Proto-North Caucasian: *=āṭwV
Meaning: to cut, hew
Notes: Medial -r- is obviously secondary in PD (other languages do not have any traces of it), and may be a remnant of the separate durative morpheme. The root demonstrates the old Ablaut *a / *i.
-n-conjugation in the Av.-And. variant *ṭʷVn- may be secondary, or else it may reflect quite a different EC root, whose remnants in other subgroups are possibly Darg. Chir. čer=iṭVn- / čer=ilṭ- 'to skin, cut off skin'; Arch. arṭin- 'to take meat off the bones; to gnaw' (although the semantic difference between Darg. and Arch. forms, on one hand, and Av.-And. forms, on the other, is considerable, and the etymology is only tentative).
See Абдоков 1983, 181.
