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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Do Zeus and Jupiter derive from `light' ?
In-Reply-To: richardm@dilithium's message of 27 Jun 1995 12:20:40 GMT
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In article <3sot2o$rtp@pheidippides.axion.bt.co.uk> richardm@dilithium
(Tin Tin) writes:

>I remember reading somewhere in a book on language families that Jupiter comes
>from old Sanskrit. I can't remember the spelling but basically it is
>(according to the book - and my memory!), from two old words Ju and p'ter,
>which came toegther to mean God the father, cfr dieu / pater.

Not exactly.  Rather, both the Sanskrit form dya:us pita: and the Latin form
Iuppiter derive from the Proto-Indo-European *dye:us *pXte:r , the meaning of
which is best understood as "Father Sky."
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
