KU and GYN as oldest words for woman


Neeraj Mathur replied to Holly:

I think you're missing the point. Nobody's talking about what words are used
or are commonly used by most Dravidians today. The question is what
morphemes can be reconstructed for the ancestral language to the modern
Dravidian terms five thousand years ago. Over that kind of time period, you
would well expect that words would change register or fall out of use. As an
example, the Indo-European root for 'woman', *gwen-, has changed register in
English (it's modern form is 'queen'); for the general context we prefer
another word which we made up from compounding 'wife' and 'man' (Old English
'se wi:fman', masculine in gender). Although it had a reflex in Sanskrit
(jan-), that is not found in everyday modern Hindi (which prefers borrowings
like 'aurat'). That doesn't mean that I can argue that, since it's absent in
modern Hindi, it was absent in Indo-European, obviously.


Phonetical reconstructions of early words are not reliable.
I propose another method. Look out for traces and diffraction
patterns left by potential early words. Ponder permutations
of three-letter-words on the Magdalenian level of time, Lascaux
cave, some 15,000 years ago. Consider two-letter-words on
the time level of the Middle Stone Age in southern Africa,
Blombos cave, 75,000 years ago. Then follow the hypothetical
words upward in time, along time. Much easier than working
backward.

KA --- hypothetical Middle Stone Age word for sky, beyond,
also for what is hidden behind rock, in a well, deep inside
ourselves, accessible to a shaman in a trance

KU --- hypothetical Middle Stone Age word for woman

Some Australian aboriginal words from a small compilation
by Alexander Wyclif: quei and cue-on-meme for a little girl,
quei-marla for an adolescent and a big girl, que-on-buntor
for girl, gin for woman, gunee for mother, kurtoo for wife,
kurunto for womb.

CA --- hypothetical Magdalenian word for sky, beyond

AC --- inverse of ca, an expanse of land with water

GYN --- hypothetical Magdalenian word for woman;
ancient Greek gynae for woman, and many other words
that shall be mentioned later on

NYG --- night, time one spends with a woman, when women
have the say; ancient Greek nyx for night, Nyx was a powerful
goddess, alter ego of Gaia, her priestesses gave oracles,
Latin niger for black (color of the night), nectar for something
sweet (either a drink or a fragrance)

NGY --- pretty and clean; ancient Greek naegateos for clean,
splendid, nakae for fleece (a fleece one wears for cloth or
sleeps upon)

YGN --- health, hygiene; ancient Greek hygieinos for healthy

YNG --- a pregnant woman; ancient Greek enegkeia for to
bear, bring, aorist of phero for I bring, brought, here a woman
who brought a child into the world, so gyn may have been
a woman in general, and specifically a pregnant woman and
a mother

GNY --- child; ancient Greek gnaesios for a (legitimate) child,
genuine, true (consider the old saying of truth being the child
of time)

Magdalenian GYN for woman would survive in many more
words than Greek gynae and English gynecology. It became
Latin genus and generatio, Scottish kin for a narrow crevice
or cleft in a rock (a vulva of the rock, so to speak, a common
feature of rock painting in southern Africa and in European
caves, where animals are painted so that they emerge from
crevices and clefts of a rock or a cave wall), English kin and
kinship (in early times probably matrilinear - mater semper
certa), Norwegian kona for wife, English queen. The female
given name Gwendolyn comes from a Welsh word meaning
white and may originally have referred to the white body of
a naked woman. English gun and the German female given
names Gunhilde and Gundula that refer to war engines may
originally have been sexual metaphors for the male member
and a woman penetrated by a man. When we had been given
our guns in the Swiss Army our instructor told us: give her
a name, she will now be your woman ... Struck me as crazy,
but there must be a link between a gun and a woman, perhaps
along this line: if you can protect your folks you are worthy of
a woman.

In the light of the above reconstruction, queen and gwen are
later forms, while the origin - as far as I can look back - was
KU some 75,000 years ago, and GYN some 15,000 years ago.
A long life, even a very long life for a word.

Regards Franz Gnaedinger www.seshat.ch

Sorry, Heidi, for changing the title of your thread. I am a Ketzer,
you know, and besides I love cats. They are the only animals
that joined us humans out of their own will.

.

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