On 2008-11-20 19:10, Arnaud Fournet wrote:
> It's quite strange that our anscestors : people with 35 years life
> expectancy could confuse youth, life-time and eternity.
They used "a lifespan" as a unit of time. It then came to mean 'a long
time, aeon' (Gk. aio^n). Lat. aevum (with several close cognates) is a
thematic vr.ddhi derivative of *h2jw-: *h2-e-jw-ó- > *h2aiwó-
'life-long' (> 'eternal'). Of course even in the Neolithic there were
people individually blessed with a long and healthy life. I suppose they
were called *h2júh3ones.
> This makes no common sense at all.
> I think it just has to be stated to be blatantly absurd.
I see. It's blatantly absurd to say that a child's "age" (another
cognate of *h2aju) is, say, three years when "age" may also mean a
century or even hundreds of millennia (as in "the Ice Age").
Piotr