From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 23222
Date: 2003-06-14
----- Original Message -----
From: Peter P
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2003 3:55 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: Indo-Iranian
> FU has *kota 'house/home' > Fin. kota > koti 'house/home'
> Hung. ha'z 'house/home'
> Aves. kata 'shelter/house'
> Pers. kad 'house'
> Mong. gada(n) 'house/village'
> Turk. kota 'house'
> Ainu kota 'village'
> I just wonder if *ko~tja belongs with these?
That's the Iranian wanderwort *kata- (hence the Finno-Ugric and Turkic
words; I don't know about Ainu and Mongolic). It was possibly borrowed from
Finnic into Northwest Germanic (*kuta- > Eng. cot, cottage), and from
Iranian into Slavic (*kotU, *kotIcI 'cot, cell', and, possibly, dialectal
*xata, *xatUrUc^I 'hut, shelter', interpreted by Trubac^ev as a late loan
from some Middle Iranian language). The word had no nasal in Iranian, so
Slavic *ko~tja can't have been borrowed from those quarters. It isn't
impossible to connect them at a deeper level (*kh2n.to- or the like meaning
'dugout', cf. Ir. *kan-, Skt. khan- 'dig'), but that would mean common
inheritance rather than borrowing.
Piotr