--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@> wrote:
> >
> > Sigh. Seems I have to translate another Kuhn article. This one's
> > gonna be long.
> >
> Translation:
>
> [...]
>
> In my "second Old Europe" I see nothing which points to the
> name-givers being Indo-Europeans. The phoneme sequence 'ur' was just
> as unfamiliar to early IE as the /a/ in general and thus also /ar/,
> and with /ir/ it would have been similar. Also ending-less
> nominatives, as exemplified in Dur (in Ireland) and Nar (in Central
> Italy), would be foreign to IE.
[...]
I have a minor point with negligible impact on Hans Kuhn's overall
theory. The Nar (now the Nera) can be given a P-Italic etymology and
does not belong in his ur-/ar- system. That the earlier form was
Nahar can be determined from Latin inscriptional evidence and the
Umbrian Iguvine Tables. In particular, the phrase <Naharkum
numem> 'the Naharcan folk', i.e. 'the people dwelling on the Nahar'
is found in Tab. Ig. Ib:17, written in the older Etruscan-based
alphabet which never uses <h> as a mere sign of vowel-length, as the
newer Umbrian alphabet does. Thus the Nahar had a sounded /h/, and
can originate from an inherited root *nagh- or *na:gh-. The Greek
for 'duck', Attic <nêssa>, Boeotian <nâssa>, can be regularly derived
from *na:gh-ya, and the duck is a diving bird. The Nera, which
plunges over waterfalls in its course through the Appennines, is a
diving river. The nominative ending -ar (from *-ars) is found in
Oscan/Paelignian <casnar> 'old man' (cf. Lat. <ca:nus> 'gray, hoary
with age', etc.), Lucerian <loucar> 'grove', and probably Lat.
<caesar> 'infant cut from the womb' if, as seems likely, the word is
borrowed from Sabine.
Attic <né:kho:>, Doric <ná:kho:> 'I swim' (originally 'I dive'?)
probably comes from the same root, *(s)na:gh-, an extension of *sneH2-
, *sna:- 'to swim', the root-postfix perhaps signifying 'downward'.
The fact that Umbrian did not lose the /s/ in <veskla snata
asnata> 'wet and dry vessels' (IIa:19) is not problematic to this
etymology of <Nahar>. In England, Nottingham is from earlier
Snotingham, but noses are still snotty, not *notty. Place-names can
lose "s-mobile" while appellatives retain it.
Douglas G. Kilday