--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "stlatos" <stlatos@...> wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "david_russell_watson" <liberty@>
> wrote:
> >
> > You still haven't, seemingly, looked at the myths themselves,
> > wherein Thrita and Thraetaona Athwiya simply cannot be treated
> > separately from one another or from Trita Aptya of the Vedas.
>
> What does this have to do with an additional possible connection
> with Scythian?
What it's meant to show is that 'Thraetaona' is connected to
'Thrita', and hence not as easily equatable to 'Targitaus',
which involves at least a different suffix and possibly an
entirely different root or roots. I don't accept the sound
changes by which you claim to have shown otherwise, remember.
> Just because Thraetaona- was probably once seen as Thrita's son
> doesn't mean their names are directly related.
It does lend to their names being related, but there's more
to it than that, as their stories and other attributes also
overlap considerably.
> In Targitao's myth, Zeus is a third son and T. had three sons
> who fathered the Sc. tribes; why can't the names Thrita- and
> Thraetaona- relate to those features instead of being related to
> each other by an unknown -auna- suffix of descent?
Reading some literature on their myths and you'll find the
suggestion more than once that Thraetaona and Thrita both are
reflexes of the same original Proto-Indo-Iranian mythological
character. That fact, along with the strong similarity in
their names, does suggest to me that 'Thraetaona' is no less
based upon the word for 'third' than 'Thrita'.
However I'm not completely hell-bent against an explanation
involving *taw-, but only against the set of sound changes
you offered trying to make 'Thraetaona' and 'Targitaus' full
cognates.
> > This forces us, whether we like it or not, to take Proto-Indo-
> > Iranian *trita- "third" as our point of departure for 'Thrae-
> > taona', whether or not that is also the case for 'Targitaus',
> > which is not a direct cognate. Note that Piotr did not claim
> > direct cognacy either, positing different suffixes in each name
> > for *traya- and *taw- both.
>
> I showed that earlier discussion to let you know that even a
> professional linguist can disagree with your interpretation
> without being 'a dabbler' or 'reinventing the wheel'.
Disagreeing with what you're calling "my" interpretation
is not what makes you a dabbler, but rather your apparent
ignorance of the standard model of sound changes and its
vastly superior explanatory power.
> I don't accept everything Piotr said, I just wanted to show
> that he accepted metathesis to allow an earlier form with
> *tri- not tar-, a connected with PIE *tew-x 'fat, strong,
> etc.', not *thraita-una- but *thrai-tauna-, and so on.
And *tray-tawna- could well be right, given the difficulty
with a suffix -awna-, but, again, Piotr never tried to make
cognates of 'Thraetaona' and 'Targitaus', which they could
not be by any known sound changes, your own suggested sound
changes being unrealistic and unconvincing, I'm afraid.
Finally, for want of a better way to explain myself, let me
describe an imaginary scenario:
Suppose that a fellow jogging at night along some south-west
highway was hit and killed by a car, and that subsequently
a number of urban myths were inspired by the story involving
people encountering his ghost running along the highways of
Arizona, Nevada, and S. California. Suppose also that an
anthropologist (or whichever sort of 'ologist' studies this
sort of thing) went to the south-west to document the myths
and learned, and dutifully documented, that the ghostly
character was called "The Runner" in Arizona, but as one
went further west was also known as "The Running Man", until
reaching California where he was known exclusively by the
latter name. Now suppose that a would-be linguist of some
centuries later read the accounts and assumed, quite correctly
of course, that The Runner and The Running Man were reflexes
of the same character, but then went about devising a set of
sound changes to derive both '&r' and 'INmæn' from a single
earlier sequence.
Obviously that would be quite wrong, but is comparable to
what you're trying to do with 'Thraetaona' and 'Targitaus'
now, and the sort of thing you've indulged in so often
before, Sean.
David