> From a purely linguistic point of
view, to what extent would the development Varuna > Wodan be reasonable ? I
am a complete amateur, but i have read somewhere the statement that d/t/r are
often interchanged.
They are, but the preferred direction of
change is d > r rather than r > d intervocalically. Then, relatively
frequent as this kind of alternation may be cross-linguistically, it can't be
proposed ad hoc without a good reason, since we are talking of concrete
languages, not of the general statistics of sound-change. I don't know of a
single case of Sanskrit -r- corresponding to Germanic *-d- ([ð]). Then, what
about the vowels that do not match at all (/a/ vs. /o:/, and /u/ vs. /a/)?
In <varun.a-> versus *wo:dana- the only potentially matching elements are
the initial *w and the final *-n(o)- -- hardly impressive, since *-no- is an
extremely common suffix in PIE. To sum up, from a purely linguistic point of
view there is no ground whatsoever for proposing a connection between the two
names.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 12:37 AM
Subject: [tied] Wodan