| Abstract: In this paper, I examine three Vedic stems: vār-, udán-, and udaká-, meaning ‘water’, in the light of the hypothesis that vār- and udán- formed a suppletive paradigm in Vedic and reflect two related PIE forms, *u̯e/oh1r and *ud-en-. According to this view, formulated by M. de Vaan and A. Lubotsky, vār- reflects the old PIE heteroclitical nom.-acc. form *u̯od-r and udán reflects
the oblique stem *ud-en- ‘water’, because of the conditioned sound change *d > *h1 in PIE. My research shows that, while vār- and udán- could indeed form a suppletive paradigm in Vedic, they are probably unrelated on the PIE level. The meaning of the independent noun *u̯e/oh1r was ‘wet, moist’, and all attested meanings of its derivatives could develop from this semantics, among them Avestan vāra- ‘rain’; Latin ūrīnor, ūrīnāri ‘to plunge under water, dive’, ūrīna ‘urine’; Old Irish fír ‘milky; milk (gloss)’, Old Welsh gwir-awt ‘strong drink’; Old Norse úr ‘drizzle’, Ols English úrig- ‘dewy’ (in compounds); Old Prussian wurs ‘pond’ etc. A remarkable parallel for such semantic development can be found in Slavic: reflexes of the Proto-Slavic noun *moča / *močь ‘wet, moist’ have the meanings ‘wet, moist’, ‘rain’, ‘rainy weather’, ‘marsh, swamp’, ‘urine’ etc. It is further established that the unusual phonetic appearance of *u̯e/oh1r- is insufficient reason to analyze it as containing the root *u̯eh1- and the suffix *-r; the same can be said of PIE *i̯eh1r- ‘year’. Finally, I analyze the assumed sound change *d > *h1, listing the most significant cases, and conclude that these examples are not fully convincing, while the phonetic conditioning of this sound change is obscure. According to these data, the correlation between the stems vār-, udán- and udaká- can be described as follows: the regular heteroclitic nominative-accusative #vā̆dar was lost and supplemented by the similar nominative-accusative vār- /váar/ ‘wet, moist; rain’. The latter received the meaning ‘water’ but retained its earlier meanings ‘wet, moist’ and ‘rain’ in several cases. Later both vār- and udán- were replaced by the noun udaká- ‘water’, which was the cognate of udán- and became the basic word for ‘water’ as early as the Atharvaveda. |