Our approach starts from Palaite
ḫaapnaš (=Hittite
ḫapaš) “river” and is based on a linguistic Eurasiatic survey originating in J. Greenberg. He posits that
*no (
*nV) is a marker establishing the membership of the macrofamily and that
ḫapaš stems from a term applying to
water. To justify these developments, our study focuses on a pre-celtic term
onno “river” analyzed as
*(H)on-spring +
*nV in order to try to show that a structure
*dh-(h)on-, with the
*dh- prefix, after a linguistic break, went into the making of an Indo-European root (“to flow”). The pair
ḫaapnaš/ ḫapaš is then considered within the complex history of the Anatolian genitive, at this stage of our approach we resort to a former membership case reshaped in various ways into the nominative when some verb forms, coming after Eurasiatic verbo-nominals, appeared in Indo-European. The analysis of Eurasiatic and Indo-European is completed with a comparative discussion of Lithuanian
upė “river”.
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