This is Idoneus again.
Can anyone help me? I have been Googling, trying to see whether the Indo-European root of the word “cosmos” is known. All I get is the information that it is from ancient Greek. I already knew that!
The frustrating thing is that when I searched it last month, I got the answer. That there was a root “kwehre-,” or something like that, meaning “arrange.”
Mike
It is *ḱens:
This etymology is not readily accepted by Frisk or Chantraine, although Chantraine adds that connecting it with Latin cēnsēre and Sanskrit śaṁs- śaṁsati (and also Old Persian θātiy ‘declares’, I may add) is “le moins improbable” (the least improbable). Beekes, on the other hand, is more inclined to accept this connexion. I can understand the hesitation, though, of Frisk (»trotz wiederholter Bemühungen nicht befriedigend erklärt») and Chantraine (»[étymologie] obscure»), as phonetically and semantically it’s not straightforward (if not totally inexplicable, either).