> As mentioned before, the earliest
> designation of the Dnipro ("Borysthenes")seems to have
> been borrowed by the Greeks from a Thrakoid rather
> than from an Iranic speech. From a population, also,
> which used "t" rather than "d" in many instances.
We have the same confusion of voiced and unvoiced stops in many
Scythian (Iranian) propria in the Greek inscriptions of the
hellenistic and imperial ages, e.g. Phlimanakos ~ Phleimnagos,
Iranian *prya- + *manah- + suffix *-aka- (numerous examples in
Zgusta, Die Personennamen griechischer Städte der nördlichen
Schwarzmeerküste, Prag 1955, J. Harmatta, Studies in the History and
Language of the Sarmatians, Szeged 1970). An example of the classical
age is Traspies (Herodotus 4.2) = Iranian *Drw-asp-ya-, the name of
one of the four tribes of the Iranian Scythians, cf. A. Ivantchik,
Revue des études grecques 112 (1992) 141-192, G. Hinge, in: The
Cauldron of Ariantas, Aarhus 2003, 55-74 (=
http://www.pontos.dk/Cauldron_Ariantas/BSS1_07_Hinge.pdf).
Georg Holzer (Entlehnung aus einer bisher unbekannten
indogermanischen Sprache im Urslavischen und Urbaltischen, Wien 1989,
also F. Kortlandt, in: Languages in Prehistoric Europe, Heidelberg
2003, 253-260) believes that the language of the Cimmerians was
neither Iranian nor Slavonic (as believed by some Russian scholars),
but an hitherto unknown Indo-European language, "Temematisch", which
had mediae for IE tenues and tenues for IE aspirated mediae. His key
example is: Greek Kimmerios / Russian sjabjor "peasant" < Temematic
*k'embro- < IE *g'he:m-ro- "irdisch".
Another example is the Greek name of the river Don, Tanais. However,
since the appellativum was common in East Iranian - cf. Ossetic
don "river", it is more safe to assume an Iranian origin of the name
and a regular Scythian confusion of mediae and tenues. Cf. G. Hinge,
in: Language and Prehistory of the Indo-European Peoples, Budapest
[forthcoming] (=
http://herodot.georgehinge.com/integr.html).