Celt. *meh2-ró- ‘large, great’ versus Gmc. *meh1-ró- ‘made known, spoken of’

As I will argue elsewhere, Hitt. UZUmuḫr(a)i- means ‘ham, flesh of the thigh’. It is an i-stem noun *mh2-rí- from a ro-adjective *mh2-ró-. Gk. μηρός ‘thigh(bone)’ reflects direct substantivization of the same adjective renewed as *meh2-ró-. The thigh is the large part of the leg: cf. Mandarin Chin. dà-tuĭ ‘big-leg’ = ‘thigh’ and Engl. ‘thigh’ < ‘the thick/swollen (part of the leg)’. The adjective *meh2-ró- ‘large’, for whose root see Yakubovich (2010; Hitt. māi- ‘grow’, etc.), is the source of Celt. *māro-, shown by Schmidt (1957: 77 et passim) to mean ‘large, great’, not ‘famous’. Close inspection shows the alleged cognacy of Celt. *māro- with Gmc. *mēro- ‘famous’, based on matching patterns in personal names, to be a Scheingleichung. The claim endures, despite admission by all handbooks of facts showing that ‘famous’ cannot be the original sense even of the Germanic, much less derived from ‘large, great’. Not only Gothic, but also West Germanic, shows that the original sense of all derivatives was a neutral ‘report, speak of, make known’. An unprejudiced review of these facts argues for the trivial change from ‘spoken of, made known’ to ‘famous’, as in Gk. φατός and other derivatives of φημί. I conclude by recalling that we sorely need a PIE verbum dicendi root *meh1- ‘speak (of)’: no current etymology for Hitt. mēmi- ‘speak’ is remotely credible. We have now found it in Germanic.