The meaning of life: PIE. *gWiH3w-

I think all of us on this list should feel privileged that someone who can
write such an essay is willing to put up with the sometime inanities of this
list.

Piotr was kind enough to send me a .pdf of the essay that appeared in a
prestigious academic journal.

It was an eye opener for me because I have been struggling with the possible
relationship between PIE *gWa:-, 'come' and *gWei-, 'live', for many years,
actually, although I did eat and sleep a few times during the period.

I think most people may overlook the meaning of 'be born, come into the
world', listed also in Pokorny under *gWa:- - well, I did. I thought 'be
born' was a function of 'come (out/into)' but as I see it now, 'come
(out/into)' is a function of 'be born'.

When looked at from this perspective, *gWei- can easily be interpreted as
'live after being born'.

It will probably be scarcely by some but O&S have listed a HS root that is
the cognate of PIE *gWa:-, namely #516 *ca?, 'move upwards' (the <c> has an
inverted chevron over it).

This allows me to interpret *gWa:- as deriving from pre-PIE *gWa?-, or as we
like to write it *gWa(:)H- or *gWeH2-.

Some will scoff - and if this were an isolated example, so would I.

But we also have HS #550 *cem-, 'go, enter' (same c as above), which is
cognate with PIE *gWem-.

One of the startling surprises I had when I first begin these studies was
that PIE *gW was cognate with dorsal fricatives in other languages like
Egyptian: s(j)m, 'go'.

There is so much to productively discuss in the paper but I will end here
and wait for comments before looking at other aspects of the analysis.


Patrick