poet Eumolpus in Petronius, saepius poetice quam humane locutus es. Watkins
cites a Middle Irish treatise on grammar and poetics, the Auraicept ne n-Éces,
in which ‘arcane language of the poets’ and ‘language of the Irish’ are recog-
nized as two of the five varieties of the Gaelic tongue.^9
VOCABULARY AND PHRASEOLOGYThefirst intimation of Indo-European poetry as a possible object of study
came from Adalbert Kuhn’s discovery in 1853 of a phrase common to Vedic
and Homeric poetry: áks
̇
iti s ́rávah
̇or s ́rávas... áks
̇itam,κλο Eφθιτον. The
constituent words were cognate, and the concept they expressed, ‘unfading
glory’, was clearly not so much at home in everyday speech as in poetry, or at
any rate in elevated discourse. It seemed a reasonable hypothesis that this
collocation of words was traditional both in Indic and in Greek poetry, and
that the tradition went back to the time of a common language.
This particular formula, and others relating to glory, will be considered
more closely in Chapter 10. Here we shall undertake a general survey of poetic
vocabulary, phraseology, and verbal idioms that may plausibly be inferred for
Indo-European from comparisons between the different traditions.
First it is important to make the point that while etymological corre-
spondence, as in s ́rávas... áks
̇
itam=κλο Eφθιτον, is a satisfying and
telling element in such comparisons, it is not a sine qua non. We have to allow
for a phenomenon universal in the history of languages, namely lexical
renewal.^10 An old word fades away and is replaced by a more modern syno-
nym. This can happen even to the most basic and common vocables. One
would not have thought that such essential everyday words in Latin as caput
andequus could ever fall out of use; and yet in the Romance languages the
words for ‘head’ and ‘horse’ derive from testa and caballus, slang words that
came to prevail in vulgar Latin. In an ancient poetic formula one or more of
the words might come to be replaced by younger equivalents, without the
phrase losing its historical identity.
Sometimes we can see the process happening before our eyes. For instance,
an early Indic formula *urú s ́rávas‘wide glory’, corresponding to Homeric
κλο ε1ρ3, is reflected in the personal name Urus ́ravas, which occurs in the
(^9) Petr. Sat. 90. 3; V. N. Toporov, Poetica 13 (1981), 209; Watkins (1994), 467. On the her-
meticism of the Indo-European poet cf. Watkins’s whole paper, 456–72; id. (1995), 179–93.
(^10) Cf. Campanile (1977), 21–3; id., Diachronica 10 (1993), 1–12; Meid (1978), 13; Watkins
(1995), 10, 15.
78 2. Phrase and Figure