Linguistic Society of America

Indo-European ozdos, Greek , Germanic asts, etc. Author(s): Maurice Bloomfield Reviewed work(s): Source: Language, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Dec., 1927), pp. 213-214 Published by: Linguistic Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/409254 . Accessed: 29/12/2011 05:18
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INDO-EUROPEAN ozdos, GREEK B6os,GERMANIC asts, etc. BLOOMFIELD MAURICE

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

The 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 A JPh 16.417. If we had in addition to these three a fourth congener 'lying', the lazy*fayif~nu chain would be complete: 'Don't walk, if you can stand; stand, if you can sit; sit, if you can lie!' To make up for the failure to complete this in the group, the RV has patayintip 'flying' which reflects patcidyantam TB has The stanza below. To match preposigamifnu 'going'. carinA tion ni in niZatsnUi adds, however, to the word the particular idea of 'nesting', 'nestling', German 'nisten'. It occurs in a charm for the safe delivery of a woman, RV 10.162.3 (MG 2.18.2), where the various postures and movements of the embryo in the womb are compared with the actions of a bird in the nest: ydh sarisrpdm, yds te hdnti patdyantah nifatsnzrh 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 from here.' The words sarisrpdm and patdyati occur also in connection at AV 19.48.3; the natural contrast between the two implies the rendering 'hopping' rather than 'creeping' for the intensive sarisypd. In any case nigatsnti, as well as other combinations of ni+sad (y6dnz ta indra nifdde akari, RV 1.104.1), reflects nidd 'nest', IE ni-zd-o- 'place to sit in'. With IE ni-zd-o-s 'nest' rimes IE o-zd-o-s 'ast'. The fonetics of the latter 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 vrkedm d'sadan, analyzes the idea formally and functionally. Both *nizdo213

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MAURICEBLOOMFIELD

and *ozdo- owe their being to sympathetic observation of bird life, almost idyllic in mood. Stokes, in Fick's VergleichendesWoerterbuch4 2.50, posits a word *odbos (Erse odb) for *odgyosor *ozgVos,which Bartholomae, ZDMG 46.305; IF 5.355, identifies with Vedic ddgas, as well as Gr. 05os, Goth. asts.1 For all of these he posits a start-form *ozgyos. He does not explicitly discard IE ozdos but he leaves the reader puzzled as to why Gr. 6pos, (Lesbic io0os), Goth. asts, Arm. ost should not represent IE ozdos rather than IE ozgYos. Vedic ddga (Middle Persian azg according to Bartholomae) does not rest upon a very firm foundation. It occurs in obscure connection AV 1.27.3, where the comm. reads udga which he glosses by gQkha 'branch'. Neither ddga nor udga is quotable from the literature a second time. If, however, the Vedic and Celtic forms should justify IE ozgyos 'branch', that word seems most likely to be derivable from the IE root segl' 'hang' in Skt. saj 'cling', Lith. segzi 'bind' (see Fick4 1.137). The meaning of *ozgOos would then be 'place to cling to'. In Sanskrit the combination d + saj is very frequent; see, e.g., the expression KIuq. 75.19 gakhdydmdsajati (to be sure, not in connection with birds). Brugmann, IF, 19.379n., suggests that Gr. 6sxos, 6oxn 'branch' is with the preposition o (5). If so, the derived from the root of Xwo meaning would be 'place to hold to'. In case the formation be prehistoric it would reflect a third parallel *o-zgh-o-, matching both structurally and semantically *o-zg-o- and *o-zd-o-.
1 He does not include Armenian ost in his statement.