Abdullah Konushevci wrote:
> About Alb. <zgjuar> 'bright' I think that it is participle of the
> verb <zgjoj> 'to awake, to wake up, to rouse'. It is, naturally,
> standard form, besides dialectal foms: (g.) <i zgjuet>, <i squet>, <i
> zgjuem> 'awakened, clever, intelligent, bright'.
> According to Meye-Lübke it is borrowed form Romanian *exvigilare and,
> according to H. Barich it is cognate with Snk svap 'dream, sleep',
> where z- is prefix.
> Taking into consideration dialectal form <i squet> 'bright, clever',
> I guess that standard form <i zgjuar> is just sonorized one. So, I
> think that Alb. <i zgjuar> is derived from prefixed form z- + *k^lou-
> enyo and can't be separable from the big family of the words derived
> from this root, like: quaj/quej 'to call, to name', shquaj/shquej 'to
> discern, to distinguish', dëgjoj/ndigoj 'to hear'.
>
> Konushevci
Mayer-Lübke have had his sins too:-.)
It seems he was not aware of the Rom. word "zgâi" with the same meaning
as Albanian "zgjoj"
Beside telling my idea about let us see what DEX means:
zgâi: vr (la) to stare (at), to goggle (at), to gape (at)
etymology: from "zgãu"= hole; etym. of zgãu = unknown
Now, the meaning given by DEX is not entire completely. "a zgâi" means
in fact "open wide your eyes or ears" for hearing/seeing well what you
see.
In fact the word "zgâi" cannot deriv from "zgãû" because of the
semantism.
Abdullah see it as (s)k^lou-enyo but I am afraid the root won't fit for
the Rom. cognate, at least the first part of the root.
the last part, "-enyo" should be accepted for Rom. "-âi" which will
point as follow:
-enyo > ãnio > ãn'i- > ân'i > âi
For the first part I fail to see how we can get the reduction of *k^lou-
to a simply "k" or "g" . I say "k" or "g" because the "s" as prefix
could make the group "sk" to become once "zg" and once it could remained
"sc".
Since the Rom. word "scânteie" is in Albanian present with "sk" too
(shkëndijë) one guess could be that there is no (s)k^lou- but the
initial cluster is "sg-".
For the Rom. word I will think at two variants: *sg(h)eu / sg(h)eni- or
*sk(h)eu / sk(h)eni-
Before going deeper with these reconstructions I should like to ask
Abdullah if these forms (*sg(h)eu / sg(h)eni- or *sk(h)eu / sk(h)eni-)
will be phonologicaly acceptable for the Albanian word.
I guess none doubts about the Rom. "zgâi" shouldn't be cognate with Alb.
"zgjoj" seen trough the phonological and semantical aspect
Alex