Number: 2662
Proto-Semitic: *daSS-
Meaning: 'buck (said of gazelles and goats)'
Akkadian: daššu (taššu) MA, SB on [CAD d 120], [AHw. 165]
Notes: Akk. daššu (taššu) 'buck (said of gazelles and goats)' MA, SB on [CAD d 120], [AHw. 165] is traditionally compared to the present root. Forms with d- are clearly predominant and attested as early as archaic Mari (v. references in ARMT 19, p. 164) while the t-form appears only once in a lexical list. While the shift -yš- > -šš- is conceivable (a curious parallelism with Akk. laššu ~ Arb. laysa 'there is not' was pointed out in [Brock. 822]), word-initial d- is quite unexpected. Sceptical attitude towards this comparison see in [Sima 143]. Further parallels with d- are sometimes proposed for this root: Hbr. dīšōn 'aurochs' [KB 221] (hapax in the dietary law Dt 14.5; Sam. dšn 'an animal' [Tal 179] is most probably a Hebraism) and Akk. ditānu (didānu) 'aurochs' SB [CAD d 164], [AHw. 173]. This comparison looked very doubtful because of the word-middle -t- (-d-) and the meaning difference, but recently discovered Akk. evidence makes it more attractive. As pointed out in a special study [Durand 1988], the term UDU.HÁ ti-ša-né (with t-, -š- and meaning 'a (wild) ram' and not 'a (wild) bull'!) appears in lists of exotic animals from Mari. As pointed out by Durand, a phonetically similar form ti-ša-nu-uš has long been identified in the Hittite column of the trilingual lexical list MSL 3 64.11' (= Akk. ku-sa-ri-iḫ-ḫu, Sum. ALIM), likely representing a borrowing from some Semitic language. According to Durand, here may also belong the form ti-ša-nim in the OB sa- piential text BWL 227 10 (without translation in [AHw. 1362]). Durand does not hesitate to put together dīšōn, ditānu and tišānu without explaining convincingly either the phonetic shifts or the semantic difference. Further evidence for the reflexation of *tayš- in Akkadian comes from MA and NA where the forms tušēnu and tešēnu are attested ('eine Art Büffel ?' accroding to [AHw. 1352]). CF. A SPECIAL STUDY LION NABU 1991/60 Finally, it was suggested in [Conti-Bonechi] that Ebl. ti-sa-na (with variants) might be indentified with tišānu in spite of the fact that the Ebl. term denote a kind of jewel (the authors give further examples of zoomorphic jewels in Ebla). Conti and Bonechi explicitly relate the Ebla and Mari terms to *tayš- 'buck' (*tayš-ān-um > tīš-ān-um).
