Re: [tied] Thracian place-names

george knysh wrote:

> ****GK: Here there are two problems. According to
> Abaiev, the Ossetian shift from "a" to "o" did not
> occur until the 13th/14th century, and so he does not
> think that the Slavic "Don" was an Ossetic borrowing,
> since it existed earlier...*****

Back to the original issue: the Ossetic shift of *an to /on/ is
irrelevant here. If the source was Proto-Ossetic (or pre-Ossetic, or
para-Ossetic) *dan, its short *a would still have been rendered as short
*o in early Slavic, in accordance with the completely regular pattern of
substitution in early loans. Of course the Proto-Iranian form was
*da:nu-, but the loan wasn't taken from Proto-Iranian.

Piotr