"Magic Squares" - examples from Proto-IE?
From: C. Darwin Goranson
Message: 48830
Date: 2007-06-02
I've heard only of one:
WORD + DEED
TONGUE + HAND
or reconstructed approximately
*wo:kw- + *werg^-
*dn.g^huh2- + *g^hes-r/*g^hos-to-
I read it in either the 9th or 17th Reports of the Annual IE
Conference of UCLA, I forget which. The word used to describe the
pairing of two related expressions was "magic square", and it was
said that these were thought to be very powerful spells, as the
surviving attestations all show replacement of at least one of the
words, and are all in serious circumstances (the R.g Veda, the Zend
Avesta, an oath to uphold Athenian democracy, an Oscan curse, and I'm
not sure if there were any others).
As such combinations are attested in a slightly varied form in
healing spells (bone to bone, sinew to sinew... skin to skin) across
the swath of Indo-Europea, they're obviously very, very old and
probably of PIE date (heck, the last one even has Hittite
references!). I'd like to know if any other examples of connected
expressions are known, as these surely reflect some very important
elements of PIE culture.