Grzegorz Jagodzinski wrote:
> And did I say it has to? I only said that Greek <khoiros> 'pig' is striking
> because <gry:los> also means 'pig' but <khoirogryllios> ('pig-o-pig') means
> 'hare'.
No, <kHoirogrull(i)os> refers to the Syrian hyrax, _Procavia syriaca_.
It's a chubby little critter with a quivering snout, easy to associate
with a piglet. I'm not sure at all that the <-grull(i)os> part was
supposed to mean 'pig'. <grullos> can also mean a performer of
<grullismos> (an Egyptian dance) or, figuratively, a comic character or
caricature. Given the agility of hyraxes, contrasting with their plump
form, something like 'pig-dancer' sums them up fairly well.
> I also noticed that the hypothesis that Slavic *xe^rU 'grey' is
> inherited and comes from *kHoiro- is probable when you consider Greek facts.
> You are right that arguments are not too strong (because the development of
> *kH in Slavic is not attested with many examples - even the most famous
> example of <soxa> 'primitive plough' may be an Iranian borrowing and not an
> inherited word related to Skr. çakha 'branch').
It's quite possible that *kh2 > Slavic *x, but I don't know of any
examples of stop + *h1 yielding an aspirated stop even in Indo-Iranian,
not to mention Greek.
> But you have not strong
> evidence that this word is a Germanic borrowing either.
No, but at least the formal match is impeccable.
> And of course Slavic
> <zaje,cI> may be completely unrelated but it does not has to be. However, we
> know that the name of the hare may come from 'grey'. It causes that the
> hypothesis of genetic relation between <zaje,cI> and *xe^rU cannot be
> rejected at the start, nothing more. And if we were able to show more
> examples of twofold development of *k^H in Slavic, into *x and into *z (no
> matter how much irregular and improbable it seems now),
If.
> ... all the "grey hare"
> hypothesis would be yet more probable.
OK, I promised to tell you what I think of *zajeNcI. To begin with, the
Russian case forms that seem to contain a yer have been influenced by
variants of the word without a nasal vowel, *zajIcI or *zajIkU (with a
restored velar); Old Russian had gen.sg. <zajaca>, but the Russian
falling together of unstressed /ja/ and /je/ (< *jI, with a strong yer)
has obscured the difference and has led to a mismatch between the
official spellling of the nom.sg. and the vowelless forms of the other
cases.
I'd derive the word from the root *g^hei- 'dart, move abruptly', which
also underlies OInd. háya- and Arm. ji (< *g^Héj-o-s). There seems to be
a good deal of contamination between this root and a few similar ones,
and I'm not quite happy, for example, with the way etymological
dictionaries lump these words together with others meaning 'hurt, spear'
etc. (cf. Gms. gaiza-), which may constitute a different etymon (or even
different etyma). However, RV <héman> 'impulse' and <hitá> 'running' may
well belong here (< *g^Hei-mn., *g^Hi-tó-). An animal name could be
formed as an o-grade root noun (cf. Gk. pto:ks 'hare', sko:ps 'scops
owl'), so we'd get something like *g^Ho:i (gen.sg. *g^Hej-ós for
acrostatic *g^Hei-s), converted into a Proto-Slavic i-stem *zajI
reflecting the vocalism of the old nom.sg. (like *g^Hwe:r > *zve^rI or
*nokWts > *noktI). *zajI-cI ~ *zajI-kU are simple diminutives of that.
The origin of the nasal in *zajeNcI is unclear. We have to start with
pre-Slavic *za:jin-ko-, which looks like an untypical (archaic?)
diminutive of a nasal stem (the *in may of course reflect a syllabic
*n.). Perhaps the 'hare' word could also be extended with the highly
productive Slavic suffix -nt-, cf. *zve^rI ~ *zve^reNt- or *agnIcI ~
*agneNt-. The hypothetical *za:jin(t-) + -ko- > *za:jinko- does not look
impossible (cf. *kamykU 'pebble', with -k- attached to the nom.sg. *kamy
rather than the stem *kamen-). To be sure, the *-nt- noun *zajeN is not
directly attested (but neither is *agnU, which must have existed, and
*de^tU 'child' is vanishingly rare in the singular), and if -nt- stems
could ever form their k-derivatives in this way, the process lost its
productivity with the spread of the *-eNt-U-ko type, with a buffer vowel
between the suffixes (and the resulting diminutive remaining neuter). A
difficult word, however one explains it.
Piotr