obscure

Note: Latin obscūrus has traditionally been linked to a presumed Indo-European verbal base *skeu̯- "cover, conceal," and hence to an assortment of Germanic etyma, most formed with hypothesized root extensions of this base (compare shower entry 1, sky entry 1)—hence, J. Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, p. 951, American Heritage Dictionary, Oxford Latin Dictionary, and the Oxford English Dictionary, third edition. However, etymological work of the last half-century has thrown doubt on the existence of such an etymon; in particular, the Sanskrit verb skunā́ti, glossed as "covers," has now been judged a late and isolated semantic development of a verb that meant "push, poke" in Vedic. The difficulty with any analysis of obscūrus that posits a meaning "cover" for -scūr- is that it makes little sense semantically compounded with the prefix and preposition ob(s)- "facing, in front of, toward/against" (compare ob oculōs "before one's eyes," obviam "in the way of"). It is not even certain that the word is correctly parsed as ob-scūrus, rather than obs-cūrus, as has been proposed by E. Hamp ("Some Italic and Celtic correspondences II," Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung, 96. Band, 1. Heft [1982/83], pp. 98-99). While acknowledging this problem, M. de Vaan suggests a relationship with the bases of Latin scaevus "left-hand" and obscēnus, obscaenus "ill-omened" (see obscene), though he admits that supporting cognates in other Indo-European languages are lacking (Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages, Brill, 2008).