This word does not seem to be an IE creation, in such or another way. I mean
it is either part of the Nostratic heritage, or it was borrowed from a
substrate into some language families parallelly, "as is".
Once I found a hypothesis that such a word was spread all over Eurasia, and
even in some parts of America (I do not remember where).
One even cannot reconstruct a common IE protoform, and it is not also a
problem of Germanic *i:kwirna-, ON i:korni, OE ácweorna. But cf. also
Slavic *ve:ver-, Baltic *va:ver-, *vaiver-, *ve:ver-, New Persian varvarah
(with a full reduplication of the root), Lat. vi:verra (with another
meaning!), or various Greek forms: skíouros "squirrel" (Webster's cites the
naive Frisk's etymology skia + oura = "shadow" + "tail" for this word but
the form may be related to the one in Gmc) together with áilouros, aiélouros
"cat" and "weasel" (< *wai-wer-?).
Outside the IE family:
Finnish orava, Saam oar're, arre:, viøirrev, uøirrev, uairrev "squirrel" <
*orava < ? *wera-wa- (a reduplication but of a little different type than in
IE),
Khakas. örke "gopher", Evenki urike "gopher";
Tamil ur_uttai "squirrel" (derivate of "to jump"?),
Arab. yarbu:, arrabu "jerboa"
and maybe even Ojibwa wa:wa:s^ke:s^s^i "roe-deer".
Btw. note that names of animals like to change irregularly, e.g. fox <
*puks,
Greek alo:pe:x < *HloHpek- (even the New Greek alepou is not a result of any
regular development), Slavic lisU < *leipso-, Latin vulpes < *wlpe-, Sanskr.
lopaka and lopaça.
The Germanic variant for "squirrel" may even be another word, also
Nostratic. Cf. the Slavic word kuna < *kouna: "marten" (with Baltic
cognates, suggesting *keun- or *kioun-), and Greek skiouros.
Outside IE, see Turkic *kür'en, Mongolian *kürene "ferret, weasel",
Mongolian keremü "squirrel",
Georgian k.uerna "marten".
(there exist similar forms even in Chadic Yenisseian, Austric)
Anyway, all trials to find an IE etymology (like < *wer-) for "squirrel" do
not look too plausible, as well as any trials to find phonetic rules for so
different IE forms, even inside one branch (cf. Baltic).
Grzegorz J.
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