Re: [tied] Re: Interpreting some Scythian names

----- Original Message -----

From: george knysh

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2001 8:27 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Interpreting some Scythian names

*****GK: Probably because in Scythian "eye" was "spu" (:=)). I prefer the lexical information offered by Herodotus in the 5th c. BC to the putative scientific etymology of the early 21rst c., not because I doubt the relevance of the latter in its contexts, but
because I think Herodotus stood a better chance of being properly briefed about these things (even if he could occasionally garble a bit). ... And if Herodotus says that "arima" meant "one"(or some equivalent thereof)in Scythian, then I must believe him, other things being equal (and they haven't yet been shown not to be).******

 

Well, why don't you buy his one-eyed men and gold-guarding gryphons as well? Very few ancient Greeks were interested in learning a barbarian language (even fluent Persian, as in the case of Themistocles, was an exception confirming the rule); they surely expected foreigners to learn Greek instead. Herodotus often made mistakes showing that his linguistic knowledge of foreign langages was very limited. For example, he opined that all Persian personal names ended in <-s> (meaning, I suppose, masculine names only). This shows that his knowledge of those names was restricted to their Greek forms. He could easily have been misled by unreliable informants, second-hand sources, or by his own imagination.

 

*****GK: My untutored use of Indic and Iranic (and some of your corrections I obviously accept) does not mean that I consider Scythian to have been an Indic or Iranic dialect (I
also used extant Thracian on occasion). Viktor Petrov (no mean linguist) exploded the myth of Scythian Iranism a generation ago, demonstrating that it was a distinct East European satem language with multiple affinities.******

 

Here I beg to differ. Of course the term "Scythian" is often applied rather loosely to any reputedly nomadic tribes of the Eurasian steppe zone (historically sandwiched between the "Cimmerians" and the "Sarmatians"). As such, it might well have included some non-Iranian speakers (Thracians, Slavs, perhaps some residual Indo-Aryan groups, if Trubachev is right, not to mention non-Indo-Europeans from Central Asia or the Caucasus). But if we exclude such components, what remains is a cluster of Northeast Iranian dialects, not a mystery Satem language. Loanwords in Slavic and in Finno-Ugric show diagnostic Iranian traits and so come from Iranian, not from a distinct branch. Loans in Finno-Ugric can be grouped into several chronological strata identifiable as stages in the (pre-)history of Iranian. In the case of Slavic there might be just a few Indo-Aryan borrowings, but the bulk of steppe influence comes from Iranian and testifies to its linguistic dominance in the North Pontic region. Besides, "Iranian Scythian" is not completely extinct; Ossetic and Yaghnobi (the modern descendant of a Sogdian dialect) derive from it.

*****GK: ... Does "arima" mean "tame" in Iranic? I know you don't like these stretches, but humour me. Could it also mean something close to "one" "single" "alone" or the like?
If it doesn't so be it. We then would have a Scythian word with no known analogies in Indic or Iranic, which is perfectly OK.*****

 

We have PIE *h1(e)rh1-mo- 'quiet, calm, gentle' > *arima- (cf. Avestan airime). The Iranian words for 'one' are reflexes of Proto-Iranian *aiwa- (found virtually everywhere, also in Sogdian as <'yw>) plus the idiosyncratic Khotanese form <s's'a> < *sya- < *k^jo-, derived from a pronoun. "First" is *fra-tama- or *fra-tara- < *pro- with suffixes), and "once" is *hakrt- < *sm-krt-, as in Indo-Aryan. I can't think of any Iranian word looking like *arima- and meaning 'one', 'sole', 'only', etc.

 

*****GK: You don't like my "expressive" interpretations. But I did not invent "man-killers" (oior-pata, the Amazons), "not 'real men'" (enarees in Herod. and Hippocrates, the Scythian priestly class), "man-eaters" "black cloaks" "beautifully horsed" "wild
white horses" et sim. (even if the latter have only survived in Gr. rendition there is little doubt they are Scythian expressions).******

 

"Man-Killers" for the Amazons or descriptive names like "the Black Cloaks" may be correct or incorrect interpretations, but at least represent common naming patterns and are surely more down-to-earth than "Spouseless Observers" for one-eyed creatures. Wherever we are able to make sense of Scythian names, there's nothing typologically unusual about them. I'm afraid we'll never find an acceptable etymology for some of them, but that's normal too. After all, there are some perfectly obscure tribal names in Slavic, Germanic, Greek, etc. I'll post my modest attempt to analyse some of those Scythian names soon, but I can't promise it will be something sensational -- just a couple of heuristics for eliminating _very wild_ guesses.

 

Piotr