Talk:πίθηκος

Etymology

The current etym states,

Commonly connected with Latin foedus (“ugly”), as if from a Proto-Indo-European *bʰid-, *bʰoid-.

1. What do Proto-Indo-European *bʰid- and *bʰoid- mean? Glosses would be very welcome, especially since EN WT currently doesn't have these entries, leaving the user with no apparent way of discovering what these PIE roots mean.
2. Latin foedus (“ugly”) gives its own etymology as:

From Proto-Indo-European *bʰoyǝ- (“to frighten; be afraid”). Compare Old English bǣdan (“to defile”). More at bad.

Why the discrepancy here? Or is *bʰoyǝ- (“to frighten; be afraid”) some kind of alternate form for *bʰid-, *bʰoid-?

Confused, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 09:00, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

For starters, I didn't come up with the etymology, I took it from one of my betters. The discrepancy is plausible from the simple fact that these are hypothetical reconstructions, which can vary based on which word you reconstruct them from. However, the discrepancy is fairly minor; *bʰoy and *bʰoi are merely following different orthographic conventions. I have no idea what the gloss would be, but the semantic connection between ugly and ape seem fairly plausible. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 18:21, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

• Thank you for the additional detail. Reading CodeCat's and others' threads about PIE has led me to view every glyph difference in a PIE reconstruction as semantically important, rather than possibly just a spelling variance. :) Different filters, different sources, I guess. Thanks again, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20:25, 2 April 2014 (UTC)