On 2008-04-20 08:55, Kishore patnaik wror an epetote:
> Do you know any article that discusses the meaning and etymology of
> Duhita- Cf my message that duhita means the girl who milks the cow.
The stem is <duhitar->, with a final /r/. It can't have anything to do
with milkmaids for the following reasons:
(1) The 'milk, press, obtain' root is *dHeugH-, as confirmed by
Indo-Iranian, Greek and Germanic data. An agent noun derived from it
would be either root-accented *dHéugH-to:r or hysterokinetic *dHugH-té:r
(the latter type vanishingly rare in Indo-Iranian). They would have
given, respectively, <dogdHar-> or +<dugdHar-> in Sanskrit
(additionally, one would normally expect a feminine agent noun to show a
femininising *-ih2 > Skt. -i:). We actually have Ved. <dogdHar->
'milker' (m.) -- a regular reflex of the predicted agent noun.
(2) Even assuming for the sake of the argument that the root was for
some unknown reason extended with *-h2 in PIE (or an epenthetic vowel
independently in Indic and Greek) before the agent suffix, we still
can't accoun for the Greek form in this way. Gk. tHugate:r can only
reflect *dHugV-, certainly not *dHugHV- (which would have given
+tukHate:r). This shows very clearly that 'daughter' and 'milking' are
unconnected.
Piotr