Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

The next stage seen in the fourth term for wheel/chariot is marked by the absence
of Greek and by the beginning of the dialectal dispersal of some groups like Balto-Slavic
(with clear Eastern Baltic innovation opposed to an archaism preserved in Western
Baltic and Slavic as marginal dialects). To this period the name for hub may belong: Old
Indian Vedic nâbhi “nave of a wheel; navel”, nâbhyam “nave of a wheel”, Sinhalese
saknäba “hub” < *cakra-nâbhi “nave of a wheel”, Old Prussian nabis “nave of a wheel,
navel”, Old English nafu, nafa “hub of a wheel” (nafogar “auger” < *nabô-gaizaz “tool
for piercing wheel hubs”), Old Icelandic no1’f, Old High German naba (the transfer of the
names for parts of the body to denote parts of the wheel or carriage is characteristic of
different Indo-European traditions, see above on Ossetic 379 ). Greek has another term
probably derived from *k w el-(H)- (see above on Mycenaean qe-re-me-ne-u). Dialects
that do not participate in the isoglosses of this chronological level have their own
original words. An interesting “Scythian-European” dialectal term that spread in
Eastern Iranian, Albanian, Balto-Slavic and Germanic may be seen in Ossetic fsondz
“yoke” (fs- < *sf- < *sp-), Albanian pendE “pair of yoked oxen”, Latvian spanda “a rope
to bind a plough to the yoke”, Old High German spannan “to stretch” (German Ge-
spann “team, couple”), Old English spinel “spindle”. 380 Ossetic stî/evdz(ae) “vertical
pivot connecting a yoke to the thill” is supposed to have entered a similar isogloss, since
comparable technical terms are found in Baltic, Slavic (Russian spica “spoke”), Germanic
and Latin 381 , but only some of these words are specialized in meanings related to
vehicles.
To the period of separate dialectal migrations of some Western Indo-European
dialects belong such local isoglosses as the word common to Italic (Latin currus) and
Celtic (Old Irish carr, Gaulish carros > Latin carrus “four-wheeled chariot”) but known
378 Benveniste 1964, but cf. Dzhaukian 1982, 136.
379 Abaev 1973, II, 149, suggested that the Indo-European term for “navel” had been borrowed into
Western Caucasian, but for a different explanation of these words see: Nikolayev and Starostin 1994,
306. On Old Prussian as an archaism cf. Eckert 1995, 53.
380 Abaev 1958, I, 485; 1965, 9-11; Delamarre 1984, 123.
381 Abaev 1979, III, 152; Delamarre, ib.