(1) You might perhaps claim the licence to
stretch the attested form just a little once per etymology if the remainder
matches perfectly, but if you have to do it twice (for "oior" = "vir" and "pata"
= "biti, batog" independently), the exercise begins to resemble the etymological
achievements of our great Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, who, for
example, explained Nebuchadnezzar as Slavic "ne boh odno tsar" ('no god but
the emperor'). My gut feeling is that Herodotus recorded the names more or less
correctly but that his etymologies are completely fanciful and based on (his own
or someone else's) preconceived ideas about what they "should have
meant".
(2) I ventured some guesses about the
Arimaspoi when we discussed the question some time ago. They were based on the
observation that Iranian dialectal aspa- < *acwa- < *ek^wo-
'horse' was a common onomastic element. <arim(a)-> could be
interpreted in more than one way in Iranian terms. Tentative, to be sure, but
what else is possible here? You didn't like that particular etymology because it
didn't reproduce the Herodotean meaning 'one-eyed'. I have no good
theory about <oiorpata> to offer, but if something plausible occurs to me,
I'll put it forth for discussion.
Cheers,
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2001 4:08 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Scythian Cognates
(1) Is it really that difficult to find a way of
reconciling "oior" with "vir"(or perhaps "uir" in some lips)?
(2) It would be more interesting, e.g., to have theories
about what could be hidden behind Herodotus' "spu" "arima" "pata" "oior" etc..
than to state (no doubt correctly) that these words are not compatible with
certain reconstructed sound changes. If they are mangled words what might the
correct form be? If Thrakoid, as I suspect on other grounds, I appreciate the
difficulty of the task.