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From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Scythian religious terms and Ural Altaic.
Message-ID: <petrichDCIqJ0.AuB@netcom.com>
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References: <3v71ee$dh9@news.htp.com>
Date: Sun, 30 Jul 1995 07:37:48 GMT
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In article <3v71ee$dh9@news.htp.com>,
Fred Hamori  <budapest@mail.calypso.com> wrote:
>Scythian religious terms based on the accounts of Herodotus
>Fred Hamori

>Most of the Scythic gods mentioned by Herodotus around 500BC. have 
>excellent Ural-Altaic, rather than Iranian explanations! Here is a 
>more detailed list of religious & mythological terms which were 
>recorded by Herodotus and their Ural-Altaic comparisons. The main 
>agglutinative languages of Asia today are Finn-Ugor (Uralic), 
>Altaic (Turkic,Mongol,..) and Dravidian (in India). In the past 
>most of Iran and the near east also spoke such languages, like
>Sumerian, Elamite, Hurri, Urartuan, Hatti, Guti, Lulubi, Kassite.. 

	Agglutinative is simply a kind of structure -- it says nothing 
about relationship. Simply look at the Indo-European languages -- they 
are widely divergent in structure, yet they are recognizably related.

	And let's see what sense the comparison semantics make...

>     Tab-iti  = "Hestia" fire god according to Herodotus
	["fire", "to hit", "iron", "tinder", "cinder stones"]
	A rather horrible mix.

	[Words for "father": ada, ata...]
	This is a baby-talk sort of word, like "mama" or "papa" or "dada"

>     Oeto-syr-(us)= "Apolo"=sun god, according to Herodotus
	["Sun", "time", "month", "fire", "years"]
	I can understand "Sun" and "day" being linked, and maybe even "Sun" and 
"fire", but the others don't make a whole lot of sense.

>           2.Sumir      sar       =king 
>             Etrusk   ae-sar      =god  >> Latin cesar >>Germ kaiser
	Where would the "k-" have come from. "Caesar" was in fact Gaius 
Julius Caesar's family name, and not a royal title. Like saying that a US 
President is the Washington.

	[Much of the rest are like that...]

>     Their burial customs included the burial of the chief with his favorite 
>     horses and often his wife in a burial mound. The horse burial was common
>     among Sumerians (onager), Scythians, Huns, Turks, Hungarians.

>             Indo-saka  tope       =a mound
>             Sumir      dub        =mound,hill
>             Egypt      tep        =mound,hill
>             Turkic     tepe       =mound,hill
>             Ugrian     tomp       =mound,hill,island
>             Hungarian  domb       =mound,hill
>             Sanskrit  stupa       =temple in shape of a mound

	It could also have been of Indo-European origin and transmitted 
into those other languages -- according to the Kurgan hypothesis, the 
builders of those structures were speakers of early IE dialects and as 
they spread, they could have taken their word for "burial mound" with them.

>                      Daughter of Boristen(es)    
	[comparison with Uralic and Altaic legends...]

	The problem there is that these mythical motifs could have gone 
in the other direction, or could even have been descended from some 
common Eurasian Paleolithic ancestor.
-- 
Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster	Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
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