Re: [tied] PIE laryngeals?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

> 01-09-03 21:59, etherman23 wrote:
> >
> >> How do you know that Hitt. dai comes from *deh3- in the first
> >> place? It means 'take', not 'give'.
> >
> > Three reasons:
> > 1) The semantics are very close.
>
> Possibly, since giving and taking are different aspects of the same
> situation, as in the case of 'borrow'/'lend' or 'teach'/'learn'.
> However, this kind of closeness is tricky and not far from "lucus a
> non lucendo" (is 'left' close to 'right' or 'wake up' to 'go to
> bed'?).

This problem seems intrinsic to linguistics. Just now I opened up to
a random entry in Bomhard's "Towards Proto-Nostratic" and found the
PIE root *men (Bomhard reconstructs an a here but that's not too
important). The reconstructed meaning is "to jut out, project, stand
out." Yet here are some of the reflexes: Avestan mati "mountain,"
Latin mentum "chin," and Old Icelandic moena "to tower." This big
variation in meanings seems pretty common. This is probably not
controversial either. Give and take are surely more closely related
semantically than chin and mountain.

> Where else in Indo-European do we find *doh3- with the
> meaning 'take'?

That I don't know. Possibly it was a Hittite inovation.

> Well, I haven't got any reliable Anatolian dictionaries to hand, so
> I can't check all the proposed by-meanings, but 'take' is
> certainly the usual gloss, and *pai- (Hitt. pai/pijanzi, Luw. pija-
> , Lyc. pije-) is the Anatolian verb with the central meaning
> of 'give'.

There are some Internet resources that I've used. I don't know the
exact site, but you could do a search for "Hittite concise
dictionary." IIRC it's based on some work by Gamkrelidze among others.