Re: Lat. niger once again

On 2009-06-13 18:57, dgkilday57 wrote:

> 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'.

I actually misquoted Anttila the first time round (I was probably
writing from memory). What he actually suggests is *negWHr- > *regWHn- >
*re:n. The Latin treatment of inherited *-gWHn- is a bit uncertain for
lack of sure examples.

> Latin-speakers evidently ran out of variants and substituted a different
> word, much as English later discarded <nere>.

It did not. <kidney> comes from ME kide-ne:re ~ kide-neire. The first
element is usually explained as OE *cyd(d)e 'belly'. Apparently the
variant pl. <kideneiren> was misanalysed as <kidenei-r-en> (doubly
characterised, like <ei-r-en> 'eggs' or <child-r-en>.

> 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.

I agree with that.

Piotr