Re: Etymology of Houbit and haben

On Mar 26, 10:27 am, "Franz Gnaedinger" <f...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mar 25, 9:33 pm, "Douglas G. Kilday" <fufl...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

What, your dictionary calls Vergil post-classical? That's like
calling Buddy Holly a punk-rocker. See Aeneid 12:926-7. "Incidit
ictus ingens ad terram duplicato poplite Turnus." Here "duplicato
poplite" = "with redoubled knee, bent knee" (cf. Spanish "doblar la
rodilla").

The extension from 'knee' to 'ham, hough' probably comes from the
expression "poplitem succi:dere" = "to undercut the knee, to disable
by cutting the hamstring, to hamstring" being reinterpreted as "to
undercut the ham". For the presumed semantic development of <poples>,
cf. Sp. <rodilla> 'little wheel' > 'kneecap' > 'knee'.

My dictionary is usually reliable, but I willingly accept
poples 'knee' if you can quote Virgil on this.

Actually, my dictionary says that poples means hollow
of the knee, while the meaning of knee is unclassical
and metaphorical. Harvey and Baldi give poples 'back
of the knee', so this meaning must be older than the
one of knee and knee cap, whereas, if the word came
from *kwel- 'turn and kwelkwlo- the early meaning of
poples should be knee cap and not back of the knee.

As for the k-form I'd like to propose the following idea:

OC --- right eye, to look, watch, observe
CO --- to think, reason, with an alert mind

LOP --- fortified dwelling

CO OC LOP --- to observe (oc) (the surroundings)
from the city wall (lop) with an alert mind (oc),
guards turning their rounds on or behind the city
walls, watching out, observing the surroundings
with alert minds

wherefrom Cyclops 'one-eyed giant, eye, city walls'
- the cyclops Polyphem symbolized Troy (see my
message from this morning in my etymological thread)
- and kyklos 'wheel, circle, cycle'.

Dwellings protected by hedges were old (Dolni Vestonice
dates back to around 26 000 BP) while the wheel is a
relatively young invention, and so hypothetical CO OC LOP
would account for Cyclops, kyklos, and even wheel:

CO O(C) L(OP) CO-O-L whe-oh-l whe-e-l wheel

If my reasoning holds, CO-O-L predates *kwel- 'turn'
and may even replace it. For a cognate I think of German
kollern 'to roll unevenly', for example a boulder rolling down
a mountain slope. Consider Polyphem throwing boulders
after Odysseus. One-eyed giants throwing boulders at
pirates were also known from the Caucasus above the
shores of the Black Sea, where they had a positive
connotation, other than Polyphem in Homer's Odyssey.

Regards Franz Gnaedinger






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