Re: Panjabi and Hungarian cognates for dog?

From: g
Message: 27467
Date: 2003-11-21

On Fri, Nov 21, 2003, at 10:21 AM, Piotr wrote:

> If Hung. kutya is of Iranian origin, its shape looks pretty archaic. It's
> closer to Proto-Iranian *kuti- than to Proto-Ossetic ("Alanic")*kudz^i.
>
> Piotr

All I can say is that the [t] in Hungarian, when written
followed by a <y>, is as palatal-velar as, say, in Slovak,
Czech, and (partly) Russian. I don't know whether there
was an initial [j] as in *['ku-tjO]. It could've been that
the [i] in the ending prompted the native-speakers to
transform the [t] into that so... Slavic sounding palatal
sound -- and which is, by the way, not extant in South
Romanian sub-dialects (hence, those Romanians are tempted
to write the Hungarian word as *<cucheo> or *<cuchio>, which
is by far less accurate than the Hung. original, <kutya>.
(Anyway, the vowel rendered as ASCII-[O] is - in Hungarian -
actually closer to [a] than to [o].)

What's interesting in this respect is that certain Hungarians
(I ain't able to show in which regions) along with Romanians
of the regions Banat (S-W of Romania) and roughly Bistritza-
Nãsãud (center-NE of Transylvania) tend to pronounce this
palatal-T (or palatal-K if some of you prefer) as a [tS].
So, a [ku-tSO] seems to me also close to that protoAlanic
*kudz^i. (But don't ask me why this peculiar [tS] pronunciation
in Hungarian - whether only a whim or whether a real dialectal
feature or a relic. I remember I asked the question a Hungarian
pal who has this idiosyncrasy, and he couldn't answer: moreover,
he's the only one in his family pronouncing the <-ty-> in this
... un-orthodox way. :-) I mention this only to point out that
there can be tendencies to and fro between these two consonants
of the alveolar-palatal kind, at least in respect of these
unrelated, but neighboring, languages: Hungarian and Romanian -
both stemming from language families where the <ty> sound was
or has been... foreign [AFAIK, no Fino-Ugric language has it;
nor any Turkic, for that matter].)

George