ἄβιε <Iranian; Early Byzantine period>
👉 ἄβιε – a Scythian verb form with the meaning of Greek ἔβαλλον, i.e. ‘I was throwing’ or ‘they were throwing’ (Hsch. α 120).
⚠ Hsch. α 120: ἄβιε· ἔβαλλον. Σκύθαι – “abie: I was throwing/they were throwing. Scythians”.
🅔 A Scythian word, perhaps going back to an Proto-Iranian compound verb *abi-Hah- ‘to throw to’ attested in the Young Avestan form huu-aiβiiāsta- ‘thrown well’; cf. Old Avestan aibi ‘to, towards’, Young Avestan aiβi ‘id.’, Old Persian abi ‘id.’, as well as Old and Young Avestan ah- ‘to throw’, Old Persian ah- ‘id.’ etc. (probably from PIE *h1es- ‘to throw’; cf. Vedic as- ‘id.’). Accordingly, ἄβιε might represent an athematic form in a past tense similar to *abi-āha (1. sg. or 3. pl.); cf. the Old Persian verb ah- ‘to be’ with its imperfect forms āham (1. sg.; *-m̥ > -a- with the secondary -m) and āha (3. pl.; *-n̥t > -a). Concerning the phonetics, it is clear that the Iranian voiceless glottal fricative [h] in an intervocalic position has no counterpart in Greek; instead of the final -ε, we would expect two vowels, e.g. -αα (< *-āha), but, on the one hand, we are not able to reconstruct an exact Scythian form (our knowledge of Scythian phonetics and morphology is very limited), on the other hand, the form ἄβιε transmitted by Hesychius may be slightly distorted. We cannot exclude another possibility, that ἄβιε is an unknown Scythian verb beginning with b- and ἀ- represents an Iranian augment, cf. Old Persian a-, e.g. the imperfect forms abaram (1. sg.) and abara (3. pl.) of the verb bar- ‘bear, carry, bring’.
📖 Data: AiW: 87 and 279f.; EDIV: 152f.; ESIJa: I, 71f., 72f. and 94f.; LIV: 242f.; WAK: 124 and 127. Ref.: cf. Brust 2008: 5f.; Witczak 2005: 282.