Re: [tied] The word for horse

--- Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <bugalowbil@...>
> To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Sunday, February 09, 2003 5:49 PM
> Subject: [tied] The word for horse
>
>
> > Anyone out there know the word for horse in
> Goedelic, Cimmerian, Scythian and Thracian? Many
> thanks - Jim
>
> >/.../
> (Piotr)Of Cimmerian we know practically nothing.

*****GK: True. As luck would have it, the Iranic
"horse word" seems to be present in the name of one of
the attested Cimmerian kings, one TSEUSHPA or
TSUSHPA.******

>
> "Scythian" is a collective term for a number of Old
> and Middle Iranian dialects. It seems that in most
> of them the word for 'horse' was <aspa-> or similar.
> In Khotanese, spoken by the eastern Saka tribes, a
> recorded language related to but much later than
> Scythian proper (7th-10th c.), it was <as's'a->.

*****GK: Unfortunately we haven't much extant evidence
on the "horse word" in the non-Iranic ethnocomponents
of classical Scythia. Leaving aside such groups as the
Baltoid Inner Neuri and the (possibly) Indic Alizones
[both presumably might have had something close to
<asva> ?] because they were not considered proper
"Scythians", and focusing only on the four key tribes
which were identified as such by Herodotus(Piotr's
points primarily apply to the Paralatae or Royal
Scythians), we might argue that the Traspies also
evidence the Iranic horse-word in their name. If the
Catiari were Indic (as some have hinted), then <asva>
would be their term. As for the Aukhata, while Piotr
has (to my mind) very persuasively etymologized their
name on the basis of Iranic, they were probably a
fundamentally "Thrakoid" people, whose horse word
might consequently have resembled what Piotr states
below for Thracians.******

In

> Ossetic, which is a surviving Sarmatian (Alanic)
> dialect, it is <�fs�> (the Sarmatians, also an
> Iranian-speaking people, subdued and replaced the
> Scythians of the Pontic steppes between the 5th and
> 3rd c. BC).
>
> The Thracian word for 'horse' seems to have been
> <esba-(s?)/ezba-> (perhaps phonetically [ezva-])
>
> Piotr

******GK: This was probably discussed before, but I've
lost the reference. What exactly is the etymology of
the Slavic horse word (komon'/kon'/kin')?*****

>
>

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