--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> This is a long-promised attempt to make sense of "Scythian"
ethnonyms, beginning with those whose Hellenised version ends in <-
tai>. They seem to contain *-ta:, the Northeast Iranian collective
suffix, eventually generalised as a plural marker in Sogdian,
Yaghnobi and Ossetic. It seems that *-ta:, whatever its etymology,
was originally a clitic particle attached to fully formed words --
the nom.sg. of thematic nouns and the nom.pl. of at least some of the
consonantal stems. Final *-ah (< *-os) developed into a front vowel
(apparently *-i), so we eventually get the collectives *-ah + ta: > *-
i-ta (usually rendered as Greek -etai) for a-stems, and *-a: + ta: >
*-a-ta (Greek -atai) for a:-stems. This regional innovation can be
dated to late Old Iranian times, but when the intervocalic voiceless
stops were voiced in some of the Northeastern dialects, the still
existent boundary between the word and the clitic blocked the
voicing; as a result, the *-t- of *-ta: has remained voiceless (as in
Modern Ossetic). Thus, for example, tribal names of the form <...-
sagetai> reflect *-sagi#ta < *-sakah#ta: '-Saka[pl.]'.
>
> To sum up, names with (Greek) <-a-tai> and <-e-tai> can be treated
as extensions of originally shorter ethnonyms. Their characteristic
feature is the presence of *-ta:, Hellenised like the plural of Greek
stems in -te: < *-ta: (i.e. with <-tai>), and always with a voiceless
stop (rather than anything rendered <-toi> or <-doi>). Attempts to
etymologise such names in Iranian terms should begin by stripping off
the pluralising suffix. So much for starters; I'll try to deal with
individual items later on.
>
> Piotr
Aha! So that means the Massagetae were not a kind of Getae, but
rather a confederation of masseurs?
Torsten