Re: [tied] Exampaeus

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

From: george knysh

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2002 1:38 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] Exampaeus

>*****GK: I realized that *ek^wo gave Thr. "esvas" ("ezvas") after posting by checking a Thracian word list. ...

 

(PG) It's usually spelt esba- (phonetically perhaps [esva-]), or, with assimilation either way (in Greek rather than Thracian), ezba-, espa-.

 

>(GK) ... But I also found Thr. "asn-" (from IE *eg'hom) (I,me); and Thr "zan-" (from IE *g'en) (to give birth, a kin) which seems to suggest that you can also get Thr. "a" from IE "e". The "a"-"e" issue interested me because I had noticed that some Thracian words could be rendered by either (darsas or dersas 'courageous'; tarpas or terpas 'a gap, crack').BTW I also found one instance where IE "a" became Thracian "e" (*kapro- = ebros  'goat').*******

 

(PG) "Asn-" is derived, as far as I can see, from Georgiev's highly dubious reading (or shall I say straight out, misreading) of the Thracian ring inscriptions. The variation *kapros ~ *epros (also *wepros) for billy-goats and boars goes back to PIE (it must have been a technical word with several regional variants, or the effect of contamination between originally different near-synonyms). Some spellings suggest, however, that Thracian /e/ was lowered before /r/ and could then be confused with /a/. It was surely lower than Greek mid-high <e> (epsilon) in all positions.

>>(PG) I think the Scythian soothsayers were more likely > "non-male" (*a:nara- < *n-h2nero-) than "un-Aryan".

>*****GK: That certainly sounds much better than "non-Aryan". But I wonder why the "e" here since Greek and Iranian shared the privative.*****

(PG) They did, to be sure, but the peculiar Indo-Iranian phonetic development of *nh2- > a:- was entirely un-Greek and made the word unanalysable in Greek terms. A form like *a:na(:)ra- would hardly make a transparent cognate of <anandro->. Herodotus is clear about the <enarees> being "androgynous", so non-male fits like a glove.

******GK One more interesting point from that Thracian word list. It says that in Thr. "bor-" means "mountain" and claims that "Hyperborean" actually means "those living behind the mountains". What do you think of this?*****

 

(PG) If <boreios (Ion. bore:ïos)> has to do with *gWor(h2)- 'mountain', that is, if 'northerly = from the mountains', the development *gW- > b- is Hellenic, and certainly not Thracian. Labiovelars did not turn into labials in any of the Satem groups, and Thracian is no exception.

 

Piotr