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Abstract.
Five short articles are presented offering, in some, new etymological suggestions (§§ 1 ... 'fight', ... 'reward', ... 'want, wish' : Slavic *golb 'bare, naked', 4. ... 'warmth, heat of the sun'), in others, comments on existing etymologies (§§ 1. ... 'reward', 3. ... 'wound', 5. ... 'nail' and delabialization by *l in North and East Germanic). Two of the items present alternatives to reconstructions with PIE *a (§§ 1, 3).
Keywords: Greek language, etymology, Slavic languages, Proto-Indo-European language
(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)
1. ... 'fight', ... 'reward'
Svensson (2006: 295, n. 1) urges as "strong evidence" for PIE *a the correspondence set Lith. magü, magëti 'please', OCS mogç, mosti 'be able', Ved. amahe (RV 7.92.2) 'verschafft' ('gives, grants(?), takes(?)' - Monier-Williams 1899: 146c s.v.; make 'is able' - Svensson, l.c.), OHG magën 'be able', Gk. ... 'fight'. The same set was apparently also discovered independently by Zehnder (LIV2: 422) who supplies the semantic bridge linking 'is able' with 'verschafft' and cites as well the Ved. optative sám mahema 'zustande bringen'.
The only guarantee of PIE *a in this set is Gk. ... 'fight', which is sufficiently distant semantically from the other words in Svensson's comparison for Beekes (2010 s.v.) to find it "isolated" and probably of substrate origin. If we reject PIE *a and reconstruct instead *mh2eghl-1,2 for the Greek word we expect to find a zero grade derivative *mh2gitó which as a neuter substantive would mean *'something that was fought' and/or *'something that was gained by fighting'3 and would yield, by Beekes' law,4 Proto-Indo-Iranian (PII) *mijhtó > Gathic mïzda Imizdal (for the phonemic interpretation see Beekes 1988a: 234; for the environment in which *H > GAv. i, ibid. 85-87) n. 'reward, prize', i.e. 'something that was gained by fighting', as well as RV mïdhà/mïlhà n., not only, as in Gathic, 'prize in a contest, reward' but also 'contest, strife', i.e., 'something that was actually fought'5 (for the formal development cf. PIE *ligi-tó > PII *rijh-tó- > Ved. rïdhà-, cf. on the Iranian side Khot. ristä Ticks', Mayrhofer, EWAia, 2 s.v. REH), i.e. a semantically and formally exact comparandum with Gk. ....
It is no secret that the existing etymology of Ved. mïdhà, Gathic mïzda links these words with Gk. ......