Well, I have all the patience in the world.
Given the typically loose semantics of IE compounds, *a-vi:ra-pa:ta: can be
interpreted as 'capable of defence without any male heroes, thank you very
much' rather than 'ladies in distress'. The Greeks often substituted <h->
for Iranian <v->, (e.g. Hystaspe:s for Vis^taspa-), or dropped the
consonant when between vowels or in a Grassmannian environment. I'd expect
something like *aïrpata- in Greek, which is not very far from <oiorpata>,
especially if a pretonic short /a/ was not a fully open vowel in
Scythian.
I don't know the etymology of Latin
battu-/ba:tu-; the dictionaries I have consulted do not specify the Celtic
source. There are similar words meaning 'stick, bat' in Goidelic, Old
French and Middle English, but it's hard to tell who borrowed what, when,
and from whom; the tendency of /b/ to occur in 'heavy blow'
onomatopoeia (e.g. English boom, bang) only confounds the issue. MacBain
reconstructs a Celtic root *ba:- 'hit, slay', referring Old Irish bás
'death' there, but I wonder if the latter is not a euphemistic derivative of
*gWah2- 'go' ('going away'). We should really ask a specialist in Celtic
-- Chris Gwinn could help us out, perhaps.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2001 11:35 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Scythian Cognates
****GK: Let's try again, patience allowing. What
seems
linguistically plausible is rather weak in historical
terms,
especially since we now know that Scythian
women weren't exactly wall
flowers, and here we're not
talking about them but about Sarmatian Xenas.==
You
mentioned Latin "battuo" (to pound, to beat) as
similar in sound but
genetically unrelated to my
suggestion of "batog, biti". Forget my
suggestion. I
note from the Oxford Latin Dictionary that "batto"
or
"batuo" is listed as a borrowing from Gallic. So the
question would now
be: what is the etymology of the
Gallic term, and could it be related to the
recorded
Scythian "pata"?******