Re: "Wife" (was: Homosexuality etc.)

JS Bangs scripsit:

> What do you mean by "Indo-Hittite hypothesis" ? If you mean the fact that
> Hittite is related to IE, then my impression (from reading current
> articles) is that the theory is alive and well, and has become accepted
> fact.
Quite true and not what I meant.

> If you mean the re-drawing of IE trees to split immediately to
> Proto-Hittite and Proto-Everything-Else, then I agree that the theory
> isn't current. My current understanding is that Hittite and
> otherwise-reconstructible PIE are more or less sister languages, descended
> from a common ancestor that can't be reliably reconstructed.
???

These two sentences seem to contradict each other.  My understanding of
current orthodoxy is that Hittite is just another branch like Germanic,
Greek, Italic, or Tocharian, not particularly more remote from the others
than they are from each other.

> > I've always wondered what it was like to be Hrozny, staring at a cuneiform
> > text, seeing "nu BREAD-an ezzateni, watar-ma ekuteni" (where "BREAD" is a
> > known Sumerian ideograph) and suddenly intuiting that it meant something
> > like "now eat bread and drink water", not only IE but almost Germanic!
>
> Every word there is clear to me except "ekuteni" - what's the cognate?
Ya got me -- it's obviously not derived from dhreg-, at least not in any
simple way!  It may be a nonreconstructible word, but surely it doesn't
take much to interpret "now eat bread and -- water" as "drink water".

--
Winter:  MIT,                                   John Cowan
Keio, INRIA,                                    jcowan@reutershealth.com
Issue lots of Drafts.                           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
So much more to understand!                     http://www.reutershealth.com
Might simplicity return?                        (A "tanka", or extended haiku)

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