Re: [tied] Re: *dan-

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 5561
Date: 2001-01-16

I don't think these roots were the same or had the same meaning. *dHen- is a verbal root meaning 'run, rush, speed on', and *dah2n-u- is a concrete noun meaning "river". River terms were often formed from verbs meaning 'run' (the classic example is *druw-nt-ih2). The authors of the EIEC note that there are phonological problems (like the wrong vowel length) if we want to derive all the relevant words from *dHon-u-. The matter is not terribly important, but just to be on the safe side I prefer, tentatively, to work with two independent roots.
 
The late Neolithic of the European Plain is a fascinating thing to discuss. We've done it before on Cybalist and I think I'll return to it presently (I've just finished reading a new book on the Globular Amphora culture).
 
Piotr
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Torsten Pedersen
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2001 1:11 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: *dan-

It seems to me (and correct me if I'm wrong) that your position is
this: There are two distinct IE roots, sloppily (by me) denoted as 1.
*dh-n- "run, flow, valley with stream, etc", and 2. *d-n- "run, flow,
river, etc" and that the two are not related. Pokorny has 1., but not
2. EIEC lists both but is in doubt as how to distribute their
respective "descendants". Bomhard (IndoEuropean and the Nostratic
Hypothesis, root 83) has 1, which he relates to a Proto-Kartvelian
*den-/*din- "to run, to flow"), *dn- "to melt" (BTW, afaik IE
replaced a Caucasian language exactly in the *d-n- river area, which
doesn't make things easier), Proto Highland East Cushitic *dun- "to
leak (bag, roof), *dun-am- "to leak (water). Searching in cybalist, I
came up with Egyptian dxn- "primordial water", dnyn "a sea people".
And since I have read Oppenheimer's "Eden in the East" and found some
of the artifacts depicted therein strangely similar to what I
recalled from school excursions to Danish National Museum (and
checked it out), I leafed through a Javanese Dictionary and found:
danan "still-standing water".

To maintain your position (such as I imagined it) with two
independent IE roots, you would have to deny that words had been
loaned from elsewhere. On the other hand, I don't have a sub-, super-
or arriving-on-a-civilizing-mission-in-canoes layer to from which a
loan could have come (except for the non-IE part of Germanic).

BTW I came across the TRB (Trichterbecher) culture in EIEC. It
stretches all the way from Jutland to the river Tanew.

Torsten