Why is fucus reconstructed as *bhoiko-? Not *bhoikos or *bhoikon? Is "cus" a suffix like in raucus > ravis?
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2there 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– TristanSep 15, 2021 at 14:51
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2 Answers
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).
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.
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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– TristanSep 15, 2021 at 15:13
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2@Tristan also, sometimes the gender of a noun maybe not known, so we either have -os or -om ending in nominative.– AnixxSep 15, 2021 at 15:41