Re: Brothers-in-law
| From: | Peter Bleackley <peter.bleackley@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, May 5, 2006, 7:44 |
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staving Jim Henry:
>On 5/4/06, Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> wrote:
>
>>Apparently, there is no common PIE word for "wife" reconstructable, nor
>>for any wife-relative family terms. What this says about the structure and
>>nature of PIE families is left as an exercise for the reader...
>
>Would it be reasonable to guess that PIE, like
>modern French, used a single word for both
>"woman" and "wife"? Ancient Greek seems to have
>lost the PIE root for husband as far as I can tell,
>substituting a generic "aner, andros" for man/husband.
>What other languages (IE or not) have common
>words for "man/husband" and/or "woman/wife"?
>Are there any commonalities obvious about their
>present or recent past marriage customs?
I believe that in Old English, "wif" also overlapped meanings between
"wife" and "woman", and I think that "cwen" did too.
Pete
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