngeals. From here, the
Etruscan reflex of *e varies as either /e/ or /a/ (a dialectal variation
proven by /clen/ vs. /clan/ "son" which possibly derives from Tyr
*k:al-ene). IndoTyr *t: regularly becomes Etruscan inaspirate /t/ while
lenis stops *t and *d merge as aspirate /tH/. So we arrive at Etruscan
/lautn/ (probably for *lautan) in regular fashion.
Now semantics. I think most of you realise the association between "family"
and "tribe" (ie: "extended family") and so I won't bore you with the
Etruscan definition. The meaning given for the IE reflex is "tribe" and the
jump from an ethnonym to the meaning of "tribe" (as in "my tribe" or "tribes
like us" as opposed to "foreign tribe") is an insignificant step to
overcome.
Finally, in much the same way as "Anishinaabe" denotes not only the Ojibway
people but all other peoples speaking Algonquian languages (known as
Anishinaabemowin), I feel that the IndoTyrrhenian speaking population as a
whole, even thousands of years after their fracture into seperate languages,
tribes, cultures and mythologies, continued to use the phrase "People of the
Rivers" as well as the dialectal corrupted versions (lautn/*leudhos) to
designate each other based on their common linguistic heritage that they
themselves were fully aware of.
- gLeN
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