Re: [tied] Re: Sobaka and Iranian

--- Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:

> Loans change too, once they enter the vocabulary of
> the receptor
> language. The fact that Herodotus was aware of
> <spaka-> does indeed
> suggest that the Median word had some currency as a
> "trade name" in
> the ancient world. The problem is that <sobaka>
> can't be very old in
> Russian; I don't think it could have been borrowed
> before the eighth
> century,

*****GK: Could Arabic be a source of the epenthetic
"o"? We know they turned the Byzantine "sklav" into
something like "saqalibah". And Arab merchants traded
actively (via the Caucasus)with the Khazars (and Volga
Bulgars, and East European Slavs)*****

and no known Iranian language retained

> anything like "spaka"
> until so late. My idea is that the ancient cultural
> loan survived
> relatively unchanged in some other linguistic
> reservoir in the
> Caucasus area.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos & More
http://faith.yahoo.com