From: tgpedersen
Message: 50361
Date: 2007-10-18
> I wouldn't think so. The Alans' self-given ethnonym (one of twoas
> known ones) was A:s (with long /a/). I don't readily see how
> Sogdian <'ws^-> (Romanicized as "Osh") 'dawn' could have turned
> its /'w/
> phonemic segment into /a:/ in another Iranian language. You may
> have been led astray here by the existence of an ethnonym Os for
> the Ossetes of the Caucasus, which is, however, peculiar to
> Georgian only (where it alternates with the form Ovs). That's not
> the original tribal self-designation of the Alans.
>
> See my message, copied from the indo-iranian List, which I posted
> an indirect reply to your original query forwarded there by Torsten:How about an original *ans-,
>
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/indo_iranian/message/1972
>
> << A:s of medieval Muslim (Arab, Persian) sources, As (pl. Asut) in
> Mongol (whence the form A-su occurring in Chinese chronicles of the
> Yuan period), Os ~ Ovs in Georgian, Ia:s (Ya:s, Ja'sz) in Slavonic
> and Hungarian, Jas of Old Russian chronicles, are all derivatives of
> the tribal self-designation of the Alans, A:s, which they used in
> alternation with another tribal self-desigantion of theirs derived
> from Proto-Indo-Iranian *arya, from which the various forms
> (Greek, Chinese etc.) of the ethnonym 'Alan' (Engl.) are derived.
>