Some of the people called "Scythians" by Greek historians
may well have been (pre-Proto-)Slavs, but where is the
evidence that their linguistic presence extended, say, south
of the range of the Chernoles culture? As usual, it is the
need for your scenario that ought to be demonstrated first
(by its proponents), not its impossibility (by the critics).
Who would bother to discuss an unnecessary idea? What does
the "(Balto-)Slavo-Scythian hypothesis" explain that could
not be explained without it? If early Scythian was partly
Slavic or more akin to Slavic than to anything else, that
still does not explain the obscure areas of its vocabulary:
for example, *arimaspu does not mean 'one eye' (or anything
else, for that matter) in Slavic. I've seem tentative
attempts to define a "Cimmerian" substrate in Slavic, but I
remain unconvinced. As for Trubachev's "Pontic Indo-Aryans"
surviving into the mid-first millennium BC, I'm cautiously
sympathetic to that theory, among other things because there
are a few Slavic words that could be elegantly explained as
Indo-Aryan loans (e.g. *sudorvU 'healthy', which looks
Indo-Iranian but cannot be Iranian, and has a parallel in
Indo-Aryan).
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
From: "george knysh" <gknysh@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 2:03 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Interpreting some Scythian names
But the view espoused above does not deny Iranian
borrowings, far from it. It holds that "Slavic" evolved from
a more ancient tongue the dialects of which were very close
("Scythian" being probably a southern branch). As I've
mentioned you can see the Iranic borrowings in the Scythian
Foundation legend itself ("ksaj"). Can you demonstrate that
this is an impossible scenario?