I think that Albanian Enj < *Ign (com. *gno-sco, Albanian njoh, Lat.
dignus, Alb. i denj, Lat. signum, Alb. shenj)with evoluation of /-i-
/ > /-e-/ befor a cluster fo consonants (comp. also Alb. shigjeta <
Lat. sagitta, Alb. letër < Lat. littera, Alb. mesha < Lat. missa)
and through transformation of the gn > nj, could throw more light in
this issue. This word is preserved in the name of day E
enjte "Thursday", suffixed form Enj+-te and is calc lingvistique of
Latin Dies Jovis (It. Giovedi, Ger. Donnerstag). So, I think that
this is the cognat of Indic Agni "the God of Fire", Sllavic. Oganj,
Lat. ignis, etc.
Yours:
Abdullah Konushevci
--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
> Pre-Slavic *o would have been lengthened by a following plain *g,
giving Slavic *a (at least it _probably_ would; the precise
conditioning of Winter's Law is still something of a mystery.
>
> We can get round this difficulty if we assume *n.gni- > *ungni- >
*u:ngni- > *o~gnI > *ognI, with dissimilatory denasalisation, as has
been proposed for <ignis> (as a bonus, we get an easy explanation of
Slavic by-forms with vyg- < *u:g-; they represent a variant in which
denasalisation occurred a little earlier; to Pokorny they
were "completely unclear").
>
> Baltic *u as in Lith. ugnis and Latv. uguns could then be derived
in a similar from the same Proto-Balto-Slavic *ungnis (I can't take
seriously the idea that they owe their /u/ to the influence of Old
Swedish ugn 'oven').
>
> To sum up, although the first *n does not surface anywhere
directly, it's a hypothesis that allows us to unify the etymon.
>
> I wouldn't be so sure that the expected initial laryngeal was *h1.
*Hn.gnís is what comparative analysis plus phonotactic
considerations suggest. Perhaps it's somehow related to
Pokorny's 'coal' etymon (PBSl. *angli-, with Indo-Iranian and
possibly Celtic cognates < PIE *h2ango:l/*h2angl- 'coal, glowing
ember').
>
> Piotr
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <richard.wordingham@...>
> To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 10:49 AM
> Subject: [tied] *h1ngni-, Fire
>
>
> > Why does one reconstruct *h1ngni- from Latin ignis, Sanskrit
agni- and Proto-Slavic *ognI? I can't see the justification for the
first /n/, though it is consistent with the Latin and Sanskrit
forms. (So is the reconstruction of the first vowel as /e/, as in
> Pokorny.)