Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/slonъ

Etymology 1
Most likely related to 🇨🇬; Witczak (2013) cites many parallel cases of semantic spread between different exotic animals in Indo-European. Compare 🇨🇬. If not, perhaps a deverbative from, relating to the medieval story of an elephant sleeping leaning on a tree.

Vovin (2011) proposes that Slavic slonъ reflects, an etymology previously suggested by Ivanov (1977: 156–57) with a then-current Old Chinese reconstruction *sðaŋ. As Vovin notes, contact between Slavic and Old Chinese is out of the question, so the solution might arise from an intermediary source. Ivanov (1977:154) believes that the 🇨🇬 forms, are Russian loans, with the latter being called into question by Vovin on phonetic grounds. According to him, Russian /o/ (phonetically a diphthong [uo] with a mid-high syllabic element [o]) is unlikely to be borrowed as Chuvash low vowel /a/. The reverse, namely the borrowing of slightly labialised /a/ as Slavic /o/ is more than likely. 🇨🇬 is exactly the expected outcome of the Old Chinese *slaŋ with the insertion of ⟨ă⟩ break-ing the OC initial cluster /sl-/ and typical Bulghar shift of PT *ŋ to /n/. The presence of this word in Chuvash places proto-Bulghar speakers in the vicinity of Northern China no later than the first century BCE, because approximately after that date the initial clusters in Old Chinese underwent the process of simplification.

Noun

 * 1)  elephant

Descendants

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Etymology 2
According to Bulgarian Etymological Dictionary, the form is a, ultimately from.

Noun

 * 1) offset, cornice
 * 2) shed, shelter
 * 3) screen

Descendants

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