...with the citation from Weiss' brilliant article, which I had never known of, never mind read), made me think again, of course.
I'm happy that you enjoyed that read. I thought the paper quite convincing and well-argued.
A subversive question now arises: given the likelihood of dialectical variants in different parts of the Latin Sprachraum, and that Latin itself is naturally a stress-based rather than a quantity-based language, may there not have been already in antiquity some confusion between the stems and their meanings?
Ah! You have asked the salient question. Any confusion which existed by the time of Early Latin, and certainly by the Classical period, however, might be based on a semantic connection already lost by that time ( and, perhaps lost even by the time of Proto-Italic?). Certainly, Latin
iugum, and its antecedent, IE
yugóm, both suggest, in addition to "a joining" of beasts of burden, "a continuity" between the yoked beasts.
Yugóm is from the perfective IE root
yewg- ("to join, to yoke, to tie together"). Rix, however, has suggested (1976) the reconstructed form
hyugóm (with laryngeal), which if true, would seem would make the IE root thereof:
hyewg-. The extended root form of the first element of
h₂yu-gʷih₃, h₂eyu-/ h₂óyu-, is indeed: h₂yew-. Of course
-óm (Latin
-um)is the neuter ( and, so, presumably nominalizing) suffix in the IE tradition. All this leads one to regard with suspicion, a possible semantic connection between
h₂yu-gʷih₃ on the one hand, and the noun
hyugóm (
yugóm) on the other.
Sorry to have waxed so 'linguistically theoretical' here in the Latin forum, but the natural course of the conversation seems to have led to it.
