Re: Etymology of Ossetic "Nart"? (the suffix?)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "david_russell_watson" <liberty@...> wrote:

> I think Abaev was on the right track identifying it as the
> plural suffix, with 'Nartæ' then taking the form of a clan
> name and the Narts thus obstensibly descendants of a 'Naræ'
> or 'Nar', whether we believe that name to have a Mongolian
> origin or not.

Well, yes, that makes sense to me, too. I had started by assuming Nartae was basically
from *H2ner- plus an Iranian collective/plural suffix like *-ta (e.g. Herodotus's Skolo-toi)
reflected in Ossetic -tae. But I was mystified by Pokorny's unexplained -thra suffix, and
wondered if there was something I was missing.

> That by itself might not be a problem, though. Please see
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/37209
> where Piotr explains that vowel quantity played no part in
> borrowing between Ossetic and Slavic, only vowel quality.
> If the same is true of Mongolian and Ossetic, then Ossetic
> might have preferred its own 'a' over 'æ' to represent the
> Mongolian short 'a', on the basis of similarity in sound,
> indifferent to the length of the vowels in either language.

OK, fair enough!

> I'm not convinced of a Mongolian origin for 'Nar(æ)' either,
> however, but on a different basis. Nowhere else in Ossetic
> is 'nar(æ)' found with the meaning 'sun'. Moreover the sun
> had great significance in the pre-Christian Ossetic religion,
> with religious terminology tending to be very conservative,
> and where the sun was always referred to as 'xor' in Digoron
> and 'xur' in Iron. It doesn't seem likely that the Ossetes,
> who still remember the Mongols as former enemies, would have
> adopted a Mongolian word for the 'sun' in such a context, and
> solely, as it would appear to be, in such a context.

Good points.

> I wonder if 'Nartæ' couldn't have originated meaning simply
> 'descendants of (a) man', a sort of name attached elsewhere
> to individuals of uncertain patrilineage. Note how Satana,
> the mother of the Narts, figures prominently in the legends,
> while their fathers are much more hazy. The problem is that
> 'nar(æ)' isn't attested in Ossetic as 'man' either, though
> such a root patently did exist at some point in its history
> and could have survived in this one form alone.

Well, it seems to me eminently plausible that the ethnonym _could_ have been formed at a
time when some reflex of *H2ner- was still alive in "proto-Ossetic", and the name remains
the same while the common word for "man" or whatever has become something else. (Not
that my knowledge of Ossetic is good enough to, erm, actually know what that is, I fear!)

Does it need to be analyzed as "descendant of a (possibly unknown) man" as opposed to
simply "a bunch of manly guys"? After all, this is not too far away from that most popular
of ethnonyms: "the people". ;)

Or might we have a *ner-to- form like that standing behind Irish nert, Welsh nerth that
has had that -to- suffix confused or conflated with an Iranian plural -ta suffix?

> I also have to wonder if some kind of connection to 'Indra-'
> is possible. :^)

How so?

Cheers,
Carl