Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

g) From a purely phonetic point of view the best solution might be to suppose a
borrowing into Proto-Greek of this dialectal Northern Caucasian form of the type
Proto-Tzez-Khvashi *Íig w P “mare” (> Tzezi ÍIg w P “mare” > Ginukh Íeg w P 288 ). The initial
fricative in Greek before becoming h- might have had variants *Í-/*s- < *s-. The only
difference in Greek would be the voicelessness and gemination of the intervocalic
labiovelar stop. There are two main difficulties with this comparison. First, in a number
of dialects it is the name for donkey 289 , and it is not a general term for horse (with the
exception of a compound with a collective meaning “horses” into which it enters as the
first element). Second, there is no known historical reason to compare just this
Northeastern Caucasian dialect to Proto-Greek. Among other Northern Caucasian
languages in which the word had forms comparable to the Greek, Western Caucasian
Ubykh could be a more understandable source of borrowing from the point of view of
historical geography: if the hypothesis about the early spread of Proto-Greeks in the
Southern Transcaucasian area is accepted, the southern group of Western Caucasian
dialects might have been in the vicinity of the early Greeks before their migration to
eastern Asia Minor. But Ubykh forms (cPg w P, ÇPg w P) are less similar to Greek,
particularly insofar as the initial consonant is concerned (for the same reason as well as
because of chronological inconsistency the early reconstructed protoforms of the word
could not be compared to Greek). A possible objection to the suggestion of such a
borrowing might refer to the lack of sufficient documentary data on any Northern
Caucasian language besides Hurrian 290 (and Hattic, where the name for horse is
horses, had been more important from the economic point of view (as donkeys were at the time of the
Old Assyrian colonies still in Asia Minor).
288 Nikolayev and Starostin 1994, 444-445. Cf. Trubetzkoy 1930, etymology 51; Starostin 1987, 458.
289 So it may be a Northern Caucasian representative of a migratory term for “ass, donkey” found in
Egyptian and Altaic, discussed above.
290 For a probable Greek loanword from Hurrian, see below on the name of Artemis. On Hurrian ashi
“skin, hide” (with a possible link to Northwestern Caucasian * ? wärćwP “skin”, cf. also Diakonoff and
Starostin 1986, 47; 1988, 185; Nikolayev and Starostin 1994, 228-229 on a very complicated semantic
reconstruction) for éskÒw “skin, hide”, see Neu 1996, 114, n.38 (with a reference to Gamkrelidze and
Ivanov). As to Szemerényi’s suggestion regarding the link of sigalÒeiw “shining, glistening” to
Hurrian Íehel- “pure” (Szemerényi 1974, 153; critically mentioned by Chantraine 1990, 1001), it seems
confirmed by the stem in -al- of Íeh-al- “pure” (Neu , ib., 194, n.195) and by a similarity in the usage