Re: I need help explaining basic linguistic concepts to a lay person


"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:43C3C84F.2398@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> J. W. Love wrote:

>> Actually, Peter, the Baldi you typeset* implies (p. 304) that <fe:mina>
>> is indeed some sort of <fe:-> plus the PIE suffix <*-men->---but of
>> course that <fe:-> has no clearcut connection with the Spanish <fe>
>> 'faith' (Latin <fides> 'trust, faith, confidence'), which is presumably
>> what the evil-minded prelates were working from. L&S, the big old Latin
>> dictionary, relates this <fe:-> to Greek <phu-ô> 'to produce'.
>
> There's no /f/ back in PIE, so at best that explanation is mixing items
> thousands(?) of years apart.
>
> MW 10th Collegiate makes it "akin to" (which means they can't exactly
> explain the connection) OE delu, Gk thêlê 'nipple', also Lat. filius,
> felix, fecundus as well as felare.

Both IE *bh- and *dh- in initial positions yield a Latin f- (cf. stems fu-
(fuit, futurus, etc) from *bheu- (Grk phu-, Skt bhu), and fe- (fecit), from
*dheH- (Grk tithemi, Skt dha:).

The reason, I'm sure, for the lack of certainty in the case of the 'suck'
verb is the -l- it's got, which strikes me as very strange. *dheHl- does not
strike me as a normal-looking IE root; in any case, explaining what that -l-
is and, more importantly, why it's not there in fe:mina is a bit
problematic. The proposed derivation from *bheu- might be easier: *bheumen-
might give fe:min- with perhaps a labial dissimilation. The meaning would
also work, since *bheu- often seems to contrast with *Hes- in that the
latter is more or less timeless, while *bheu- has a starting point ('become,
produce, be from birth').

Neeraj Mathur


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