Re: [tied] Re: PIE for "eel"

Of course IE snakes could be "emanations of the principle of crookedness" or creepy-crawly snakehood, but in that case derivatives of *serp- 'to wind, be crooked, creep' were used, hence Lat. serpent-, Gk. herpet- and Skt. sarpa-. CVC roots are almost never nasal-infixed, so {h2engWH-} or the like would have to be treated as an unalysable whole. Well, I'm not aware of such a verb root, whatever its supposed meaning. On the other hand, the i-stem *h2ongWHis could be adjectival, so maybe the root from which it was formed had been lost. {h2eng^-} 'squeeze, tighten' does exist, but as I said its association with serpents is at best folk-etymological.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: tgpedersen@...

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 11:50 AM

Subject: [tied] Re: PIE for "eel"

Being the superstitious Platonist that I am (or rather, being one who suspects these ancient peoples of being just that) I wondered whether there was an underlying verb "to wind, to be bent, to be crooked" which verb then might have an n-infix (or be perceived to have, which by back-formation, removing the -n-, would add up to the same thing). Were snakes then snakes (in an Linnéan sense) or were they emanations of the principle of snakeness or crookednes? This discussion might look fatuous, but I think it determines in the end what we will accept as semantically "contiguous". One of the reasons I wonder is because in the course of collecting material for my clever Austronesian theory, in that material there seemed to condense three collections having to do with "creation", maintenance" and destruction, respectively, and *H-n-g- (or similar) was exactly that (principle of) "destruction". http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/forces.html Torsten