--- In cybalist@..., Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:
> > 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 -----
> From: matt6219
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 12:37 AM
> Subject: [tied] Wodan
Piotr, thanks for responding.
I take note of the need for more concrete reasons - my reasons for
looking at a link initially were not linguistic.
Nevertheless, as we are already on the subject, could these have a
common source, something like va:dun.a perhaps ? Are the changes
a: -> o and u -> a unknown, allowing more than one step for each of
these ?