Abstract
This paper has been stimulated by Benveniste’s remarks about the name of the ‘heir’ in his Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, and it deals with the etymological and semantic problems related to the names for ‘orphan’, ‘heir’ and, to a minor extent, ‘widow’ in some Indo-european languages. Among the lexical items investigated are terms such as Old Irish orb; Gotic arbja; Latin orbus, heres, vidua; Greek χήρα, ὀρφανός"; etc. While the etymologies of most of these words seems, in their basic lines, rather uncontroversial, the aim of this work is to evaluate the most likely diachronic patterns and semantic developments that might have led to the rather intricate picture that can be observed in forms derived from the roots *ĝhēr- *orbh- and *ṷeḭdh in the historical languages. The examined data is mainly from Celtic, Germanic, Latin, Greek, Anatolian, as well as Slavonic and Armenian; the hypotheses finally advanced concern the naming processes of family / social figures such as ‘widow’, ‘heir’ and ‘orphan’ within the whole frame of Indo-european.