Re: Eating, Cattle and Elbow (was: Hermes/=Mercury)

> English 'elbow' and its Germanic cognates are compounds of 'ell'

and 'bow'.

> Old English elnboga (which occurs as well as 'elgoba', the only

form you

> quote from Watkins), Old High German elinbogo and Old Norse o,lnbogi
> illustrate the compounding summed up in Proto-Germanic *alinobogon.
>
> The word for 'bow', the weapon, is 'boga' in Old English; the

change of

> unsoftened, intervocalic g > w is a regular change from Old English

to

> Middle English. It's a weak noun in Old English, i.e. the oblique

cases

> have -n-, and in German its uninflected 'Bogen'. (The OHG

nominative

> singular was 'bogo'.) West Germanic languages were very fond of

forming

> weak nouns (and of course, we have the weak form of the adjective

with the

> same suffix), whence what you refer to as "parasitic 'n'".
>
> The issue of non-Germanic cognates of 'bow' and 'bow' (both the

homonyms) is

> complicated. The Germanic forms point to PIE *bHeugH-, but the

other

> languages (Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, at least - I haven't checked

Pokorny

> for other languages) point to PIE *bHeug.

>
> As I see it, you are offering


>one for PIE *bHeugH or Germanic *beug,
> Turkic bük. There used to be a lot of doubt about the phonetic

realisation

> of this Altaic *p-, so the relationship may be plausible.
>
> I apologise for not beang able to trim this post much.
>

Danish has 'bukke', Swedish 'buga' for "bow" (vb.). That kind of
behaviour will make the root a member of Schrijver's
hypothetical "language of geminates"

Torsten