< Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European
Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/meh₁
Proto-Indo-European
Etymology
Compare Tocharian A/Tocharian B mā (“not, no”), not a prohibitive particle. According to Martirosyan, if the word originally meant ‘not’ and later obtained the function of the prohibitive, we are dealing with an Armeno-Greek-Albanian-Indo-Iranian grammatical isogloss.
Particle
*meh₁
- prohibitive particle
See also
- *ne
Descendants
- Proto-Albanian: *mē
- Albanian: mo
- Proto-Albanian: *mē tše
- Albanian: mos
- Proto-Armenian:
- Old Armenian: մի (mi)
- Armenian: մի (mi)
- → Urartian: 𒈪𒉌 (/mī, mi, me(i)/, “usually: and; as a prohibitive: no, not”)
- Old Armenian: մի (mi)
- Proto-Hellenic: *mḗ
- Ancient Greek: μή (mḗ)
- Proto-Indo-Iranian: *maH (see there for further descendants)
- Messapic: [Term?] (ma, “not”)
References
- Martirosyan, Hrach (2010) Etymological Dictionary of the Armenian Inherited Lexicon (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 8), Leiden, Boston: Brill, page 468f
- Martirosyan, Hrach (2013), “The place of Armenian in the Indo-European language family: the relationship with Greek and Indo-Iranian”, in Journal of Language Relationship, issue 10, § 3.4, page 91
- Абаев, В. И. (1973), “ma”, in Историко-этимологический словарь осетинского языка [Historical-Etymological Dictionary of the Ossetian Language] (in Russian), volume II, Moscow, Leningrad: Academy Press, page 60f