The Lady (Almost) Vanishes

Georges-Jean Pinault (1)

1 Mondes Iranien et Indien - UMR 7528

Discussion of the alleged reflexes of the PIE word for 'woman', that can be reconstructed as *sor-/*ser-. Alternative reconstructions are falsified. This noun has been used as a quasi suffix for referring to female beings, at the stage where there was no feminine gender, nor any feminine suffix. The point of departure of this morpheme was in univerbated phrases, as seen in Anatolian. New interpretation of PIE *swe-sor- 'sister'. Latin uxor does not contain this lexeme, and can be explained totally differently, as a delocatival derivative, based on a noun for 'house, home'.

Mots clés: Indo-European Linguistics; Indo-European etymology; Indo-European morphology; Indo-European language; Anatolian languages; Latin language; kinship terms; gender marking; feminine gender

Domaines: Linguistique

Georges-Jean Pinault. The Lady (Almost) Vanishes . Adam J. Cooper; Jeremy Rau; Michael Weiss. Multi Nominis Grammaticus. Studies in Classical and Indo-European linguistics offered to Alan J. Nussbaum at the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, Beech Stave Press, pp.240-254, 2013, 978-0-9747927-9-8. ⟨halshs-01333792⟩