The Source of "Water" (2020) | Hacker News Reader

The Source of "Water" (2020)

jamesgill.net

12 pointsstakkur7 comments

The Hittite word, watar appears in a sentence that was the first clue that it was IE: nu ninda en e-iz-za-te-ni wa-a-tar-ma e-ku-ut-te-ni

Czech linguist Bedrich Hrozny translated this in early 1900 s as: now you will eat bread and drink water. After this breakthrough he was able to mostly decipher it. https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/hittite.htm

My only source is having read Russian novels in English. I wonder if the "little" water is like someone's diminutive name, i.e., meant to show familiarity or affection. Like, Mishka is the diminutive of Mikhail.

Yes, exactly that. The -k or -ka suffix in Slavic languages often expresses the diminutive, similar to -ito, -ita in Spanish. Thus:

* вода - voda - water

* водка - vodka - vodka

English has several form of diminutive that are still in use but only -ie seems to be still somewhat productirlve (i.e. used to produce diminutives of new words).

-ie (doggie)

-let (booklet)

-ling (duckling)

-ette (cigarette)

None of which seem to work well with "water" (waterie, watelet, waterling, waterette)

https://web.archive.org/web/20200724021016/https://jamesgill...

I'd like to read more about the difference between living aqua and dead water.

Spent a little time on wiktionary:

> Unlike its neuter synonym wódr̥, h₂ep- is always gendered in descendants. This may reflect the same animate–inanimate (or semantically active–passive) distinction in early PIE that is often supposed for the nouns meaning “fire”, such as h₁n̥gʷnís m and péh₂wr̥ n respectively.

> Two main terms for “fire” are reconstructible for Proto-Indo-European: h₁n̥gʷnís and péh₂wr̥. They are usually considered in semantic opposition. The first term is usually masculine and refers to fire as something animate and active (compare Agni, the most prominent Old Indic deity), whereas the second term is neuter and refers to fire as something inanimate and passive, i.e. as a substance.

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