On the etymology of Latin signum and its Sabellic counterparts
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Kanehiro Nishimura
Abstract
The etymology of Latin signum ‘mark, sign’ and its Sabellic cognates such as Oscan segnúm ‘statue’ has long been disputed. I reevaluate the two main hypotheses as to what verbal root of Proto-Indo-European underlies these forms: *sekH- ‘cut’ (Lat. secō) or *sek w - ‘follow’ (Lat. sequor). The former, though well received among scholars, will turn out to be problematic from a phonological standpoint; while the syncope of the vocalized laryngeal in the putative reconstruction *sekH-no- and the subsequent voicing assimilation of *k before n could account for Latin signum, the same explanation is not applicable to the Sabellic data due to the forms like Oscan akeneí ‘year’ with a voiceless velar. The reconstruction *sek w -no- thus enables us to pursue a unitary treatment for both Latin and Sabellic. Furthermore, I argue that the wide range of semantics of signum can be better explained by *sek w -. As the Germanic derivative *sek w -ni- shows (e.g., Gothic siuns ‘sight, appearance’), the underlying notion ‘follow’ of the verbal root is used as not only ‘physically follow’ but also ‘visually follow’; this binary value is sufficiently broad to encompass the various senses of our ‘sign’ words.
Acknowledgments
I owe a great debt of gratitude to Aurelijus Vijūnas, Anthony Yates, and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are of course my own. The production of this paper was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP20K00608, JP24K03863.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Clausal versus phrasal comparatives in Latin
- More on the collapse of contrastive vowel length in late Latin: a review of the metalinguistic evidence
- A note on Latin nota ‘mark, sign’
- A new hypothesis on the etymology of Lat. mulier ∼eris ‘woman’
- On the etymology of Latin signum and its Sabellic counterparts
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Clausal versus phrasal comparatives in Latin
- More on the collapse of contrastive vowel length in late Latin: a review of the metalinguistic evidence
- A note on Latin nota ‘mark, sign’
- A new hypothesis on the etymology of Lat. mulier ∼eris ‘woman’
- On the etymology of Latin signum and its Sabellic counterparts
