Horses

[Eduard Selleslagh]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" <mcv at wxs.nl>
Sent: Friday, February 04, 2000 4:53 AM

> Wolfgang Schulze <W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de> wrote:

>> By the way: Why is it so difficult to accept that Sumerians used to term
>> horses 'donkeys (that stem from / of) the mountains' and that they might
>> have used the term ans^e-kur(r)a as it appears ('phonetically' speaking)?

> It's not difficult to accept, it's just that the Sumerian word
> apparently (according to Miguel Civil) *was* <zizi> (usually
> written <ans^e-kur.ra>, just like <tabira> "smith" was usually
> written <urudu-nagar>, to quote Robert Whiting on ANE).  It's of
> course the same word as Akkadian sisu^ "horse", but the Akkadian
> is also borrowed from an unknown source.  Given the phonetic
> shape (*tsitsi-), one might think (just a thought) of some
> reduplicated form *dzidzei- connected with Skt. hayah. "horse"
> and Arm. ji, jioy ([dzi]) "horse" < PIE *g^hei- (satem *dzhei-).

> Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

[Ed]
Note that in Basque, 'zezen' means 'bull'. At least it has four legs ;-)

Coincidence? Another loan cum semantic shift? Or did these words originally
mean 'big four-legged domesticated animal' or 'head of cattle' or something of
that kind?

Ed. Selleslagh