Re: Res: Res: [tied] Re: (was Latin Honor < ?) Bestia

From: Joao S. Lopes
Message: 67856
Date: 2011-06-25

Could locus be a dialectal variant of lu:cus "grove" ? In Sanskrit cognate loka meant "world", in a shift "illuminated place" > "grove" > "clear place" > "place" > "world".

JS Lopes


De: Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
Para: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Enviadas: Sábado, 25 de Junho de 2011 9:02
Assunto: Re: Res: Res: [tied] Re: (was Latin Honor < ?) Bestia

 
W dniu 2011-06-25 07:17, Torsten pisze:

> It is true that he doesn't think it is so, since, arguing for a
> derivation from *sleh1g- "leave off, cease" instead of Buck'e
> *sleig- "glide, smooth", he doesn't consider stlocus at all, so on
> the other hand it is not true that he thinks that it isn't so. And
> since I don't recall having seen anybody other than myself propose
> that there is a connection between Oscan sla(a)gi- and Latin
> (st)locus you could say that no one else thinks so, until such time,
> of course, that some one else realizes that the two glosses are close
> enough phonetically and semantically that they might be cognates, in
> which case that person will also think so, which process, by
> iteration would potentially bring about that several people might
> think it is so.

They are, however, sufficiently different to make an etymological
equation difficult (to say the least). "Phonetic closeness" means little
by itself unless you can suggest how they are derived from a common
root. OLat. stlocus is routinely referred to PIE *stel- 'erect, fix,
make ready' (vel sim.), but the details are far from clear. Pokorny's
*stlo-ko- makes no sense as an IE form. A root like *slek- won't work,
since initial *sl- was simplified already in pre-Latin times rather than
receive an epenthetic *-t- in Old Latin.

I would suggest that the word was once trisyllabic and that it was
affected by the syncope of the initial syllable at a time when Italic
stress was still mobile (there are fairly convincing examples of such a
process in Brent Vine's paper [still in press], which you may remember
from the 2009 Copenhagen conference). Vine suggested there developments
like *dHogWHó-ko- > *þo(G)wóko- > *þwoko- > focus 'hearth' (from
*dHegWH- 'burn'), and my impression is that in such cases an unaccented
short vowel was typically lost in an open syllable between an obstruent
and a liquid or glide. A hypothetical *stVló- would meet such a
descrition, so perhaps the best way of emending Pokorny's etymology
would be this:

We can therefore start with PIE *stoló- 'base, support (for placing
things on)' (cf. PSl. *stolU 'table; throne, seat', Lith. sta~las
'table'), possibly Germanic *sto:la- 'stool, throne' with a long grade
if not from *stah2-lo- (the two roots are confusible in derived forms).
Cf. *stel-on- 'plant stalk/shoot' in Germanic (OE ste(o)la) and Latin
(stolo, stolo:nis). The semantic shift from something like 'base, seat'
to 'place, post, location, abode' is easy and commonplace. The suffixed
derivative *stoló-ko- would have yielded pre-Latin syncopated *stloko- >
(st)locus. Nothing to do with Osc. sla(a)gí, I'm afraid.

i

Piotr