--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
> I admit near-complete ignorance as regards the possible sources of
<-ko> in Japanese. A large number of Japanese _female_ names (and a
small number of masculine ones) end in <-ko>, which does seem to
function as a diminutive suffix, but I believe it's simply the
Japanese _common noun_ <ko> 'child' agglutinated to the name (e.g.
Akiko 'Summer-child', Yoshiko 'Good-child', Yukiko 'Snow-child',
etc.). The consonant /k/ occurs so frequently cross-linguistically
that its accidental appearance in analogously functioning morphemes
in unrelated languages is relatively likely.
>
> Piotr
>
I suppose the closest you'd get to a possible Iranian source is the
presence of Alans in the Chinese Imperial administration.
Torsten