indoeuropean

[Stefan Georg]

>Dear Sir : I belong to the indoeuropean list and I am a begining student
>of this matter. I would like to know about the origin of the greek
>classic word : "cheir" , that means hand and that has done origin to the
>latin word "chyrurgia". There is a sanskrit radical for the word hand ?
>Thanks for your attention. Adelgicius paulae.
>e-mail : lagos at artnet.com.br

Gk. cheir, commonly reconstructed as going back to *ghes-r has several
Indo-European cognates. That in Sanskrit is /has-ta/ (the roots match, the
suffixes don`t; an interesting derivative - and if only for mnemotechnic
reasons - is /hastin-/ "elephant", the handed animal); other cognates
include Hittite keSSar, Tokharian Sar/tsar, Armenian jeRn, and, believe it
or not (I do) Albanian /dorE/. Other languages have replaced this
apparently oldest word for "hand", to wit Latin manus, Gothic handus,
Baltic and Slavic *renka/ronka (from a verb meaning "to grasp", cf.
Lithuanian /rinkti/. The limited distribution of this core-vocabulary item
in IE has once given rise to the bromide that the early Indo-Europeans did
have feet but no hands (mocking at linguistic palaeontology, of course).

St.G.