Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

Northern Caucasian, which is close to the earliest date of horse domestication (around
V mil. B.C.). 326 Thus a Proto-Northern Caucasian term should have penetrated into
some Indo-European dialects. The place of the borrowing depends on the historical
geography of migrations. At least for Greek as well as for Albanian, which belonged to
the satPm Eastern Indo-European dialectal group, the possibility of borrowing from
Northern Caucasian is quite real. If the word was borrowed from Northern Caucasian,
then the Indo-European -l- (*-ln-) in intervocalic position is the result of the
accommodation of the original -r- (*-rn-) in the source of the borrowing.
There is a possibility of a distant (and accordingly very old) relation between this
group of words and the Hittite word kurka- “a foal” compared to Greek kÊrnow 327 ,
which might be a common borrowing from the same Northern Caucasian stem to
which different suffixes were added in each of the Indo-European dialects. The stem in
Northern Caucasian might be *gwålV “horse” > Nakh *gile “horse, steed” > Chechen
gila, Proto-Tzez-Khvarshi *guRu > Tzezi gulu “stallion, horse”. 328 The Proto-Tzez-
Khvarshi root could have been the source of both the Greek and Hittite words, with a
characteristic change of voiced into voiceless consonants depending on the rules of
Hittite phonology. Another borrowing from the same source (but without a suffix and
the diminutive sense connected to it) might be Latin caballus “work horse” which
ousted the earlier general term in Romance. 329 This word and such dialectal terms
326 As the earliest possible area of domestication is near the proposed proto-Finno-Ugrian homeland, a
possible link to the Ugrian name for horse reflected in Hungarian ló, Mansi lo(w), Khanty t/law
deserves to be discussed (the Tocharian etymology suggested for the latter does not seem persuasive; see
Napol’skix 1996 on a later borrowing in Altaic). It has been suggested (Ivanov 1984) that the Indo-
European term can be traced back to an an earlier compound, the second part of which consisted of this
word cognate to Ugrian *lo and the first of which was the name for “child” spread in different
families, but the weakness of the suggestion is the universal character of the first element, see above on
Latin puer, Yagnobi pulla-.
327 Forssman 1980; Melchert 1994, 132. It is not easy to conclude whether the words should also be
compared to Iranian terms like Persian and Tadzhik kurra “foal”, since the latter is connected to the
onomatopoetic appeal to address horses: cf. Vakhan kurr-kurr “Come!” in this function and kurrást
“neighing of a horse”, Griunberg and Steblin-Kamenskij 1976, 371-372, 656.
328 Nikolayev and Starostin 1994, 445-446.
329 On a possible non-Indo-European source in a language of Asia Minor, see Ernout and Meillet 1994, 80.