Names of Cereals in the Turkic Languages - Wydział Filologiczny UJ

Oats || nyxa 53We would like to suggest a slight modification of this etymology, and – as no ultimateproof can be presented here – another proposition for explaining this word.In anlaut, the alternation j- ~ ǯ- can be explained by a purely Tkc. alternation which,however, has not been studied thoroughly enough to allow for a full verification ofthis assumption. However, what seems to be more problematic is the lack of -v- and achange from the remaining -aa-, -aə- &c. into -u-. This is why we believe that the firstpart of this compound should have rather been borrowed from a form such as liter.Pers., i.e. ǯou.The second part definitely should have been a word of back vocal harmony. Wecould take into consideration such forms as Talyš., Arab. or Pers. (dial., not liter.,with non-palatalised short a’s). Arab. can probably be excluded, as it would requirean assumption, that on the dial. Tkc. ground a presumably local borrowing fromdial. Pers. / Talyš was compounded with a borrowing from Arab. which is quiteunlikely. On the other hand, a compounding of a form such as the liter. Pers. ǯou(which could have appeared in dial., too) with a Pers.dial. / Talyš form [alaf], seemsto be quite realistic.There is still at least one more way of explaining this word. Namely, it could be regardednot as a compound, but as an iotated borrowing form Arab. علف ‘alaf ‘dry grass; hay;fodder’. Iotation is not a common phenomenon, and definitely not a regular one, whichis certainly a weakness of this proposition. Tekin 1975: 205 gives only three examplesof modern ju- deriving from MTkc. long vowel: *ī-, *ō-, *ȫ-, and all of them come fromSarUyg. As far as our knowledge goes, it has not yet been established what the conditionsallowing for iotation were in dial. Tksh. (Ott.). If they were the same, one couldbelieve that ‘a- was rendered as *ȫ- > ju- 34 . In such a case, only the Arab. form could betaken into consideration, the Pers. ‘- being nothing but a graphical tradition with noimportance for the actual sounding.From the semantic point of view, ‘grass; hay; fodder’ > ‘oats’ is at least as probableas ‘barley grass’ or similar > ‘oats’, given that oats are often used for fodder.None of the three propositions is completely convincing. Ultimately, the modifiedversion of ÈSTJa’s explanation appears to be the most realistic.nyxaforms: nyxa Kmk.: RKmkS, Dmitrieva 1972etymology: as yet not discussedcommentary:The sounding of the word clearly suggests a borrowing, presumably from one of theCauc. languages, but we have not managed to establish the exact source.34 Although cf. Tksh.dial. alaf, alef ‘fodder for animals; hay’ (Tietze 2000).