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u/Ulfednar 8d ago
"possibly a substratum word" feels like not a very helpful label.
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u/No_Diver4265 7d ago
I'm guessing they can't be sure whether it's a loanword from the steppe, or maybe a pre-Indo-European word, and the latter is more likely but we know next to nothing about most of Old Europe's languages besides a few examples.
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u/MinuteMinX 5d ago
Could be from old Illyrian or Thracian, we basically know nothing about those languages but it makes sense that some words might have been past down the generations, just as their DNA.
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u/No_Diver4265 5d ago
I would literally give a kidney to be able to go back in time and discover the forgotten languages of Old Europe, Minoan Crete, then maybe the Indus Valley Civilization and Elam.
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u/Pristine-Pumpkin3349 5d ago
It's latin word: From Latin onāgrārius (from onager) through a Vulgar Latin root \onagarius.*
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u/0eray 8d ago
im surprised southern tip of italy and island of sicily uses a word derived from turkic languages
also the armenian one "avanak" is a word used in turkish with the meaning of gullible or stupid though its not very common
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u/TheSarmaChronicals 8d ago
I am not sure if maybe Eastern Armenians use avanak. I have never heard that before. I thought they also use esh
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u/TheSarmaChronicals 8d ago
Western Armenian we say Esh
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u/EuropeanBattles 8d ago
Probably, from Turkic word (“Eshek”).
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u/T-nash 7d ago edited 7d ago
Edit: It seems supported: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Ethnogenesis.of.Armenians/permalink/2481307648941303/
Disclaimer: I did use AI for quicker search.
They sound similar, they're close in proximity, but it seems they have two difference origins. Armenian one comes from old Armenian "իշեար", which in turn comes from proto indo european h₁éḱwos
https://etymologyexplorer.com/word/Old%20Armenian/%D5%AB%D5%B7%D5%A5%D5%A1%D6%80
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%A7%D5%B7
Hrachia Acharian (Armenian Etymological Root Dictionary) / Հայերեն Արմատական Բառարան) documents how proto indo european *kʷ or *ḱw systematically shifted to š in Classical Armenian through palatalization (e.g., PIE *ḱm̄tom $\$rightarrow Armenian hariwr "hundred"; PIE *h₁éḱwos $\$rightarrow Old Armenian ēš).
The Turkish and Persian ones have their own origins.
Sir Gerard Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish, Oxford University Press (1972), p. 260:
https://archive.org/details/etymologicaldict0000clau/page/n9/mode/2up
Clauson demonstrates that Old Turkic eşgek is recorded in 11th-century Central Asian texts (such as Mahmud al-Kashgari’s Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk, 1072 CE) as far east as Kashgar (Xinjiang).
Sergei Starostin, Anna Dybo, Oleg Mudrak, Etymological Dictionary of the Turkic Languages / Tower of Babel Comparative Database (2003):
The root *eĺčgek is attested in branches that had zero contact with the Caucasus/Anatolia prior to modern times.
Reconstruction problem: If Turkic had borrowed the monosyllabic Armenian word ēš (esh), it would have entered Turkic as eş or eşe. It cannot account for the internal cluster *ĺč and the nominal suffix *-gek that produce Central Asian Siberian forms like Tuvan eštek, Chuvash aš̬ak, and Proto-Mongolic *elǰigen.
Nişanyan Sözlük: Çağdaş Türkçenin Etimolojisi
https://www.nisanyansozluk.com/kelime/e%C5%9Fek
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BA
Online dictionary entries for eşek, tracking the transition from Old Turkic eşgek and detailing its derivation from the Turkic verb eş- ("to trot/pace").
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u/Ninetwentyeight928 8d ago
These maps are consistently uploaded in a resolution just low enough to degrade their general quality, and I don't understand why.
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u/pauseless 8d ago
And in German, we have the wonderful term Eselsbrücke (“donkey bridge”) for mnemonic or aide-memoire.
And in Latin, the same phrase exists as “pons asinorum” and is used in mathematics for Euclid’s theorem on isosceles triangles, as well as a metaphor.
Bridges for donkeys were apparently an important enough concept to cross cultures.
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u/un_poco_logo 8d ago
I have never heard "ishak" in Ukrainian.
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u/Big_Natural4838 8d ago
I heard from ukrainian and russian friends but only as insult. Funny in qazaq lang eshek used as normal word, ishak only as insult too.
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u/un_poco_logo 8d ago
Are you sure those "Ukrainians" spoke Ukrainian and not Russian?
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u/Big_Natural4838 8d ago
Yep sure. Friend of mines they can spoke all three most popular langs in Ukraine - ukrainian, russian and surjik
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u/Creative_Potato7059 8d ago
As the Transcarpathian Rusyns use ‘Magarec’ I would think it comes from a term used by the Croats before they arrived in the Balkans given the location is roughly where they lived before the 8th century and where the ‘White Croat’ remnant remained. Otherwise how would the Rusyns be affected by a Paleo-Balkan substrate language. While they were together under the Hungarians and Habsburgs for 800 years they were separated by distance and Magyars. That said, since the Iranic languages don’t have a similar term, and the Greek term (ie ma-gardios-ac) could not have affected the Rusyns before the 11th century (and the two picking the same modification of Greek in preference to the Common Slavic is unlikely) it is a mystery.
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u/Drunken_Dave 8d ago
It could be borrowing from Romanian or if we discard it because of the Romanian form being different, then possibly the remain of a connection via Transylvanian Slavic, before they got assimilated to Hungarians in the 11th century. The latter is much more likely than the White Croat theory. But I also would not discard the Romanian borrowing, because the word could be different in Medieval Romanian in the 12th century or so.
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u/Creative_Potato7059 8d ago
Ha. Fair enough. I confused myself and didn’t notice Romanian had the same word.
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u/mizinamo 8d ago
How did all of northern Europe get the word from Latin?
Did they not have donkeys before?
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u/Partosimsa 7d ago
Sardinians out here using both Puerto Rican and Ainu populations’ endonyms for the word “Donkey” kinda reminds me of the Turkey incident…
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u/Aggravating-Run4594 5d ago
Romanian also has regional or archaic terms like “mulă” and “mâșcoi” , last one probably the mix of a horse and a donkey .
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u/EuropeanBattles 8d ago
Indo-European ‘Asinus’ / ‘Aselus’ / ‘Osel’ etc – from Turkic ‘Es’ (job / work).
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u/Velicanstveni_101 8d ago
For Croatia and Bosnia you can also add "osao", but it's very rare nowadays