Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Missing the sky

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Thursday, March 7, 2002, 18:35
En réponse à Joe Hill <joe@...>:

> > As far as I remember..*djeu/*dyeu was the Sky God, commonly known as > Jove. >
Yep! But where do you think the name come from?
> Ok, I've just looked it up in the PIE roots index. > > *djeu-onom (-onom is the infinitive suffix) is 'to shine' > > '*djeu-' the noun, means the Sky God, or alternatively, the sky. >
Exactly the "day sky". And the name of the god (or the gods, because very early the name was taken to simply mean "god", probably by metonymy, the gods being named after the place they were supposed to dwell in - or at least it's the theory I've read and it makes sense :)) ) is derived from it (usually with a suffix -(e/o)s). And by the way, the name Jupiter comes from the PIE expression or compound dyew-s pH2ter (H2 is a laryngeal. But I'm not sure it's the right one :)) . As for the vowel, remember that in PIE the vowel e could alternate with o or disappear altogether, so taking the form of a compound the word could easily become dyu-s pH2ter, with w becoming syllabic) which is basically "deus pater" or Father God, and is found in plenty of Indo-European languages (most of them didn't go as far as Latin which fused the two words). This explains why "Jupiter" has its cases based on the stem "Jov-", like accusative "Jovem" or genitive "Joves". In this case, I'm nearly sure the name of the sky god is derived from the name of the day sky and not the contrary, since the name of the god usually appears with the suffix -(e/o)s, but not the word for day sky. Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

Replies

Joe Hill <joe@...>
Matthew Bladen <matthew.bladen@...>