Tocharian A kopräNk ‘antelope, deer’

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Authors

BLAŽEK Václav SCHWARZ Michal

Year of publication 2015
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Tocharian and Indo-European Studies
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Field Linguistics
Keywords Tocharian; Iranian; Indic; moonstone; etymology; haplology; umlaut
Description With respect to the metal names wäs ‘gold’ and nkinc ‘silver’ appearing in the same text A303, where Tocharian A kopräNk is attested, Feist (1913) interpreted this word as a cognate of Latin cuprum and translated it as ‘copper’. Pinault analyzes the compound kopräNk-pärsánt as representing the poetic name of the moon-stone, originally “antelope-spotted”, judging from Sanskrit kuraNga-lánchana- ‘deer-spotted’, as a metaphoric designation of the moon with the spots resembling those of an antelope. In this perspective Tocharian A kopräNk is derivable from a Middle Iranian compound *kafra-ranku-, probably shortened via haplology to *kafranku- and further adapted to proto-Tocharian A *káprunk (as A tuNk vs. B taNkw ‘love’), and finally through u/w-umlaut (as in A motarci, B motartstse ‘green’ < *modhru-) and the change *u > ä resulted in kopräNk. The meaning of the assumed compound could be ‘a young of deer or antelope with a spotted coat’.
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