PROTO: *ħnǟrqwĔ ( ~ ʕ-)
MEANING: a k. of cereal (oats, barley)
COMMENT: A rather complicated case because of numerous later interloans. Besides all the loans from one language into another pointed out above, it is also not excluded that Av. niχa, Lak. niIq(ʷ)a and Darg. niqIa also were borrowed (in fact, it seems rather probable that both Av. and Lak. forms are early loanwords from Proto-Darg.: since the word seemingly had a short front Auslaut vowel, Lak. and Av. -a is irregular. At least, such a possibility must be reckoned with).
Nevertheless, if we exclude all possible loanwords from one language into another, the root is still there: the Akhv., PTs, PD, PL and PWC forms could not have been borrowed. Thus, the reconstruction of the root for PNC seems very probable. The proposed comparison seems to us better than relating the WC root to EC *mūqV 'barley' (q.v.), see Balkarov 1975, 79, Abdokov 1983, 108; these two authors prefer to compare EC reflexes of *ħnǟrqwĔ with Ad. zantχ(ǝ) 'oats'. The latter is a rather obscure stem, with unclear morphological and phonetic structure (attested also in Svan. zantχ and Osset. zäntχä), and should be better kept apart.
