On Fri, 19 Oct 2001 11:43:06 -0700 (PDT), george knysh
<
gknysh@...> wrote:
>I like MCV's reading of the
>Sumerogram as "donkey from foreign parts". This sounds
>EXACTLY like the sort of thing locals might have
>called this exotic beast. And there is little
>difficulty in seeing the incoming proto-Hittites
>adopting the established local term instead of their
>own (if that was the same as or close to Luwian) as
>part of their acculturation process.*****
But let me say it again: WE DON'T KNOW THE HITTITE WORD FOR HORSE.
They wrote it 302-329-233, but whether they pronounced it /sisu/ or
/aswa/ or something completely different is completely unknown. It's
pretty certain, though, that they didn't use the circumlocution <ans^e
kurra>, because no-one spoke Sumerian anymore at the time (or had
spoken it as a living language for centuries). Besides, Sumerian was
never spoken in Anatolia, so it cannot have supplied the established
local term in Anatolia (in the unlikely case that there was one).
Note that the Indo-European Armenians, when they entered Anatolia,
took the word *ek^wos with them, and it ended up as Classical Armenian
<e:s^> "donkey".