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This article deals with the identity and characteristics of the consort of Father Sky, ·dieus ph2ter. While the pair Sky and Earth is often referred to as Bull and Cow, ·diuo-h3n(h2)-íh2r "Mrs. Sky" is typically represented by a divine spring. It is claimed that Greek Evpánri and Vedic urūci, from a proto-form ·h]urhu-h3kwíh2'wide-eyed', is an old epithet of the Divine Cow = the Earth, and further that the springs are the receivers of the rain/semen from Father Sky/the Heavenly Bull.
Introduction
The best-known and most safely reconstructed element of Indo-European religion must be the concept of a Father Sky, ·dwus ph2ter, as continued in Ved. dyáuh pita, Gk. voc. Zeu патер, Lat. Iuppiter,2 and in general it seems that male deities greatly outnumber the females in the Indo-European pantheon. Still, Father Sky must have had a consort, whose identity will be the subject of the present article. In other words: who was Mrs. Sky, or "Vater Himmels Gattin" (thus Dunkel 1988-1990)?
1. The derivative ·diuo-h3n(h2)-ih2-/-ah2On
a purely linguistic basis, we may observe that the proto-language possessed a feminine derivative of the word for 'sky', ·dieu-, represented by the name of the Greek goddess Aiávy and similar formations in Indo-Iranian, Celtic and Anatolian though the exact derivational process has been the subject of some discussion.
In his meticulous treatment of the subject, Dunkel (19881990) suggested a segmentation ·diu-on-ah2- where he rejected an interpretation of the suffix ·-on- as individualizing on semantic grounds. Neither is ·-on-, according to Dunkel, identical with the "Hoffmann suffix", since a meaning "mit ·dieu- versehen" would be incompatible with a patriarchal society: "die Frau gehört ja ihrem Mann, nicht umgekehrt". Consequently, the n-stem suffix is identified as a feminine marker and ·-ah2- is assumed to be redundant. However, for an n-suffix marking the feminine, a reference to ·pót-n-ih2'mistress' beside ·pot-i- 'master' seems unsatisfactory. Apart from the fact that ·-n- in ·pótnih2- for original ·potih2- is secondarily introduced after ·h3reǧnih2r 'queen',3 a clear justification for the variation in the ablaut patterns is missing.
About a decade later (Dunkel 2001: 12), Dunkel himself proposed that the suffix of Hoffmann formations originated in a grammaticalized root noun ·-h3on-, also continued in e.g. Lat. onus 'burden', so that we would be dealing with old possessive...