Talk:durus

durus

@Gnosandes Hey, how come some connect durus to PIE *deru-, *drew- (“hard, firm, strong, solid”) and others to *dweh₂- (“far, long”), *dewh₂- (from the word's own entry) (from which is Proto-Slavic *davě). These are IMO two different roots not related to each other. Thanks in advance. Ентусиастъ (talk) 09:11, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

@Ентусиастъ: Hi. I am not dealing with this branch of the Indo-European family. Try to find the right user, for example, by looking in the history of Proto-Italic entries. There is a dictionary: M. de Vaan. 2008. Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages. Gnosandes (talk) 09:16, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

The meaning matches the *deru- root more closely. Beyond that, some have pointed out that there are basically no words in Latin that start with dr-, so there was probably some kind of phonotactic constraint against that initial cluster, and such phonotactic restraints are often resolved by metathesis, which is what has been claimed to have happened here--zero root grade *dru- metathesized to *dur-. (Sorry that I don't have the sources at the tip of my fingers. And I don't know whether this theory, which I heard word of mouth over 40 years ago at Stanford, has been either presented or convincingly refuted in a peer-reviewed journal, but I always found it interesting.Johundhar (talk) 03:58, 9 April 2023 (UTC)