>>Can "*dentu" in your opinion interpreted as
>>an equivalent of Lat. "gens"? If so, why?
>
>I don't know what *dentu- is extracted from, so I can't comment on
>that aspect. As to the phonetics, I'm surmising a development as in
>Albanian, g^ > ð, though it could also be an affricate; [_]
>
>Richard.
I was asking only because of the word "dentu"
written (probably in the 12th c.) by the
Hungarian chronicler "anonymus P.", a king
Béla's notary.
Namely in this syntagm: <dentumoger>. In the
sense the people who were the nucleus of the
Magyar nation. The chronicler maintains this
was the ethnonym when they lived in "Scythia"
(i.e. in what's today Russia and Ukraine).
AFAIK, this <dentu> has no meaning and usage in
Hungarian, nor in other neighboring languages.
And I gather that the author must've found the
term in the internal materials/traditions of
the Hung. royal dynasty (which are lost). Now...
what if this term is some PIE linguistic
relic? (Unless there's some other explanation,
in some Turkic or Iranic idiom which I'm not
aware of.)
One example:
<<Gens itaque hungarorum fortissima et bellorum
laboribus potentissima, ut superius diximus, __de
gente scithica, que per ydioma suum proprium
dentumoger dicitur__ (,) duxit originem.
George