--- Piotr Gasiorowski <
piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:
> The only solution that saves the Iranian etymology
> is, it seems, the assumption of a loan from Median
> or from an early Persian dialect (Herodotus reports
> Median spaka 'dog')
*****GK: 'bitch' in my translation FWIW*****
>, filtered through a language
> that did not permit initial /sp-/ and broke the
> cluster up with an epenthetic vowel (*s&baka).
*****GK: Perhaps the difference between initial /sp-/
and /sb-/ is also significant. My own Slavic language
(Ukrainian) absolutely HATES initial /sb-/. Other
Slavic languages do not. So a /sp-/ borrowing into
some East Slavic dialect which subsequently developed
into Ukrainian would have been OK, but a /sb-/
borrowing would almost have begged for an epenthetic
vowel. Either that or it would have become a /zb-/.
And the final word IS "sobaka". So one line of inquiry
might be: is there an Iranic dialect which might have
borrowed "spaka" from Median, and then transmitted it
as "sbaka"? In any case one would have to postulate a
fairly late transmission, not into proto-Slavic. The
pre-Ossetic Alans were around in the steppes until the
mid-13th c. (as close as the river Oskol in the
vicinity of today's Kharkiv). They had constant
contacts with the Rus', especially the southern
groups, geographically closer. But we would have to
assume (a) a transmission from Scythian (well the
Scythians WERE in Media for a generation; and some
Alan groups could have had different coexisting words
for "dog") ;(b) a maintenance of the word as "sbaka"
until the putative borrowing; (c) non-operation at
this later stage of the rule [short Iranic a= Slavic
u] which Piotr mentioned earlier. I don't know if
that's possible. If not, I would still like to know
why the Turkic "k" turned into a Slavic "s". Are there
more instances of this?*****
It
> would have reached East Slavic (but not the rest of
> Slavic) in the Middle Ages. I don't know what
> concrete intermediary could be proposed, but I
> wonder if Turkish k�pek and related Turkic words
> (such as <k�b�k>, cited by Sergei after Trubachev)
> didn't somehow branch off the same borrowing route
> (the inherited Turkic word for 'dog' is <it ~ yt>);
> unfortunately, I'm out of my depth in the field of
> Turkic etymology.
>
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos & More
http://faith.yahoo.com