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A Latin-Hittite etymology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Calvert Watkins
Calvert Watkins*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Abstract

Lat. uespillo ‘undertaker for the poorest classes’ is cognate with Hitt, wašpaš ‘clothes’, both showing a stem form *wosp- with further IE cognates. Close analysis of a variety of texts in both languages demonstrates the important position in Roman funerary practice of the ritual of dressing the corpse (performed by the undertaker), and the specific use of the Hittite term in the Old Kingdom as ‘clothes for the dead’. This collocation provides the semantic point of contact between the two lexical items: the matching of semantic mark necessary for a satisfactory etymology.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 45 , Issue 2-Part1 , June 1969 , pp. 235 - 242
Copyright
Copyright © 1969 Linguistic Society of America

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