Horses

[Patrick C. Ryan]

Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: "Stefan Georg" <Georg at home.ivm.de>
Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2000 7:28 PM

on *ek'wos

>>-- but it doesn't mean "donkey" in Anatolian, the earliest attested IE
>>language of the area, and Armenian is intrusive there.

> Not really. It does, if we take into account the Sumerogramme
> ANShE.KUR.RA -

> ANShE 'Esel, ass'
> KUR 'Berg, mountain'
> RA - genitive-morpheme

That's Sumerian, and not Anatolian. (aside: the genitive morpheme is .A
only; the writing .RA has been used by specialists to argue that this term
is not really Sumerian, but pseudo-Sumerian invented by Akkadian-speaking
scribes. I'd be grateful if some specialist could confirm/debunk this). The
fact that Hittites use Sumerograms and Akkadograms does not mean that they
didn't meant them to be read aloud as native Hittite words (nor does it
mean that they used the Sumerian/Akkadian terms as a loan-element).

 [PR]
This is not meant as a criticism of R-S but only for the information of the
readership of the list.

Thomsen, p. 90

"The genitive posposition is /-ak/, but it is never written with the sign
AK."

*Very commonly*, the -a, which is written, is combined with the previous
consonant so that spelling like

e(2) lugal-la, house-king-of,

is the rule rather than the exception.

Therefore, no valid inference about origin should be made from a spelling
like kur-ra ('of the mountain').

I believe there are no Sumerian "specialists" who would argue in this way.

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th
St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek,
at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er
mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)