From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 70728
Date: 2013-01-20
> From our previous discussion about sound correspondences of the IE 'bear' word, I'd recall the velar stop in Hittite hartagga- doesn't derive from a "thorny cluster" but rather from a suffix like Turkic qarsaq 'steppe fox', a long-range cognate. From this and other reasons, I think this is a pre-Kurganic word, that is, not derived from Kurganic, i.e. the language of the Steppe invaders.It's a pity you don't recall Piotr's explanation of 10 March 2012 in post http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/68899 of the significance of the spellings of the word, such as the entirely typical nominative singular HAR-TÃG-GA-AS, namely, "From these spellings, we may infer that the Hittite pronunciation was /h&rtka-/, in perfect agreement with the reconstruction *h2r.tk^o-."