--- Piotr Gasiorowski <
gpiotr@...> wrote:
> Some of the people called "Scythians" by Greek
> historians
> may well have been (pre-Proto-)Slavs,
****GK And VERY "pre-proto" please.******
but where is
> the
> evidence that their linguistic presence extended,
> say, south
> of the range of the Chernoles culture?
*****GK: I'll see what I can come up with after
consulting my "Hidronimia Ukrajiny v jiji mizhmovnykh
i mizhdialektnykh zvyazkakh". This is a work produced
by a collective of Ukrainian linguists (including I.M.
Zheleznyak, A.P Korepanova, L.T. Masenko. A.P.
Nepokushnyj, O.S. Stryzhak (he's also the editor), and
Z.T. Franko.) It was approved for publication in 1981
by the "vchena rada" of the O.O. Potebnya Institute of
Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukr.
S.S.R.=== It's fairly technical so it'll be a while
before I can report. I did notice though that V.
Petrov is frequently cited as an authority by these
linguists, on a par with such as V.I Abayev, T.
Lehr-Splawinski, M. Vasmer and a host of others.==== I
can already note that their view is that Iranian
hydronyms are not present in the area west of the
Dnipro, where they have found a number of "Thracian"
ones. I put this in quotation marks because it's quite
possible that these "Thracian" hydronyms could in fact
be "Scythian". Herodotus has retained for us the fact
that "ancient Scythia" (as he called it, viz., the
socio-political tribal complex which existed here
prior to the arrival of the "Royal" Scythians and even
prior to the Cimmerians) extended from north of the
Lower Danube up to Carcinitis (near the modern
Perekop). This is the area occupied in classical
Scythian times by those "Scythians" who were not
"Royals" ("Royal" territory was further to the east
and north).==== One more point. There is one Abayev
etymology of Scythian on the basis of Iranic that even
I can dispute(I believe). It is his contention that
the Ancestor of the Scythian aristocrats, "Targitaos"
(Cf. the Scythian Foundation Legend in Herodotus at
the beg. of Book IV) was actually "Darga-tava"
(="longstrong") [with an inverted ^ over the
"g"]/V.I.Abayev, "The Ossetian language and folklore",
Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. Moscow-Leningrad
1949, pp. 161,163 (in Russ.)/I happen to think that
this name is based on an import from the Middle East
(where the Royals cavorted for nearly a generation in
the late 7th c. BC)/ I will do a separate post on this
which might be of interest (minor) to our theo-logists
(for lack of a better word: those interested in Gods
and Goddesses).******
>
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