Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

Eer, Shugni Eîr, Eastern Iranian *aEr-dâna- “hearth” > Pamirian Rushan raDôn “hearth”),
Latin atrôx “frightful (< *black-looking)”. 79 An early Iranian borrowing with a still
unexplained initial *v- is a common Balkan-Carpatian areal term for “hearth/fire”:
Albanian vatër, vatra “hearth; fireplace”, Rumanian vatrÅ “fire”, Gypsy vâtro/-a
“campfire > camp”, Hungarian vatra, Slovene vatra, Serbian vatra “fire” (Ûiva vatra
“living = sacred fire”), Czech vatra, Polish watra, watrzysko, Ukranian vatra, vatryÍÇe,
Russuan vatr-uÍka “a traditional cake filled with cottage cheese”. 80 The spread of the
word should have been connected with the prehistoric influence of the Iranian fire cult.
The same hypothesis may be suggested in connection with the Hurrian word for
“fire”. The source of the borrowing seems to be definitely Iranian since in the other
languages the meaning is not exactly “fire”. It was changed as it was borrowed from
(Proto-) Iranian and accommodated into the morphonemic structure of Hurrian
nominal stems: the initial vowel disappeared and the additional final vowel was added.
Iranian influence on Proto-Northern Eastern Caucasian 81 and Proto-Kartvelian 82 is well
documented. Still, it is not clear whether the word for “fire” was borrowed only
because of the influence of the (Proto-) Iranian fire cult, or whether it was part of a
more massive (Indo-) Iranian lexical borrowing in Hurrian, the other traces of which
remain to be found (the supposed influence of Mitannian Aryan might have belonged
to the period after the composition of the bilingual text).
3. The meaning of the Hurro-Urartian stem pur(r)a- and the Hurrian name m Purra-
(with a note on Latin puer-).
79 Ernout and Meillet 1994, 53-54; Sokolova 1967, 14; 1973, 76 n.2; Edel’man 1986, 173; Pokorny 1959, 69;
Watkins 1985, 4; Delamarre 1984, 179.
80 On the areal distribution: Klepikova 1973; Hamp 1976; 1981; Huld 1984, 124. The supposition that
the Gypsy borrowing from Iranian had been a source for all the other areal terms (Machek 1957, 124)
cannot be proven. The Gypsy word (see JeÍina 1886, 97, 105, on the form in the Czech area dialects) is
supposed to come from Rumanian (Wolf 1987, 239, n.3648; Boretzky and Igla 1994, 298).
81 Starostin 1988, 113-114, with bibliography; in particular, the name “mountain, hill” shows a
specifically Iranian form and may be important for defining the characteristic features of the
landscape of the contact area. See above on the word for “left side”.
82 Klimov 1994, with references.