Re: [tied] *ekwos and esel?

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

From: michael_donne

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2002 6:51 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] *ekwos and esel?

> Yes, but 'es' is also close to the Latin <asinus>. And wouldn't we expect the Hurrians to have gotten the word for horse, along with the animal, from the supposed Superhorsemen of the Plains" the Indo-Europeans and not v.v.? This is idea seems rather central to many attempts to locate the Urheimat.

 

The similarity of <e:s^> to <asinus> is only superficial. <e:s^> can be derived from *h1ek^wos via the regular sound changes reconstructed for Armenian, which is why it makes sense to assume that it originally meant 'horse' before the semantic shift whereby <e:s^> was replaced by <ji> in its old specific sense. Werner Winter hypothesises that the Hurrians had borrowed the word from Proto-Armenian _before_ they became familiar with the Indo-Aryan horse-trainers and their horse-and-chariot jargon. In both cases the direction of the borrowing is similar: from IE (Proto-Armenian or Indo-Aryan) _into_ Hurrian.

>> Of the Indo-Iranian word for 'ass', *kHara- (Av. xara-, Ved. kHara-) is a loan of disputed origin.

> Is this a reply to my previous question: "I just noticed in Harmatta's article in Dani's book that the Persian word 'gor' means wild ass. Is this cognate with Hindi 'ghora' for horse?" If so, I don't understand the answer.

 

Sorry, I replied without having another look at the question (which was asked in a different posting), so the answer was a little beside the point. The 'domestic ass' word in Modern Persian is <xar> (< *kHara-). I am not sure what the etymology of <gor> (<gor-xar>) 'wild hemione' is. Maybe one of those "garda-" words of Central Asia, but the phonology doesn't quite fit. I'll try to check it up somewhere. Hindi gHoRa looks similar, but derives from Skt. gHot.a(ka)- (one of the Old Indo-Aryan words for 'horse', itself without a clear etymology), and the meanings don't match up.

> What is the general opinion of Harmatta's "The emergence of the Indo-Iranians" in Dani's _History of civilisations of Central Asia, Vol. I_ where he lays out eleven stages of IE? And what is the general opinion about his work? Is it respected?

 

Harmatta is a respectable scholar, of course, though his linguistics is sometimes exceptionable and you have to be use his linguistic material with some care (he's a historian, primarily). I find his stratification of IE quite arbitrary.

> In the same article, he also talks about the significance of the wide spread of the words 'Kaspoi' (Gk), Iranian 'Kasp', Sodgian 'Kas' and even Chinese 'Kasa' (these are only a few examples) and links it to a possible spread of the Kassites across all of C. Asia. What do you (y'all) think?

 

I have no opinion on that.

 

Piotr

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