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Comparison of Arm. agraw 'crow' with Lith. varnas and SC vran (both 'raven') suggests PIE *A^sub 1^uornos 'large corvid' which may be preserved in the Greek toponym ..., whose folk-etymological interpretation as 'birdless' is erroneous. This comparison suggests that the Indo-Europeans shared a widespread perception of ravens and crows as symbols of death.
(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)
In the sixth book of the Aeneid, the Sybil, sounding very much like a Roman matron, offers Aeneas some practical advice for entering and leaving the Underworld:
Tros Anchlsiadë, facilis descensus Averno
noctis atque diespatet ätri iänua Dilis.1
In the remainder of her discourse, the Sybil employs several different terms for that sad region, but the first, Avernus, is a geographically identifiable spot, Lacus Avernus in Campania, located in a seismically active region near Naples across the bay from Mount Vesuvius. The volcanic nature of the place explains the choice, but neither Walde-Hofmann nor Ernout-Meillet bother to give an etymology for Lat. Avernus, and the brief etymological opinion recorded in Lewis and Short merely identifies the Latin term as a borrowing from Greek ... . In fact, Lacus Avernus is a partial calque, a Roman rendition of the Greek ... . This Greek name is uniformly glossed as 'birdless', but that view, however traditional, cannot be right. The Germanic cognates of Gk. ..., the Gothic n- stem ara beside the u-stem of ON orn and the a-stem of OE earn, when compared to Hittite haras, ha-mas, suggest a Proto-Indo-European n-stem *Hor-on- preserved as such in Gothic and Hittite and whose oblique stem, *Hor-n- was treated as the base in other cognates. Following the loss of laryngeals, in Greek, the expected negative compound of a word with such a vocalic onset would have been ... not ... and the semivowel indicated by the Italic rendition Avernus suggests that the original Greek heard by those early Romans was not Ionic ..., but Doric ... borrowed early enough to retain the digamma lost in Attic-Ionic. The Italic borrowing also exhibits a later unrounding of pre-rhotic [o] to [e] after [w], a Latin change which Sommer places in the second century, BC (1914:67).
Nevertheless, the classical folk-etymology suggests that tradition associated this baleful entrance to the underworld with some avian...