--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud@...>
wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
> To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
>
> In what sense are those words Uralic hydronyms? Do they mean
> "wetness"? I can accept a word for "river" like 'Avon' being loaned,
> but not words for general humidity.
>
> Torsten
>
> =======
>
> They apply to rivers,
> they are etymologizable from either Uralic *el or *sos "wet"
> (German nass) they have a first component which is also Uralic
>
> Example :
> pykejn-ses' a river flowing into the Bajicha in the Turuchan
> water-basin.
> This should be somewhere near Krasnoyarsk.
> A Kamass-samoyed word : hawk-wet, not explainable from Yeniseic.
>
> Another one :
> en-Roj-Ces : tall-birch-wet (Ugric)
>
> Or
> keäN-ses : mountain-wet (Selqup)
>
> or just :
> jelok "Jeloguj River" : OStyak Vassjugan : "wet" and that's it.
>
> Whatever theory about hydronyms you have will have to take that
> into account.
>
> And this word most probably has been borrowed into Yeniseic where
> it is used to create Yeniseic hydronyms.
> Which causes a very huge mess if one is looking for Yeniseic
> homeland using that word (in fact a word and a LW that looks the
> same !) because this area is now stretching for the Volga to
> Mongolia !
Some informative maps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Asia_200bc.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ob_watershed.png
Pulleyblank
The Consonantal System of Old Chinese
has some phonetic information about the Hsiung-nu language
(pp 139-140):
'In support of the hypothesis of labials in this series we may note
the probable connection of .. M. hyon, "breast" with Tibetan bran
(Simon 1929, p. 172). This would indicate *fl- rather than *f-
probably .., .. should be reconstructed as *fo:n, and the subseries of
.. (.. .. ..) was distinguished by the presence of medial -1-. We have
noted above that *fl could give either *h or *t.h. This reconstruction
is further supported by the probable equation of the name of the
Hsiung-nu . .. M. hyon,-nou < *flo:n,-nah^ with the Phrouñoi of
Apollodorus (Haloun 1937, p. 306, n. 1). As Haloun says, "Die
sachliche Identität ist m. E. unabweisbar". This equation does not
exclude the possibility of connecting the name of the Hsiung-nu with
the Hu:n.a of India and the Khou~noi, O´u~noi, Hunni of western
writers as has sometimes been thought. There is reason to think that
there may have been a simplification of the initial in the Hsiung-nu
language pari passu with the simplification in Chinese, and perhaps
under similar influence, that of the original labial fricative in
Hsiung-nu had become a laryngal or velar fricative. Presumably this is
indicated also by Greek gamma-. A still later loss of -r- would give
us the Sogdian xwn of the early fourth-century letters (Henning 1948,
p. 615). [All Chinese character have been replaced by '..')
'
So, initial clusters in proto-Yeniseian? Could that explain the s/t/l
altenation of Yeniseian and Ostyak? BTW, why were the Yeniseians so
long called Yenisei Ostyak? Were they that difficult to tell apart?
More here:
http://tinyurl.com/b2wl8q
Torsten