Paired Horse and PIE breakup

[H.M.Hubey]

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

> Herodotus isn't very explicit about the Scythian vocabulary, and some
> of the things he claims are almost certainly bogus, like his
> explanation of the name "Arimaspians" as from Scythian <arima> "one"
> and <spou> "eye", which can be neither Ossetian ("one" = <yu>, "eye"
> = <ca"st>) nor Turkic ("one" = <bir>, "eye" = <go"r> ~ <go"z>), nor
> any other known Eurasian language at all (I've checked Mark

Turkish 'yarim' = half. So this could mean 'half-sighted'.

One of the others (Scythians) calls a drink 'achy'. That means
'bitter' or 'sour' in Turkic.

> The evidence for the Iranian character of Scythian, apart from the
> identification Saka==Scythian (and Saka-Khotanese is a
> well-documented Middle Iranian lg.), is based on ancient glosses
> (Hesychius gives "melition: a Scythian drink", clearly from the IE
> word for "honey, mead", Herodotus' Oior-pata "man-killer" (=Amazon),
> has been connected with IE *wi:ros, Skt. vi:ra- "man"), and the

'er' happens to be one word meaning 'man' or 'male' or 'husband'
scattered
throughout Turkic languages in many forms (erkek, erk, erkin, erkisi, or
even in
combination with other words like kochxar = male sheep, etc)
and there is no other word to take its place. IT seems difficult to
believe
that they did not have words for male or female  until the Iranians
taught them.

Besides this 'ar' can be found among Nilo-Saharans and may be from
the ME protoworld.

> evidence of toponymics, especially the South Russian/Ukrainian river
> names Don, Dnestr, Dnepr < PIran *da:nu "river", cf. Oss. <don>
> "water, river", *<da:nu nazdya> and *<danu apara>, the "front" and
> "back" rivers, respectively.  Another Iranian etymology is Caucasus <
> *xrohu-kasi- "ice-shiny".

These are dangerous territories. 'Deniz'/Tenngiz' means 'sea' in Turkic
and is well established in other forms like 'tennger' (in l~r Turkic and
Hungarian). Herodotus says that the 'barbarians' call all large bodies
of
water 'eridanus', and 'iri' or 'irig/ is Turkic for 'large'. 'Tang'
means
the heavens, so the root seems to refer to 'large bluish expanse'.
Tengri,
or Tanri means 'sky god' more or less. Furthermore those words can
easily
be etymologized as 'danu-apar' and 'danus-tur' so people who created
them
are simply ignoring other evidence or are unaware of them. Furthermore
'krau' or 'kirau' means 'frost' in Turkic, and 'kash' means 'rock,
stone'.
There are other etymologies for "Caucasus" also, like 'Kolkh' (Colchis),
kash-kash (as in the Kaskha, enemies of Hittites).

Furthermore, this is an easy game to play. 'Tong' or 'don' means 'to
freeze' and could refer to the "don" river. Even more so, Miziev thinks
the Danube/Dunay/Duna is from 'Tynay' from Turkic 'tyn' meaning 'quiet'
i.e. the 'quiet Don'. The root 'tam/dam' means 'drop' and could have
easily referred to water falling.


> Now it's perfectly possible that the Scythian tribes in the Ukraine
> had assimilated large numbers of non-Iranian peoples.  Herodotus
> tells us that when the Scythians arrived in Europe they drove out the
> original inhabitants, the Cimmerians (linguistic affiliation unknown,
> possibly Indo-European of the Daco-Thracian group).  And the
> "Scythian farmers" described by Herodotus are considered by many to
> be Proto-Slavs.

Miziev says the Kimmers were also protoTurkic. In the same way that
Subar/Sabir/Suvash/Chuvash referred to 'river-men' (i.e. sub=water)
kam-er refers to river-men. There are rivers in Asia in Turkic
territories
that have the name 'khem/kam' in them. The confluence of the rivers
Zelenchuk & Kuban in the Caucasus is called "ullu kam" in
karachay-balkar.
The word for ship in Turkic is 'keme/geme'. The word for island (Miziev)
is ayirakam (river-splitter, from ayir=split, and kam=river). That makes
it even more likely that some form of proto-Turkic was in that region
before the Scythians.

