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”.
--------------------------------------------------------------
