Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

above (if -r- is not a suffix here, as it seems from the opposition wand-i- : wand-ar-), but
these names show no trace of the article. Proper names like Pend-ip-Íarri (a priest of
Hurrian Ishtar-Shaushka, father of the Hittite queen of the Hurrian dynasty
Puduhepa 61 ), Nuzi Want-ip-Íarri 62 , Bant-ip-Íenni are supposed to contain want-/went-
“right (= not wrong)” 63 , but if they are not connected to this root, they may have the
passive stem of a verb in -i- 64 , see below on a verb with a similar stem.
Just as in the form discussed above (the name for “cooks”), one may see the class
prefix in the initial syllable of w/v/f-and- “right”. In that case, the stem -and- “right” can
be identified with the Northern Caucasian *Hând´zË “right” reconstructed on the basis
of Avar-Andi *hanÇ:i- “right” > Andi hanÇ:il etc. 65 ; a combination of this Hurrian
adjective with the noun herari “sinew = upper arm” (see above) can be traced back to
Proto-Northern Caucasian, since both the words belong to inherited vocabulary 66 and
very often form compounds based on old phraseological combinations. In the
Northern Caucasian stem “right”, the following changes are supposed: the initial
laryngeal *H- was either lost or not represented in the cuneiform orthography; the
vowel of the root was preserved; the final group nasal + affricate developed to nasal +
stop just as in the other words discussed above.
Besides these three etymologies (endan, f/vantar-, f/vant-), in which one can safely
suppose traces of the phonetic law just suggested, there are some other Hurrian words
in which the same origin of the group -nt/d- is possible. Thus in the verbal stem pend-
/pind- = Hittite appa tarnu- “to let come back, to return, to set free”, Akkadian
61 Laroche 1966, 144; Haas and Wilhelm 1974, 4.
62 Cassin and Glassner 1977, 165.
63 Xachikian 1985a, 142, n.68.
64 Nozadze 1978, 65-67 on this type of compound proper names.
65 Nikolayev and Starostin 1994, 544-545. S. A. Starostin has informed me that he has also considered
the possibility of this Hurro-Northern Caucasian comparison, although he did not find it absolutely
safe.
66 See on the latter Starostin 1988, etymology 14; the Northern Caucasian protoform *xwî ? rV “vein” is
discussed in Nikolayev and Starostin 1994, 1064-1065; Trubetzkoy 1930, etymology 71; 1987, 278;
Starostin 1987, 459. Etymologically, -ari should be a sufix. The same combination of the name for
“(upper) arm” (with another suffix: -hi instead of -ari, cf. Neu 1994, 153; Wegner 1995, 122-123 on