From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 18647
Date: 2003-02-09
----- Original Message -----
From: <bugalowbil@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 09, 2003 5:49 PM
Subject: [tied] The word for horse
> Anyone out there know the word for horse in Goedelic, Cimmerian, Scythian and Thracian? Many thanks - Jim
What do you mean by "Goedelic"? The Proto-Celtic form was *ekwos > OIr. ech > Mod.Ir./Scot.Gael. each (in Gallo-Brittonic *kw > p, so we get Gaul. epo-; in modern Welsh ebol means 'colt').
Of Cimmerian we know practically nothing.
"Scythian" is a collective term for a number of Old and Middle Iranian dialects. It seems that in most of them the word for 'horse' was <aspa-> or similar. In Khotanese, spoken by the eastern Saka tribes, a recorded language related to but much later than Scythian proper (7th-10th c.), it was <as's'a->. In Ossetic, which is a surviving Sarmatian (Alanic) dialect, it is <æfsæ> (the Sarmatians, also an Iranian-speaking people, subdued and replaced the Scythians of the Pontic steppes between the 5th and 3rd c. BC).
The Thracian word for 'horse' seems to have been <esba-(s?)/ezba-> (perhaps phonetically [ezva-])
Piotr