There are two superficially similar
Anatolian words: *an(n)a- 'mother' (Hittite/Palaic annas, Luwian anni-,
Lycian e~ni), and *hano- 'grandmother' (Hittite hannas, Luwian hanni-,
Lycian xn~ni). The latter's PIE prototype is reconstructable as *h2an-o-s
(/h2eno-/, phonetically [xanos]), the former is no doubt a nursery
word.
The Anatolian "father" words all have this
nursery flavour: Hittite attas, Luwian tata-, tati-, Lycian tedi, Palaic papa-.
But the "grandfather" word (Hittite huhhas, Hier. Luwian huha-, Lycian xuga) is
a normal PIE lexeme (*h2auh2-o-s) with credible non-Anatolian
cognates.
The formal PIE terms for "father" and
"mother" (*ph2té:r, *mah2té:r) seem to have been lost in Anatolian. Or were
they? One could legitimately wonder if they are indeed PIE -- that is, older
than the separation of the Anatolian branch. But Lycian has the PIE "daughter"
word kbatra < *dbatr- < *duatr- (Hier. Luwian tuwatri-) < *dug(h)atr-
< *dHugh2te:r, so it's likely that other, more primitive-looking family terms
in *-h2ter- also existed in the ancestral language.
The replacement of central family terms may
seem odd, but it isn't all that rare. Proto-Slavic replaced *ph2te:r with the
nursery diminutive *at(t)-iko- (> *otIcI), and Proto-Baltic with enigmatic
*tawa-s; Gothic used attas instead of Germanic *fade:r-, Latin lost the
inherited "son" and "daughter" terms. The original "grandparent" words have
survived in very few branches.
Typological considerations make it
virtually certain that a number of "nursery roots" like *an(n)a-, *mam(m)a-,
*at(t)a-, *tat(t)a-, *pap(p)a- *dHidHi-, *nan(n)a- (Anatolian for "brother"),
etc., existed in PIE. However, such words belong to the expressive section
of the vocabulary, often fail to develop or even look like ordinary nouns, and
may arise independently in language after language as babytalk converted into
kinship terminology. For these reasons they are normally excluded from
comparative analyses and it's difficult to _reconstruct_ them unless they lose
their Lallwort status and become fully lexicalised (the difference between
crosslinguistically comon *ma-ma- and uniquely IE *mah2te:r).
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, February 17, 2001 10:20 PM
Subject: [tied] mother: *xanos, *xana, *hana, or *ana?
*xanos - IE
*matêr - IE - *ma with the kinship
signifier, right? And, if so, why create another word for mother? Was it
just a baby-talk thing?
*ana - Uralic/Altaic
I've read both *hana
and *xana to be recostructions of the non-*ma mother word. (Are they
supposèd IE reconstruction[s] other than *xanos, or is it/are they supposed to
be Anatolian reconstructions instead?) I'm assuming IPA is being used
here, in which the /h/ and /x/ would have slightly different
pronunciations. Is this the case, or is using "h" or "x" merely a written
preference by whomever was writing?
Hannahanna - Anatolian, meaning
"mother's mother" - So, would it be logical to deduce that Hanna would mean
plain "mother" in Anatolian?
...along with others I either can't remember
or don't know. Apparently, going along with an earlier discussion of the
Anat[h]/Anahita/Neith/Athena/etc., in Canaanite (or Hebrew, or Phoenician, or
whatever it's called), was Channah (or however one prefers to spell it) merely
an epithet for the mother goddess, or is it a direct derivation from the word
for mother? It apparently is supposed to mean something along the lines of
"grace/mercy/favor/pity", though only "grace" is usually used as the meaning, as
far as I'm aware.
Could anyone tell me the Sumerian, Akkadian, Persian,
and/or Hebrewish mother-word cognates?
And what, exactly, was the at-
prefix on certain Greek names supposed to designate?
TiA!,
Eris