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Qıŋraq

"Sword, knife, blade"

Etymology

Pronunciation

*qɨŋ(ɨ)rɑːq

Transcriptions

Qing-lu (輕呂) OC *kʰeŋ-ɡ·raʔ, Jing-lu (徑路) LH *keŋ-lɑ

Part of Speech

Noun

 

Sources

Yi Zhoushu (逸周書)

Hanshu (漢書)

Notes

Bailey, in his (1979) Dictionary of Khotan Saka, connects it to the Scythian sword ἀκῑνάκης /a.kiːna.kɛːs/ (only attested for in Greek) and attempts to derive the root *ki- from Vedic कीनाश kīnāśa "ploughman." If the Greek word is truly a transcription of Qıŋıraq, it shows nothing more than that the word had lost its original phonetics due to repeated borrowing. Moreover, comparative Indologist Michael Witzel (1999) notes in his study of “Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan” that the root *kīn did not exist in Indo-European languages, even citing kīnāśa as an example of a loan into the language.


Dybo (2014) has *kïŋrak s.m.

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