Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

elated to it as Albanian kâl “horse” 330 may have been borrowed from the source
common to this Northeastern Caucasian stem. A direct borrowing is excluded because
of the difference between the voiced consonant in Nakh and Tzez-Khvarshi and the
voiceless one in the Latin loanword as well as between the -w- glide in the former and
the group -ab- in the latter. The possible intermediary language remains unknown,
although a language with the consonantal structure of the Hittite (Northern Anatolian)
type might be possible. But the term might have had an earlier link to another
important word for “foal” discussed above.
Both Indo-European terms definitely connected to the Northern Caucasian lexemes
with the initial rare phoneme *f-—the numeral “five” and the noun “fist” semantically
linked to the first word—show an alternation of the initial voiceless labial stop *p- with
a corresponding labiovelar *k w - : *penk w e > Proto-Celtic *k w enk w e “five” 331 , Latin
quînque (with dissimilation contrary to the assimilation in Gothic fimf < *pemp-); Old
English f^yst, Proto-Slavic *p2stÈ “fist”: Lithuanian kùmst& “fist”. 332 The same connection
between Proto-Northern Caucasian *f- and Proto-Indo-European p- alternating with
Hittite ku- < *k w - may be suggested also for the names for “foal”, but in this case too
the difference between -r- in Northern Caucasian and Hittite and -l- in the rest of Indo-
European should be taken into consideration.
5. Some names of wheeled chariots and of related objects.
The borrowing of a word for horse should have been connected not only to the
domestication of the horse but to the use of wheeled vehicles-chariots of a new type.
From the works of Childe it is clear that the spread of vehicles played an important role
330 Although the main Indo-European word for horse was ousted by this borrowing in connection to the
latter, some old formulae were preserved: thus in an Albanian folksong the expression kualt te putise ze
te sh-krehe “to water (< modern Greek potisë) horses and to clean them with a brush” (Lambertz 1959,
200-201) contains a trace of an old Indo-European technical meaning for a verb also preserved in Slavic
(Russian skresti “to clean” about a horse, skr-eb-nica as the name of a special instrument); another
dialectal synonym is represented in Luwian kuÍ-ala- as a similar name for an instrument, Starke 1990,
327-328, 515.
331 Thurneysen 1946, 246, § 392.
332 Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1984/1995, 361, 366, 747 (with references).