24-09-03 17:09, P. Wolfe wrote:
> Going through some notes I made from the archives, I ran across an
> idea of a reconstructed Gods named *WA:TNOSm would that basically be
> the inspired or estatic one? I understand the root *wet- from Watkins
> and I have also in my notes a root *wext-? Where does this
> reconstruction come from and what do others think about it?
*wah2t- (> *wa:t- with consistent long vocalism) seems to be guaranteed
by Germanic, Celtic and Latin data. Forms such as PGmc. *wo:da-
'possessed, furious, mad' < *wah2tó- and OE wo:þ, ON óðr 'song, poetry'
< *wo:þaz < *wáh2to- nicely match OIr. fáith 'seer, bard' (cf. Lat.
va:te:s) < *wah2ti-, Welsh gwawd < *wah2to- 'song of praise'. The
theonym *wo:danaz 'connected with rage, extasy, furor' is just a
Germanic derivative, like *þeudanaz 'lord, ruler' from *þeudo: 'people',
and I see no reason to reconstruct it as a PIE word. The "root" *wah2t-
is perhaps secondary. It looks as if suffixal *-t- had been incorporated
as part of the root (**wah2-).
I don't see any merit in Watkins's attempt to combine *wa:t- with *wet-.
The latter is properly *h2wet- 'blow', which I regard as a byform of
more common *h2weh1-. There are more such pairs, e.g. *meh1-/*met-
'measure' or *h2meh1-/*h2met- 'reap', which may mean that morpheme-final
*-t and *-h1 go back to a common source, as argued by Miguel for
grammatical endings.
Piotr