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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Do Zeus and Jupiter derive from `light' ?
In-Reply-To: schiller@prl.philips.nl's message of Tue, 27 Jun 1995 10:19:58 GMT
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In article <DAtu1A.Lyr@prl.philips.nl> schiller@prl.philips.nl (schiller c)
writes:

>A friend of mine mantains that the ethymology of Zeus and the Ju in jupiter is
>the same and derives from an old root meaning light.

>Another friend mantains that they derive from a root meaning bright sky. Which
>one is right?

The usually accepted meaning of *deiwos is "(bright) sky."  I don't remember
off-hand a secondary meaning "light" but it's not an implausible semantic
development.  So both may be correct, although in that case, friend two is
"more" correct.

There is a related Vedic collocation, as well:

	PIE		Latin		Greek		Sanskrit

Nom.	*dye:us pXte:r	Iuppiter ~	Zeus (pate:r)	dya:us pita:
			 Iu:piter
Acc.	*dye:m  pXterm	Iovem		Ze:n		dya:m pitaram
Gen.	*diwos pXtros	Iovis		Dios		divas (?) pitur

(This noun is somewhat irregular in Sanskrit, and I can't remember the genitive
for certain.  I *think* I have cited the correct formation.)

As you can see, the Latin and Greek forms drop the word for "father" in cases
other than the nominative.  (Though it may re-appear in the vocative, that is
not really a grammatical case.)  Latin underwent some paradigmatic leveling,
which removed stem doublets like that seen in Greek.

The Latin doublet in the nominative is due to assimilation of the *s yielding
-pp-, with compensatory lengthening if the geminate is simplified.

>Is there some information available on this topic in the literature?  This
>topic fascinates me, and I'd like to hear more about it.

Grace Sturtevant wrote a monograph in the 1930s on the entire family of words
related to *deiwos, published by the Linguistic Society of America in a series
connected with the journal _Language_.  Check under both Grace Sturtevant and
Grace Hopkins.
-- 
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_
