Re: HORSA vs. EXWA

At 4:38:12 PM on Sunday, January 20, 2013, Tavi wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" wrote:

>>> 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-TÁG-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-."

> It's a pity you didn't read my posts about the external
> cognates of this word, namely:

> NEC *XHVr[ts´]V 'marten; otter'
> Altaic *karsi 'fox, marten'

> This evidence suggests this word has a palatal(ized)
> affricate, variously rendered into t,kt,ks,s in individual
> IE languages. There's no "thorny cluster" here.

A perfect match with the standard PIE reconstruction is
obviously to be preferred to an asserted but unsupported
genetic relationship with vaguely similar non-PIE words with
vaguely similar meanings. Your 'evidence' is moonshine.