kλida-
‘earth, soil’
- Language
- Lydian
- Grammar
- subst
- ID
- 1063
1. Individual Anatolian Languages
1.1 Lydian
kλida-
‘earth, soil’1.1.1Transmission
This noun occurs in the curse formula of the Aramaic and Lydian bilingual inscription that was found at the cemetery of Sardis and is datable to the early 4th century BCE.
[I.Y.]
1.1.2Forms
| dat. sg. | kλidaλ | LW 1.9 (Sardis) |
1.1.3Meaning
The correspondence between the Aramaic phrase ṭyn w-myn ‘soil and water’ and its Lydian counterpart kλidaλ kofuλ=k was already established in Littmann 1916a:36 even though Littmann did not commit himself to a specific correspondence between the elements of the Lydian and Aramaic formulae. But all the subsequent treatments of this pair, including Gusmani 1964a:152, opted for the match in word order between the two languages within this collocation and assigned the meaning ‘earth, soil’ to kλidaλ. Such a solution derives additional support from the etymology of kof(i)- ‘water’.
[I.Y.]
1.1.4Stem
Synchronically, this is an a-stem, or perhaps an a-/ẽ-stem.
[I.Y.]
2. Reconstruction
2.1Reconstruction
Melchert 1994b:136 suggests an etymological connection with Gk. γλία ‘glue’, Engl. ‘clay’, which would only be tenable, if the voiced velar develops to Lydian k instead of disappearing as in Luwian and Lycian. The near absence of a phoneme g in word internal position speak for a general loss *g just as in the Luwic languages. On can compare the few attestations of g in Lycian, which only go back to the lenited laryngeal. Gérard 2004a:128 n. 17 (and Gérard 2005a:73) compares Lyd. kλida- to Hitt. kulēi ‘fallow lands’, which is phonologically problematic, because a pre-form *ku̯li- would be expected to yield Lyd. qλ-. Further, there is no independent evidence for the loss of the labial element in this position nor for its syncope after its putative delabialization. Moreover, if one starts from the Lydian word, there are more than one way to reconstruct its pre-form. Lydian k can now go back to a laryngeal; cf. Lyd. kof(i)- and the arguments of Oettinger 2021a. Further, the sound λ can reflect not only a palatalized *l, but also a sequence *ri or *di (see Sasseville 2021e with further literature). The number of different pre-forms that the Lydian word for ‘earth’ can have calls for caution and, thus, we will refrain from etymologizing it within the Indo-European frame until an inner-Anatolian cognate appears.
[D.S.]