zompist bboard

Many sources say that the source of the article is *sind, the final /d/ accounting for the /t/ in an t-uisge and so on. Does anybody know where this *sind itself comes from?

sangi39 wrote:

Wiktionary wrote:From Proto-Celtic *sindos ‎(“this”), from Proto-Indo-European *sḗm ‎(“one”) or *só ‎(“this”); weak doublet of sin ‎(“this”).

...which is tantamount to them saying "buggered if we know!"...

Matasovic suggests the accusative singular of the feminine demonstrative, si:m, plus a "particle", do, or possibly de, from which he suggests a link to Greek -de. Similarly, he suggests a parallel masculine sondo underlying the Welsh and Irish words for "here". The feminine demonstrative itself he derives from the pronominal element s-, plus a "motion suffix" -ih2 (although since -ih2 and derivatives (eg -ih2k) appear as feminines elsewhere I don't think 'motion' is necessary).

That's not quite 'buggered if I know'... but to be honest it's not much better, is it? When you have to break a word up into one-phoneme morphemes and you still can't be clear what half of them mean, that's not a good sign...