Better still, the Indonesian word for
'lake' (cognate to what you cite) is danau. This is the kind of deceptive
similarity that catches the eye but has no comparative validity. Whatever the
exact meaning *dHonu- or *dah2nu-, 'river', 'running water' or the like, the
idea of movement was an essential part of it. 'Still-standing water' it
certainly was not. Even better "matches" prove nothing if they are sporadic.
Indonesian mata and Modern Greek mati both mean 'eye'; the Proto-Je word for
'new' is reconstructed as *niw -- examples of sheer coincidence could be
multiplied by anybody who has access to dictionaries of many
languages.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2001 2:59 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: *dan-
...
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".