WeepingElf wrote: ↑Thu Sep 24, 2026 10:14 am
No, Kloekhorst never proposed a relationship between IE and Japanese. He proposed that the PIE word for 'name' is derived from a root
*h₃neh₃- 'to name, to call' reflected in the Hittite verb
ḫannai- 'to call to court'. And that seems to make sense to me.
I actually want to push back a little on Kloekhorst's reconstruction of "name" here and advocate for *h₃nómn̩.
First of all, we have Celtic *anman "name", which must reflect *(H)n̩mn̩-, and cannot be derived from a form with a medial laryngeal.
Second of all, we have Germanic *nōmijaną "to give a name", which cannot be derived directly from *namô "name" due to lacking *n (a direct derivative from the noun would have to be *namnijaną, as is indeed created later). Hence it must be inherited, or derived from some inherited formation also lacking *n, which either suggests some unknown derivative in *-mo- from the root, or else the root actually includes the *m (and I would suggest it's the latter, a causative to a lost class 6 verb *namaną "to be named", with the *ō coming from the well-attested vrddhi in this formation).
To explain the
ō in Latin, we can refer to the old explanation of contamination with
cognōscere in
cognōmen.
To be honest, I'm also unconvinced by his derivation of Hittite
ḫanna- from a root *h₃neh₃- in the first place. In particular, the phonological developments he requires are essentially unsupported (*-HR- >
-RR- is only evidenced by this exact word, and *-HRH- >
-RR- has no parallels I can find, and in fact there's an example
walḫ- "to hit" < *welh₃- that suggests the second laryngeal should be
retained in this environment) and I suspect are invented purely to allow a connection with "name". Rather, a root *h₃enh₃- would work perfectly for the Hittite and Greek verbs, as Hittite had an early transfer of simple stems ending in a geminate into the
tarna-class, a possibility that Kloekhorst conveniently ignores.