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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

Žamcarano's hesitation, p. 194) that Liang-chou is meant. Minorsky's attempt to find the same
name on Kāšyarī's map would carry it back to 1076 at least; but the correction proposed (Mi, 230)
is not very probable.

Polo's « Ergiuul » seems to represent a form *Ārjü'ül, the final element of which, maintained
in all the Mss., is mysterious. I have thought of a final in -'ul, -'ül, such as the one which, from
Sart, Sartaq, Sartaqčin, has derived the name of Sarta'ul given to the Mussulmans in Mongolian
since the days of Chinghiz-khan. But the phonetic conditions are not identical, and the hypothesis
may be wrong. The -l may be an accidental addition, perhaps of an origin similar to that of some
final -r (see « Bettela », « Caccia modun », « Succiu »; and, for a final -l due to misreadings, see « Cui-
giu »). As to *Arji'ü, *Arjü, it must be a Hsi-Hsia name.

221. ESCA

esca Z

The word occurs only in Z, in the legend about the first Uighur king, said to have « sprung
up from a certain fungus which is made up from the sap of trees, what indeed [is accustomed]
among us to be called esca » (cf. Vol. I, 156; II, xx). In B¹, 73, esca is retained without any note,
and it is omitted from the Index. Ricci-Ross retain esca in English, and, in the Index, explain it
as « tinder ». In the Introduction to our Vol. I, 49, Sir E. D. Ross, while duly connecting the
legend with that of the origin of the Qïpčaq, whose ancestor was born in the hollow of a tree (Turk.
qavuq), remarks that « curiously enough there is an alternative form of this name, qavčaq, and in
old Turkish qav means tinder (esca) ».

Latin esca, « food », had lost this original meaning already at the end of classical times, and had
soon come to mean « what served to light and feed fire », hence « tinder », a sense attested in the
Middle Ages for French esche, èche, aiche, which has survived in It. esca, Span. yesca. Èche
survives now in French only in the classical sense of « fish bait ». In the Codex Cumanicus (Kuun
ed., 90; Grønbech facsimile ed., 40 a), mediaeval Lat. esca is rendered in Persian as « puç », = pūč,
and in Turkish as « chou » = qou, both meaning « tinder ». The dialectical forms of the latter
word in Radlov's dictionary are qav, qau, qabō, qabū, qov, qō, qū, qay, qoy, one or two of them
being perhaps due to an uncertain transcription of the forms in Arabic writing. If there was, as
we must probably assume, a French prototype (direct or indirect) for that chapter of Z, it must
have given « èche » or « esche ». But the text is not quite correct, as it was not the fungus (tuber)
which was called « èche » or « esca », but the tinder made from it. As to the phonetic analogy
between qavuq, « hollow of a tree », and qav, « tinder », I think it is fortuitous.

The legend given in Z for the origin of the first Uighur king has been very naturally connected
by Ross with the one which is told by Rašīdu-'d-Dīn and Abū-'l-Ghazi to explain the name of the
Qïpčaq. It also occurs in the legend of Oyuz-khan in Uighur, and I have discussed the latter in
TP, 1930, 279-282 (cf. also Bang and Rachmati, in SPAW, 1932, 708); in my opinion, Qïpčaq
3.