Indo-Aryan words in Hurrian (Starke)

[Bjarte Kaldhol]

Dear listmembers,

When I started reading Frank Starke's Vorwort to his book about the Kikkuli
text, AUSBILDUNG UND TRAINING VON STREITWAGENPFERDEN, I was amazed to
discover that he uses full stops only very sparingly. You won't believe me,
but there were only four full stops on the first page. His chains of
thought are extremely long and complicated, and if somebody were to
interpret him live, he would have a hard job. In reading this kind of
German, one has to find the verb at the end of a paragraph (or on the next
page) before an understanding of the whole chain of thought slowly dawns.

Starke's interpretation of the Kikkuli text undoubtedly represents a big
step forward as measured against Annelies Kammenhuber's, although many of
his text emendations appear to be desperate solutions, and his "Luwian
bias" might have lead him to ignore or misunderstand Hurrian wordforms. (He
does not accept that the author was Hurrian: "Gerade im Hinblick auf den
sprachlichen Befund des Kikkuli-Textes kann daher von einer hurr.
Verfasserschaft kaum die Rede sein. Die luw. Interferenzen weisen vielmehr
darauf hin, dass diese Trainungsanleitung in einer luwischsprachlichen
Umgebung entstanden ist..." p. 122.) What was earlier seen as Runden... auf
einer Rennbahn, is by Starke interpreted as "Wendungen". So, instead of
laps, we have "turns" (-vartanna), and not in a track or racecourse
(Rennbahn), but in what Starke describes as "vorgeschriebene Fahrspur",
that is, -va$anna. Kikkuli did not train horses for "Pferdewettrennen...
wofuer es im Text keinerlei Anhalt gibt...", but for war.

After discussing the difficult term wa$anna- over many pages, he concludes
on p. 103:

"Zusammenfassend bleibt noch einmal festzustellen, dass das Wort wasanna-
im Kikkuli-Text fuer die Hufschagfigur des Zirkels mit eingeschriebenem
S-Bogen bzw. Achter steht. Setzt man fuer wasanna- die Bedeutung
"(vorgeschriebene) Fahrspur" an (was sinngemaess dem Terminus
'Hufschlagfigur' entspricht), so laesst sich diese Deutung wohl auch mit
dem heute bevorzugte Anschluss... an fruehindoarisch *va(:)z´hana- (zu
vedisch vah- "fahren" < *vaz´h- < uridg. *weg^h-) vereinbaren, selbst wenn
sich fuer den relativ spaet bezeugten altindischen Fortsetzer va:hana-, der
fuer "the act of drawing, carrying, conveying, [...] driving, riding,
guiding (horses)" bzw. fuer "any vehicle or conveyance or draught-animal"
steht, keine adaequate Bedeutung feststellen laesst."

As we see, Starke is stretching the meaning of wa$anna- somewhat. Is his
solution acceptable to Indologists? If it were not for the strange
"genitive" wa$anna$aia, I would have thought that wa$anna- could be related
to the Hurrian stem fa$-, "to enter", and interpret wa$anna as an essive of
*fa$anni. This genitive is found in the expression nawartanni wa$anna$aia,
translated by Starke as "in der Neuner-Wendung des wasanna-..." He sees the
redundant -a- in -$aia as a "Luwianism", but it might also be a
"Hurrianism", since I believe the sequence -$j- (-sy-) is unknown in
Hurrian words.

Best wishes,
Bjarte Kaldhol