Pietroasa and other toponyms (etymology +)

[ualarauans]

Hails, Daweid!

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, David Kiltz <derdron at ...> wrote:
>
> On 29.07.2006, at 12:50, ualarauans wrote:
> 
> > < IE *kouko- > PG. *xauxa- > Go. hauh-s, [...] the Alans, their
> > [the Goths]
> > loyal allies [...], keeping
> > till nowadays (in Ossetic) the word `xox', i.e. [kho:kh],
> > for "mountain"...
> 
> Hi Ualarauns,
> 
> you seem to suggest here, that Ossetic _xox_ be a loan from 
Germanic,
> or Gothic more specifically.
> It seems, however, dangerous to pick out this word from Ossetic and
> disregard its immediate relatives, the other Iranian languages. 
There
> we find, inter alia, OldPersian _kaufa-_ 'mountain'
> Avestan _kaofa_ 'ridge, bump', MiddlePersian _kôf_ NPersian 
_kôh_.
> Cf. also Khotan-Sakian _kuvaa-_ (< *kaufaka-) 'mountain, hill, 
heap'.
> While I'm no expert in Ossetian, I'd rather connect the Ossetian 
word
> with its Iranian neighbours. We find related forms in other IE
> languages, too. Also with -p (Lith. _kaupas_ 'heap') and with *-b
> (Engl. _heap_, German _Haufe(n)). Interestingly, there are also
> tribal names connected with the term, cf. OldPersian 
_Âkaufačiya_.
> MPers. _Kôfêč_. While (possibly) people from heights 
and 'mountain-
> dwellers' are rather similar, the roots aren't identical, I think.

Yes, sorry for having uttered my suggestion so inarticulately. I see 
it was this Anlaut kh- which misled me to a conclusion that the word 
could have experienced the Germanic consonant shift. Thank you very 
much for your correction. I'm no expert in Ossetian too 
(but wait -:)), and the dictionary I found offers no etymologies, 
but I confess that the first thing I did was looking through it in 
search for probable Gothic loanwords. I did find some interesting 
words, e.g. _arm_ "arm", "hand" (cf. Go. arms), but these may happen 
to be parallel IE forms, or just coincidental homophones, as it is 
probably the case of Oss. _zaeghyn_ (-gh- is spirant, like Low 
German g; -y- smth like schwa) "to say", past tense _zaghta_ - to 
compare with Dutch _zeggen_, past tense _zegde_. I felt the 
creeps... But, recalling that there was no voiced [z] in Anlaut of 
this word in Gothic (*sagjan or *sagon), there was no i-Umlaut etc 
etc, but there IS probably a secure Iranian etymology instead, 
my "discovery" was terribly frustrated. I'll be more careful in the 
future :)

Ualarauans





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