From: dgkilday57
Message: 64185
Date: 2009-06-13
>No doubt <rienes> has been influenced by <lie:n>, but Anttila's *nehr- doesn't wash, since Festus gives <nefrendes> and <nebrundines> as dialectal forms; obviously P-Italic (and probably Faliscan) had *nefr-, Latin *nebr- in the inherited 'kidney' word. All the forms cited by Festus have different extensions, so we're most likely dealing with medical tabu-substitution, as a result of occasional anecdotes of people coming down with nephritis after someone mentioned 'kidney'. Latin-speakers evidently ran out of variants and substituted a different word, much as English later discarded <nere>. As a first guess I would suggest *re:nis meant 'bent object' vel sim. from *(w)re:(C?)-, *(w)re(CC?)- with formation parallel to <pa:nis> from *past-nis, the root being *wer- 'to turn', but I need to come up with a plausible protoform. At any rate a loanword from an obscure language in order to deal with medical tabu seems to me VERY unlikely.
> [...]
>
> As for metathetic changes involving *n and *r in Latin, Anttila's
> etymology of re:nes 'kidneys' is worth another look:
>
> *negWHr- (Gk. nepHrós, Gmc. *neGWr-an-) > *nehr- > *ne:r- > re:n-
> (probably influenced by lie:n 'spleen', cf. the variant <rienes>).