bloomfield - ie ozdos, greek odzos, etc

7/27/2019 Bloomfield - IE Ozdos, Greek Odzos, Etc.

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Linguistic Society of America

Indo-European ozdos, Greek , Germanic asts, etc.Author(s): Maurice BloomfieldReviewed work(s):Source: Language, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Dec., 1927), pp. 213-214Published by: Linguistic Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/409254 .

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INDO-EUROPEAN ozdos, GREEK B6os,GERMANIC asts, etc.MAURICE LOOMFIELD

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITYThe Vedic hapax legomenon nigatsnz' sitting in' does not, as is usually

said, owe its rare suffix snu to a combination of the final s of sadas 'seat'with a suffix nu, but is an imitative congener of the pair sthasnu (sthad~u,sthadu) 'standing' and carin(t 'walking', see AJPh 16.417. If we hadin addition to these three a fourth congener *fayif~nu lying', the lazy-chain would be complete: 'Don't walk, if you can stand; stand, if you cansit; sit, if you can lie!' To make up for the failure to complete thisgroup, the RV has patayintip 'flying' which reflects patcidyantamn thestanza below. To match carinATB has gamifnu 'going'. The preposi-tion ni in niZatsnUi dds, however, to the word the particular idea of'nesting', 'nestling', German 'nisten'. It occurs in a charm for thesafe delivery of a woman, RV 10.162.3 (MG 2.18.2), where the variouspostures and movements of the embryo in the womb are compared withthe actions of a bird in the nest:

yds te hdnti patdyantah nifatsnzrh ydh sarisrpdm,jdt&rhyds te jighdisati tdm it6 ndgaydmasi.'(The demon) who seeks to slay thy flying, nesting, or hopping (foetus),or (the child) when born, that (demon) do we drive out fromhere.' The words sarisrpdm and patdyati occur also in connectionat AV 19.48.3; the natural contrast between the two implies the ren-dering 'hopping' rather than 'creeping' for the intensive sarisypd.In any case nigatsnti, as well as other combinations of ni+sad (y6dnzta indra nifdde akari, RV 1.104.1), reflects nidd 'nest', IE ni-zd-o- 'placeto sit in'.

With IE ni-zd-o-s 'nest' rimes IE o-zd-o-s 'ast'. The fonetics of thelatter are perfectly well understood, the meaning not at all. For*ozdosdoes not mean 'appendage', 'ansatz' but 'place to sit on', 'perch',just as *nizdos means 'place to sit in'. RV 10.43.4, vdyo nd vrkedmd'sadan, analyzes the idea formally and functionally. Both *nizdo-

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214 MAURICEBLOOMFIELDand *ozdo-owe their being to sympathetic observation of bird life, al-most idyllic in mood.

Stokes, in Fick's VergleichendesWoerterbuch4.50, posits a word *odbos(Erse odb) for *odgyosor *ozgVos,which Bartholomae, ZDMG 46.305; IF5.355, identifies with Vedic ddgas, as well as Gr. 05os, Goth. asts.1For all of these he posits a start-form *ozgyos. He does not explicitlydiscard IE ozdos but he leaves the reader puzzled as to why Gr. 6pos,(Lesbic io0os), Goth. asts, Arm. ost should not represent IE ozdosrather than IE ozgYos.Vedic ddga (Middle Persian azg according to Bartholomae) does notrest upon a very firm foundation. It occurs in obscure connectionAV 1.27.3, where the comm. reads udga which he glosses by gQkha'branch'. Neither ddga nor udga is quotable from the literature asecond time. If, however, the Vedic and Celtic forms should justifyIE ozgyos 'branch', that word seems most likely to be derivable from theIE root segl' 'hang' in Skt. saj 'cling', Lith. segzi'bind' (see Fick4 1.137).The meaning of *ozgOoswould then be 'place to cling to'. In Sanskritthe combination d + saj is very frequent; see, e.g., the expressionKIuq. 75.19 gakhdydmdsajati (to be sure, not in connection with birds).Brugmann, IF, 19.379n., suggests that Gr. 6sxos, 6oxn 'branch' isderived from the root of Xwowith the preposition o (5). If so, themeaning would be 'place to hold to'. In case the formation be prehis-toric it would reflect a third parallel *o-zgh-o-, matching both struc-turally and semantically *o-zg-o- and *o-zd-o-.

1He does not include Armenian ost in his statement.

bloomfield - ie ozdos, greek odzos, etc

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