Horses

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/2/00 6:04:58 PM, proto-language at email.msn.com quoted:

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

Now the 'mountain' part of this was not really the original issue, I don't
think.  It was the donkey/ass connection.

Just to go back to the original point I think...

That I believe was Mr. Crist's statement that Armenian using an *ekwos word
for donkey/ass was merely semantic drift.

And of course if a Mesopotamian word for 'horse' was also somehow related to
the donkey than that might be noteworthy - and it apparently was....

> ANShE.KUR.RA -

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

When we shift to Hittite, we find the same symbol/?/ being used for horse,
apparently also connecting it to the donkey.  But...

Dr Stefan Georg wrote:
<<The fact that Hittites use Sumerograms and Akkadograms does not mean that
they didn't mean them to be read aloud as native Hittite words (nor does it
mean that they used the Sumerian/Akkadian terms as a loan-element).>>

I take this to mean that the Sumerian/Akkadian horse symbol used in Hittite
may have been nothing more than an ideogram and therefore give no phonetic
information about the sound of the Hittite word.

My question then becomes how often Hittite does this sort of thing - use a
Sumerian symbol with no phonetic correspondence.  It could not be all the
time or we would have no basis for sounding the Hittite language.

I take it that the following also suggests this phonetic/typographic split:

In a message dated 2/2/00 5:43:41 PM, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
<<Recently on the ANE list, Bob Whiting ("Re: ANE Horses in North
Syria") wrote that the Sumerian word for "horse" was *<zizi>,
written descriptively (not phonetically) as <ans^e-kur.ra>
"foreign equid/donkey".>>

(Childe mention that the Sumerian symbol persists into Akkadian usage as
horse (1954).)

Let me suggest then that the answers to two questions that may help a little
here:

- What was the word/symbol for donkey in Hittite?
- What was the word for horse in Armenian?

If Hittite did not adopt the Sumerogram for donkey (ans^e-?), what did it
use? (And why?)

If Armenian used the *ekwos word for donkey, what is the source of its word
for horse? (And does that explain perhaps the 'semantic drift'?)

Thanks,
Steve Long