Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

laryngeal as its first phoneme). Excavations in progress might help find such
documents. In any case it is probable that the Greek term was borrowed (either from a
Northern Anatolian language or from a Northern Caucasian one) and because of this
alone does not fit into the common Indo-European scheme. All other Indo-European
groups surveyed above continued the old tradition without interruption.
It is interesting that (unlike Indo-Aryan and Italic) Greek does not show an
opposition of masculine and feminine stems, the former of which serves both functions.
Thus it seems that Greek possibly did not participate in the creation of a feminine
counterpart 308 to the old name after the two-gender system preserved in Anatolian had
been substituted by that consisting of three genders. Also unexpected is the practical
absence of typical Indo-European “horse” personal names 309 noticed in Mycenaean (the
only example that remains unclear being [I?]-qo-te-wo 310 ). This feature of Mycenaean
onomastics differs both from later Greek tradition with its marked predominance of
names with first or second element flppo- 311 , and from the rest of Indo-European,
where such names also remained popular. But derivatives and compounds with iqo- >
·ppow as well as many Indo-European formulae containing the word were continued
in the Greek tradition, although the sound shape of the word had changed. The new
shape of Greek ·ppow excludes phonetic similarity to »kÊw “swift”, such as may be
presupposed for the Proto-Indo-Iranian-Greek (Proto-Eastern Indo-European) dialect.
This substitution caused the distortion of the anagrammatical structure of a poetic
formula like Old Indian Vedic á≈vâs... â≈ávas “swift horses”, Avestan aspåMhô âsauuô
(with the same meaning), which might be understood as a figura etymologica by scholars
307 Dawkins 1927; Ellinger 1984; Vernant 1989, 183-209.
308 On the ambiguity of the long vowel in Homeric flpphmolgÒw see Chantraine 1979, 25 (cf. there also
on a proper name ÑIppÆ; these forms may still be traces of a lost feminine stem similar to the old Indian
one).
309 With the substitution of a new lexical item for an old one this semantic tradition is continued in such
Slavic last names as Russian Konev, Konevskoj, hinted at in Chekov’s short story “A horse last name”
(“Loshadinaja familija”).
310 Landau 1958, 231; Milewski 1969, 149-150 (with a strictly cultural explanation for the absence of this
type of name).
311 More than 230 names are recorded in Bechtel and Fink 1894 (Chantraine 1990 s.v. mentions 150
compounds with the Greek noun). In Sanskrit there are approximately 70 names with the corresponding