12 August 2013

Latin caesius 'light blue' (updated)

















According to my amateur colleague Marco Moretti, Latin caesius 'light blue (also said of eye colour)' is a loanword from Etruscan caisie-, ceisi(e)-. These forms, together with caizna, ceizna, have exact counterparts in Baltic: Lithuanian gaĩsa-s 'glow, redness in the sky', Latvian gàiss 'air, wheather', gàišs 'bright, clear', gaisma 'light', etc.1 In my opinion, these words are indicative of prehistoric contacts between Tyrrhenian (the language family to which Etruscan belongs) and a linguistic continuum from which emerged Baltic and Thracian2

Also Lithuanian gaidrùs 'bright, clear (said of wheather)' and Greek phaidrós 'shining, bright, cheerful' belong here, and Duridanov reconstructs Thracian *gaidrus on the basis of the personal name Gaidre(a)s3. For these forms, an IE protoform *gwai- 'light, bright'can be reconstructed, with regular delabialization of the labiovelar in "satem" languages. In my opinion, this is a loanword from Caucasian *ʔVqqwo-ji- 'white, light, blueish', in turn a derivative of *=eqqwA 'yellow'.

From the same Caucasian source it also comes a different IE protoform *koi-tʔ-, found in Lithuanian skaidrùs 'clear, bright', skáistas, skaistùs 'bright', Germanic *xaid-u- > Gothic haidus 'way, manner', *xaid-a- > Old Norse heiδ 'clear (said of weather)', heiδr 'clear, cheerful', *xaid-ra- > Old High German heitar, German heiter 'cheerful', and to which some IE-ists link the Latin word5.
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1 As Etruscan didn't possess voiced stops, c /k/ would be the rendering of a former /g/.
2 This continuum was broken by the irruption of people from the Pontic Steppes, whose languages interacted with the autochthonous ones and gave raise to Dacian (a close relative of Indo-Iranian) as well as Greek and its nearest relatives (Macedonian, Phrygian, Armenian).
3 I. Duridanov (1969): Die Trakisch- und Dakisch-Baltischen Sprachbeziehungen, p. 75.
4 Ortodox reconstructions are *gwhai- and *gwheH2i-. See R.S.P Beekes (2010): Etymological Dictionary of Greek, p. 1544.
5 M. de Vaan (2008): Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages, p. 82. 

5 comments:

  1. "This continuum, from which emerged IE languages such as Baltic and Thracian, was later broken by the irruption of people from the Pontic Steppes, whose languages interacted with the autochthonous ones and gave raise to Dacian (a close relative of Indo-Iranian) as well as Greek and its nearest relatives (Macedonian, Phrygian, Armenian)"

    I think I saw that in Stanislav Grigoriev's book...you said the same thing he said (almost anyway). Is that where you got the idea?

    You said something similar in your olive comments.

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    1. Who's that guy? My main sources are Georgiev and Villar.

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  2. Hola, Octavia!

    This is his academia.edu profile

    Stanislav Grigoriev

    The most interesting links are the ones involving his book...The Ancient Indo-Europeans. Is is a massive pdf file...128MB The Ancient Indo-Europeans

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    1. Thank you very much. I see he's an archaeologist, not a linguist, and also he has his own theory about IE origins.

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