Re: 'dyeus'

>It isn't. I don't know where you get that from.
>Early Middle Chinese thraïŋj-li according to Pulleyblank
>http://tech.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/63872
>is a loan from Xiongnu, ie Yeniseian to Chinese, not the other way >around.

I only underlined that if that thraing had had that initial cluster,
then no wonder that it became tanr-/tenr- (if they were indeed
akin).

>>(Why didn't the
>>borrowers"solve" _thra-_ *ataran, *atran, *eteren, *etirin, *itrin,
>>*itırın, *ütürün, *ötörön or *taran, teren, tirin, türün or so? Such
>>creations would've sounded more "turkic", "mongolian" and "uralic".
>
>Erh, what?

I only expressed here my expectation that a Turkic/Mongolian
adaptation of thrain would have been "better" solved by such
phonetics. But even so, tanrı and tenger show well the fact that
Turkic and Mongolian need such adaptations, they hardly can
accept a thr- cluster. (The question will be then whether the
initial, foreign, -r- moved to the end or whether the -r- in the
Turkic/Mongolian is the rest of something else, some additional
lexem.)

>That sounds like an interesting suggestion, given that Etruscan also

This is not my own suggestion, I read about dingir in the tängri
context, but the Sumerian meaning of dingir wasn't mentioned.

>It seems you can't rid of the idea that anything complicated must be >loaned from a Hochkultur. Give it up.

I won't. Lexical and language creation/mutations aren't haphazard,
aren't scrabble-like plays, they are the result of necessity (religion,
politics, everyday's real life). It doesn't suffice to see that Etruscan
has such words as tin "day", ten "height", mani "underworld", tata
"granma" in order to ... jubilate because such or similar words
with similar semantics also occur in Siberia, Ouagadougou or near
Rio de la Plata.

>As it stands, the word for the highest god seems to have been loaned >from Siberian squirrel hunters. Live with it.

Of course I live with it, as I'd live with a possible official statement
in which you'd inform me that the object possessed by the tengrist
female deity Yer (the thing we call the earth) is a disc and by no
means a ball. And even if you'd add "it's fix, it doesn't move", I
won't veto with the wording "eppur si muove". :-)

>Erh, and the PIE credentials for those are ...?

"Credentials", aha, urplötzlich, all of a sudden! :)

George