Albanian thikë 'knife'

Abstract

In the volume of essays Languages and Areas: Studies presented to George V. Bobrinskoy (Chicago 1967) 66--9, I struggled to find cognates and an Inda-European background for the obviously inherited Albanian thike, which is the ordinary word for a knife. I was exploring, without finding anything anything conclusive, the possibili­ ties of Indo-Iranian. It seemed to me then, and it still does, that lndo-Iranian assures us of an etymon *kika. 'sand, ravel'; I preferred then, in consideration of śitá- = Lat. catus etc., to trace this to *kǝ-kā., a zero-grade of*kō- (= *k'eH -), rather than to *ki-kā. I further discussed the problems and limitations of the Albanian vocalism and of a suffix in -k-.