Can someone render the name of the Proto-Indo-European chief deity's name (*Dyēus Ph2tēr) into English letters?

May 2021 3 234 Report

Can someone render the name of the Proto-Indo-European chief deity's name (*Dyēus Ph2tēr) into English letters?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyeus

Unfortunately, Yahoo will not render the name properly; the "2" in the second word of the title should be in subscript -- I've added the above link so that anyone may see the true spelling.

My question is if anyone can tell me how I might type this name out in a book or novel, so that my readers won't have to scratch their heads over how to pronounce the asterisk at the front of Dyeus, or the dreaded subscript "2" in the second word of the title.

Thank you, kindly.

Society & Culture / Mythology & Folklore

Marcos

Verified answer

Hi, let me see if I can explain a little.

The asterisk is not pronounced, and is actually not part of the name. Asterisks are used in linguistics to show that something is reconstructed or hypothetical, not known from the actual historical record. So that's all it means.

Second of all, the lines over the vowels mean that they are pronounced as long vowels. The long "e" of Proto-Indo-European sounded something like the "ay" in "day", and the "u" sounds like a slightly shorter version of the "oo" in "doom".

The "h2" represents a laryngeal consonant, but exactly which one is not known. Laryngeal means it is some kind of "h" sound or a glottal stop (like the catch in the middle of the word "uh-oh"). The best guess of linguists today is that h2 sounded a bit like a throatier version of English "h", but in this word it probably sounded more like an "ahhh".

So in summary, here is how you could write it: "Dyeus Pahter", and a guide to pronunciation could be something roughly like "d'YAY-oos PUH-tayr"

philosophyangel

Dyaus Piter -- this is how I've always seen it: meaning "heavenly father " from which the Greeks got the name Zeus (variant of Dyaus) and the Romans Jupiter (Ju or Iu a variant of Dyaus -heavenly, luminous and Piter Father, also Pater and Sanskrit Pitr)

Edit: Ok I looked at the link. I see what you mean. I think, you need to just remove the asterisks and what not and approximate a phonetic spelling--which is what that is anyway.