20-11-03 23:47, dharminder chuhan wrote:
> Could someone tell me if there is it just coincidence
> or is there a reason for the word for dog in Hungarian
> and most northern Indian languages which is kutta???
>
> If there are separate roots to the words what are
> they??
I don't know the accepted etymology of Hung. kutya; but I vaguely
remember that there are some cognates elsewhere in Ugric. A relationship
with Hindi (etc.) kutta cannot be ruled out a priori, since there is a
similar Iranian word, *kuti(-ka)- 'dog' (beside the well-known reflexes
of *k^wo:n- and *k^wn.-ko-), reflected e.g. by Ossetic (Digor) kuj
/(Iron) kWy3 and Sogdian kwty. Since Bulgarian kuc^e 'dog' also looks
similar, we may be dealing with a wanderwort. Iranian could easily be
the donor language from which the word spread independently into Indic,
Ugric and Bulgarian, but as far as I know Proto-Iranian *kuti- has no IE
etymology and may itself have come from some enigmatic substrate
language of Central Asia. The whole thing looks interesting but some
checking is in order. If there is a connection, somebody has certainly
studied it.
Piotr