Names of Cereals in the Turkic Languages - Wydział Filologiczny UJ

78 jadygan || RyeHowever, ‘foreign, strange’ could also be understood as ‘not sown, and still appearing’rather than ‘coming from someone foreign’. Then, such a derivate would beunderstandable, given the weed-like character of rye. This explanation seems to bequite likely but very difficult to prove.Finally, it might also be that it is not the above mentioned jat ‘foreign, strange’ thatexplains our word, but some unattested semantic change such as Čul. Šat ~ Č- ‘Tatar’(Stachowski, M. 1998: 116). But whether the Sag., Šr. and Küär. became acquainted withrye from the Tatars, is unknown. A semantic parallel could be provided by Pol. tatarka‘a species of groats’, gryka and others (cf. also Mańczak 1999: 95f.).Yet another possibility would be to assume the existence of some unknown nominalstem *jady. The fact that such a stem is unknown would not in itself be a strong argumentagainst such a proposition. However, the Küär. form of jatkan would then becomequite incomprehensible. Perhaps the most probable explanation would be to assumethat the word had been shortened in Küär., which is a fairly common phenomenonwith three-syllable words with a high vowel in the middle syllable.Additionally, it is rather puzzling that none of the above propositions can explain theconcurrent existence of j- and č- forms in Sag. and Šr. Generally, č- is the counterpartof Tkc. j- in these languages, including in borrowings, e.g. Sag. čablak ‘potato’ < Russ.jabloko (Räsänen 1949: 162). Perhaps the most likely explanation is that of a late borrowing,and most probably from Oyr.There exist in fact three explanations of our word, and none of them are whollyconvincing:1. jat- ‘to lie’; for: semantics; against: suffixation (partial possibility of defence),distribution2. *jat- nominal ( jat ‘foreign, strange’); for: semantics; against: phonetics (-ygan)3. *jady- nominal; for: phonetics, suffixation; against: not attested (not a very strongargument), Küär. jatkan 50Most probably, this derivate is very old, as is suggested by the facts that the base is utterlyunclear, and that the derivational model is nowadays essentially unproductive. Thepossibility of a very old borrowing, adapted both morphologically and phonetically,cannot be ultimately discounted. Determining the exact period of borrowing seems,however, to be impossible given the complete lack of old, and abundant, data.a very important clue since the cultural data show that rye should have been known in thisregion much earlier.50 Although one can not definitively exclude the possibility of a later, irregular change in Küär.caused probably by folk etymology and an association with jat ‘foreign, strange’? ‘to lie’?