Re: vesper < *wo-kWspero?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Joao S. Lopes" <josimo70@...> wrote:

> There's a lot of words for 'night, evening, darkness, cloud, fog,
> smoke' that seem to be linked but their correct relationship is not
> well-understood:
>
> Sanskrit. ks.ap-
> Avestic ks^ap-, ks^apar-, ks^afn-
> Latin vesper, creper (cf. crepusculus)
> Greek hesperos, knephas, psephas, dnophos, zophos
> OIrl fescor
> Lit. va~karas
> Arm. gis^er
> Hittite ispant-
>
> Taking Avestan, Irish and Hittite as related we can see an
> heteroclytic word: *n/r-, so ks^afn-/ks^apar could imply in a PIE
> *ksepr-/ksepn-
>
> *wesperos (Latin, Greek, Irish, Armenian) would be *we-kWsp-er-o .
> Greek words doesn't fit in regular IE shifts

E.P. Hamp has proposed a PIE etymon *weiks-ksper, a sentence formula supposedly meaning 'the time (is) night' or 'time night' (PIE *weik- = 'change, turn, switch'). J. Schindler has proposed a somewhat different prefixal compound *we-kWsp-ero-. See Puhvel's Hittite Etymological Dictionary at:

http://tinyurl.com/27ef4ac
(pp. 434-5)

Such etymological proposals regard Lat. vesper, Gk. hesperos, Welsh ucher, Lith. va~karas, Arm. gis^er etc. as remote cognates of Ved. ks.ap-, Av. xs^ap-/xs^afn-, and Hitt. ispant- 'night' (see etymology in Puhvel's HED at http://tinyurl.com/299mqza ). Both the Hittite and Indo-Iranian forms are from PIE *k(W)sep- (unanalyzable and, thus, likely to have a PIE status). The other supposed IE cognates would have derived from either a prefixed or compounded form of this noun root meaning 'night'.

Further analyses in Beekes' Greek Etymological Dictionary at

http://tinyurl.com/22l5skz
http://tinyurl.com/2bkdfdm

Beekes too reconstructs a group -k(W)sp-.

Regards,
Francesco