> The same, or worse, goes for the linguistic affiliations of the
> Xiong-nu, the (Western) Huns, the HuNa or White Huns or Hephthalites,
> the Juan-Juan or Ju-Jan, the Avars or Varchonites, the Sabir,
> Utrigur, Kutrigur and Onogur "Huns", the Toba (Tabgach), the
> Hsien-Pei, etc.  All of these have been identified as Turkic or
> Mongolian based more on geographical than on linguistic criteria.
> The reason for this is that linguistic evidence is in most cases
> completely absent.

There are linguistic criteria for many of these; ie.. for Avar,
Hun, etc. Kutrigur and Utigur are easily Turkic words.

>
> The question of the Hunnish language has been treated extensively by
> Gerhard Doerfer in his article "Zur Sprache der Hunnen", Central
> Asiatic Journal XVII/1973, 1-50.  He concludes that we just can't
> conclude anything.

There are others who have concluded it's Turkic i..e Pritsak. Right
now the Turkic side is believed. IT is furthermore believed that they
spoke l~r Turkic and not sh~z Turkic.

The Xiong-Nu may not even have been the same
> people or spoken the same language as Atilla's Huns or the Hun.a
> (Hephthalites, White Huns) of Afghanistan/India.  The glosses given
> by Byzantine authors of "Hunnish" words are all either Slavic or
> Daco-Thracian, words that the Huns had picked up after their arrival
> in the Hungarian plain.  The names of most Hunnish leaders are
> Germanic (e.g. Attila) or Iranian, with only a few (the oldest)

That is not right. The Norse version of it 'atli' is a perfectly
good Turkic word meaning 'horseman'. This problem arises because
they first assume that 'atti' is Germanic for father when they
should know by now that 'ata' is Turkic for father in practically
every Turkic language, and words like ata, apa, ana, amma, appa, akka,
atta, are all Turkic words referring to parents. It is completely the
reverse; for Vernadsky takes perfectly good Turkic words and makes
them Slavic, i.e. Besmer (bezmez, or bezmer), Asperuk (es-berir or
esberik).
Too many Turkic scholars seem to be closet Iranists or all politically
motivated, or unduly influenced by IEnists and particularly Iranists.


> As to the Xiong-nu, there appear to be some connections with Altaic
> (*ta"ngri- "sky", given as Xion-nu "tch'eng-li" in Chinese sources),
> but also with Yeniseian (Xiong-nu <kiat> "stone" ~ Yen. <khes> ~
> <kit> "stone").  Given that the Xiong-nu were the earliest known
> people to dominate the eastern steppes, it is not unlikely that these
> words are borrowings into Turkic, Mongolian and Yeniseian from
> Xiong-nu.  For the rest, all we have of the Xiong-nu language is the
> Chinese transcription of the sentence "Send out the army, capture the
> leader", given as:
>
>         sio^g-tjeg-t'iei li at d-ka^ng
>         b'uok-kuk g'ju t'uk-ta^ng
>
> Interpretations of this as Turkic have been attempted, but one can
> equally turn it into Akkadian (as Doerfer has done) or into
> Indo-European (my non-serious shot at it was: *siu:ntete leudhskom,
> po:ng(w)ete ju:s duktom).  Given the inadequacy of the Chinese
> writing system for rendering foreign words, anything's possible.

People have done similar things and have also turned Turkic writing
into Iranian. For example, the Zelencuk inscription or the Alanian
greeting have been give as Iranian for a long time, but Miller had to
do hokus-pokus to get the Zelenchuk Inscription as Iranian. I now have
a picture of the inscription and what Miller did to it, explained by
Miziev. He erased letters and made other substitutions and created a
mumbo-jumbo whereas without erasing any letters one can create
meaningful sentences in Turkic.


> =======================
> Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
> mcv at wxs.nl
> Amsterdam

--
Best Regards,
Mark
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