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Why is fucus reconstructed as *bhoiko-? Not *bhoikos or *bhoikon? Is "cus" a suffix like in raucus > ravis?

Anixx
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Кузнецов Анатолий
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    there is already a good answer, but for future questions about specifics of reconstructions to tell us where you got the reconstruction from, as these small details vary significantly between different authors – Tristan Sep 15 '21 at 14:51

2 Answers2

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This is purely a convention. Some Indo-Europeanists cite the stem-form of nouns (as in the Sanskrit grammatical tradition); others cite the nominative singular (as in Greek and Latin dictionaries).

fdb
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As fdb said, some authors cite the stem rather than the nominative.

Note the hyphen at the end. This indicates that it's a stem, not a specific form: to get the nominative, you would apply a regular nominative ending and get *bhoyko-s > fūcus.

Draconis
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  • whilst applying the regular nominative ending works in this example, it may be worth noting that in some other instances it's a little less trivial (e.g. as a result of sound-changes usually reconstructed as already active at the PIE stage, the nominative of on-stems is usually recontructed as -ō rather than expected -*ons). Even in situations like this though, the sound changes are fairly simple, they just need to born in mind – Tristan Sep 15 '21 at 15:13
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    @Tristan also, sometimes the gender of a noun maybe not known, so we either have -os or -om ending in nominative. – Anixx Sep 15 '21 at 15:41