Re: *aN- varia

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Torsten" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@> wrote:
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > > 27 Urgerm. *wexila- : *weGila- "Rohrweihe, Fischadler"73
> > > see Latin aquila
> >
> > More likely this [I meant <aquila> only, not the Gmc. word] is the fem. (sc. <avis> 'bird') of the adj.
> > <aquilus> 'dark, dusky'. Many birds are dark, but the eagle was
> > being compared to other AUGURIAL birds.
>
> The non-dark ones?

The green woodpecker and the like. Actually, since augurial birds were further subdivided into those which signal by flight, and those which signal by voice (oscines), only the former class would be relevant here.

> > Morphological comparison with <Aquilo:> 'North Wind' i.e.
> > 'Darkener' suggests borrowing from Etruscan (pace Ernout-Meillet).
>
> I think we should remember that magic was the nuclear physics of the day, thus a much more likely field to search for original senses, eg. of *aN-. I like "terrible, foreboding; premonition" better, thus the "fear" sense, from "constriction of the mind", from "narrow passage" ("dire straits"), including rivers (*axw-, ap-, up-).
> Hippocrates
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocrates
> had a theory of the nature of winds from the four points of the compass
> http://tinyurl.com/y8k96rs
> I'd rather derive the "dark" sense from "tempest, storm".

Eagles supposedly were never struck by lightning, hence their association with the Storm God. But this would be a roundabout way of deriving <aquilus>, more difficult than my proposal. The woman "corpore aquilo" in Plautus had a dark body, not a stormy one. (I know Windy had stormy eyes, but the Association is two millennia too late to be relevant.)

> And BTW, I'd throw in Lat. avis "bird" and os- of os-cen (thus "bird song").

Oscines did not merely sing; they indicated something by singing. The prefix is the same as in <ostendere>. Their song pointed something out which the augur had to interpret.

Connecting <avis> with <aquilus> and, apparently, <angustus> and the rest would require too many ad-hoc phonological assumptions.

> > Root *acv- 'to cover' vel sim., with postfix *acv-il- 'to cover
> > over, darken', pass. adj. *acvile 'darkened, dark' (whence Lat.
> > <aquilus> as LW), nomen actoris *acvilu 'darkener' (Lat. <Aquilo:>).
>
> I can't find Etr. acvil- "cover". Do you have a reference for it?

The only reference is my own theorizing, hence the asterisk and the preceding statement that this analysis is "suggested". We are all still waiting for Claudius's Etruscan grammar to be discovered. An archaic Etruscan gentilicium <Acvilna> is attested; this appears to have been Latinized as *Aquilnios, later <Aquillius>. I can only GUESS at the sense of *acvil-; 'dark' or the like is SUGGESTED by <aquilus> and <Aquilo:> if they are indeed borrowings (which is highly plausible morphologically), and by the place named Aquilonia near the modern Carbonara. Regarding Etr. -il- as a verbal postfix comes from good internal analysis, and I do not hesitate to extract a root *acv-, but it might well mean something other than 'cover', which is why I hedge it with "vel sim.".

DGK