Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

Hurrian. 336 It is connected to the Proto Northern Caucasian term for the wheel
*hwPlkwê > Chadokolob dialect of Avar horkó "carriage", Lak hark w “carriage wheel
axle”, Dargwa ? ark w “axle, carriage” > Akushi dialect of Dargwa ark, Western Caucasian
*k w :P > Adygh k w P “carriage, vehicle”. A form having (like kurka- discussed above) *-r-
corresponding to *-l- (that has been retained in the Hurrian form just cited, see above
on -l- < -r- in *pôlo-) was possibly borrowed into the Indo-European dialect reflected in
Hittite, (Hieroglyphic) Luwian and Tocharian: Hittite hurki- “wheel”, probably also
Hieroglyphic Luwian CURRUS wa/i + -ra/i-za-ni/nî-ná/na “chariot” (Karkamis A 11b, 3; A
12, 2) with a development of the palatal phoneme according to the satPm type 337 ,
Tocharian A wärk-ant- “wheel”, B yerkwantai “wheel”. The dialectal distribution of the
terms seems particularly interesting: a Northern (probably Eastern) Caucasian dialect
that was the source of this loanword had separated from Hurro-Urartian before that
time, and the Indo-European dialect that borrowed the word is a predecessor of the
centum Northern Anatolian (Hittite) and Tocharian and possibly of the satPm
Hieroglyphic Luwian, but not of the other dialects (which of course might have lost the
word later, as it might have been ousted by new terms related to technological
innovations).
From the four Indo-European dialectal terms for “wheel, wheeled vehicle” discussed
in recent studies 338 , Hittite, Luwian and Tocharian shared this first word borrowed from
Northern Caucasian, but Tocharian also had another reduplicated term for vehicle (A
kukäl, B kokale “carriage”) going back to the second term common to Eastern Indo-
European (reduplicated Old Indian cakra “wheel”; Avestan Çaxra-“wheel”, Middle
Persian chr/cxr, Parthian cxr, Modern Persian (Farsi) Çärx, Eastern Iranian Ossetic calx,
336 Ivanov 1963, 15 (not attested in Hurrian proper); 1980, 115; on Northern Caucasian in its relation to
Indo-European: Nikolayev 1985, 62; Starostin 1985, 88-89; 1988, 130; Nikolayev and Starostin 1994, 498.
337 Starke 1995, 126, n.259. A comparable loss of the initial laryngeal occurs in Milyan (Lycian B). On
the Hittite word and its comparison to Tocharian cf. Ivanov 1980, 112-115.
338 Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1984/1995, I, 621-623; Delamarre 1984, 125-127; Meid 1994; Mallory and
Adams 1997, 640-641; cf. Anthony 1995, 557, fig. 1, where, unfortunately, important terms connected to