Horses and chariots again.

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

Artur Karp <hart at POLBOX.COM> wrote:

>While commenting on PSl >v^e^za< (I do not know how to use standard ASCII
>characters to produce diacritical marks necessary to represent sounds in
>Slavic languages; in this case ^ should be reversed and imagined not before
>but over e and z) - meaning "tower" in modern Czech, Slovak and Polish - V.
>Machek [Etymologicky slovnik jazyka ceskeho, Praha 1971] makes an
>interesting remark that connects >wegh< with sleds:

See also Old Norse <vo,g> "lever", pl. <vagar> "sledge", <vo,gur>
"litter, stretcher, bier".

The root *wegh- is also occasionally connected with aquatic means of
transportation, as in Skt. vahitra-.  English "weigh" and "way" are
neutral as to the means, and only imply that something is carried
from A to B.  German/Dutch bewegen "to move" is even less specific.
Still, the fact that so many words in this family refer specifically
to *veh*icles and *wagg*ons does seem to imply an original meaning
like "to carry using some means of transportation (stretcher,
sledge)" as opposed to plain *bher- "to carry"

For what it's worth, Gamq'relidze and Ivanov mention a Finno-Ugric
root *weGe- ~ *wiGe- "to carry, to bring".


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam