Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

Again there remains the possibility of an ancient Iranian borrowing. To this one
may add that, since the form of the Thracian stem is closely related not only to Iranian
but also to some Anatolian words cited above, and the Thracian language is known
mainly through disparate names given by classical authors, it is not possible to state
definitely that these terms continued the original Indo-European tradition directly and
not through borrowing from neighboring dialects. In any case the words given above
may contain a possible trace of the Indo-European word for horse in one of the
Paleobalkanic languages considered to be a source of Modern Albanian. The latter lost
this word. 240
V. Northwestern Indo-European. Baltic and Slavic. Old Lithuanian has preserved the
feminine derivative of the Indo-Eropean word in a phonemic form aÍvà “horse”,
practically identical to the Vedic (the masculine counterpart was lost in Baltic). The only
difference consists of the shift of accent towards the final syllable which had acquired
the acute tone on the vowel becoming long after the loss of a final laryngeal (the mark
of the feminine common to Indo-Iranian and Baltic; see below on the correspondences
in other dialects): *é´kwe/o-H > *é´ ´kwaH > *é´ ´kwâ > eÍvá > aÍvá. The initial vowel e was
attested in Old Lithuanian eschw5 = [eÍvu] in the speech of Bretkûnas who often
changed old a > e 241 , thus it is not clear whether here one may definitely speak about an
archaism (as it is usually described in the handbooks), but cf. also the Lithuanian river
names EÍvìn& : AÍvìn&. Recently it has been suggested that the word in the dialectal
form osa < *asa “mare” < *asva was preserved in Old Latvian (in the XVII c.). 242 The
common Baltic character of the older vowel change *e > a 243 is seen in Western Baltic:
Old Prussian aswinan “the milk of a mare”with an -n- suffix as in Lithuanian dialectal
240 Aside from some later borrowings discussed below, in Albanian there is the word mës for a male foal
of an ass or a horse (corresponding to Illyric Messapic Menzana), which can be connected either to an
Indo-European term for “male” or to a verbal stem “to suck”: Porzig 1954; Pisani 1959, 127; Gamkrelidze
and Ivanov 1984/1995 I, 474-475.
241 Bûga 1961, III, 300-301.
242 Karulis 1992, I, 468-469; II, 564.
243 Andersen 1996, 54, 148.