Words for the Animal Elephant/Mammoth in Relation to the DNA Genealogy Data

The onomatopoetic Mongol word for the animal elephant, zaan, reflects the primordial Eurasian word for the trumpeting animal mammoth. Subsequently it had diversified into the many variants such as słəŋ, siaŋ, sioŋ, saŋ, chaŋ, slon, silonit, glan, zilonis, zihon, zo, masan, tsonoqua and many other local forms. The endings <n> and <ny> are characteristic for Europe, whereas <ŋ> is characteristic for East Asia. Exceptions to this continuum are the Cambodian (Khmer) word damri and the Lithuanian (Baltic) word dramblys. DNA Genealogy and geophysical data indicate that about 68,000 years ago the people having the Y Chromosome haplogroups A00, A0, A1a, A1b1, and B survived on the East African highlands and spread later across Africa, whereas in the area of Alps and Balkans in Europe there survived the people having the Y Chromosome haplogroups BT and CT, whose descendants subsequenly split into the Y Chromosome haplogroups C through T, which in time spread all over the world. This may be the source of the observed similarities.


Data Collected by Jandáček
Data about words for the animal elephant were gathered from literature and some dialect nuances were gathered in situ as Jandáček traveled through Asia and Africa.
In Table 1 there are collected the data about the words for elephant in Eurasia. Some similarity indicate also the names of the Amerindian Mythological Elephantine Ogress tsonoqua [No. 35], dzunnukwa, dzoo-noo-qua, dzoonokwa, tsunokwa, dzonokwa etc., as well as the Hebrew siloni or silonit, the Fourth Plague upon Egypt.
The word for the animal elephant is in Semitic languages totally different-Arabic fel, Hebrew feel or peel. They expanded the words peel or feel or fel into many parts of Central Asia as well as into Mediterranean, Western and Northern Europe, Table 2.
The West Caucasian (Table 2) as well as many European languages including all the Germanic and Italic languages had adopted the Arabic or Greco-Latin forms of the word for the animal elephant, Table 3.   In Latvian (a Baltic language) the word for elephant is zilonis, and in Amharic (the language of Ethiopia) the word for elephant is zihon (http://amharicteacher). This begs the question: "Why should the Horn of Africa and the Shores of the Baltic have such similar lexemes for elephant, and why should the Slavic word slon be centrally included?" The Georgian word is spilo. It appears to be a hybrid between the Semitic pil and the Slavic slon. The Tibetan word for elephant is glan. The Slavic words for Gold and Grain are Zlato and Zrno respectively. This demonstrates that the sounds <g>, <z> and <s> mutate across the spectrum of languages. The words for ivory and elephant often merge in lexical domains. Thus, the Tocharian A word for elephant is onkalam whereas the Tocharian B word is onkolmo. These words seem to be related to the Slavic words for elephant tusk-namely okel or kel. The Tocharian languages were spoken in western China. The Korean word for ivory is sang-a.
Hakka is a south Chinese dialect and the form spoken by natives of Formosa.
The Hakka pronunciation for the word for elephant is siong. Poles pronounce and write the <l> in slon as a palatalized <ł>. Thus in Polish the word is written słon' but pronounced swon'-with palatalizations of the <l >and <n>. In a similar way, in a dialect of Slovenian east of its capital Ljubljana locals pronounce slon as suən. They palatalize the <l> to a <u> or English <w> and pronounce the <o> as a short and stressed schwa, <ə> (Perdih, 2015).
The <l> sound is absent in the Orient, and often diminished in Slavic languages and/or dialects. In Japanese the basic word for elephant is zo, but if one intends to be very respectful one uses the formal zosan which means "He, the highly respected elephant". Evidently, in Europe and Western Asia there are three sources for the words for elephant: #1. The phonemic source from the Greek elephantas and subsequently Latin.
The Greeks ostensibly borrowed the word from Sudan where it means "the fountain" or "source of ivory".
#2. The Semitic source from Arabia and Levant is represented by pil, peel, fil, feel, etc.
The sound pair <sl> is frequent in Slavic languages but infrequent in other tongues. It is absent in Latin and Greek. Apparently, the West Europeans accepted as a loanword elephant. The word elephant was embraced from the Romans and the Greeks. The Greeks and Romans were much more "Mediterranean" people than "European" in orientation. Ostensibly, the Greeks imported the word elephant along with ivory from Sudan regions of Africa, where the root-word was Hamitic: elu. Roman hegemony spread the word elephant throughout Europe.
One must seriously consider the likelihood that prior to the introduction of the word elephant to many peoples of Europe, all of Europe used the original We can present an 8-step logical argument that Western Europeans used the word slon before they adopted the Greek/Latin loan-word elephant: 1) The Slavic word for the animal elephant-slon is totally different from the standard word in Latinic and Germanic languages-elephant.
2) Hungarians, Finns, Basques, Greeks also use forms of the word elephant in their languages.
3) Slavs share their slon word with Latvians and peoples in Eastern and Central Asia. 4) Obviously, the peoples using the lexical forms of elephant have been using such as a loan word from Greek = ελέφαντας eléfantas.
5) The Romans modified the Greek word to be elephantus. 6) Latin form has been adopted by most languages of Western and South-Western Europe.
7) This begs the question what word(s) did those peoples use before they accepted the word elephant as a loanword from the Romans and the Greeks? 8) In absence of a better candidate for a word-used in antiquity, it is likely that the various forms of slon were used in Western Europe as such terms are used today from Central Europe to Thailand. The Bantoid languages in Africa, Table 4, on the other hand, share some similarity of tlou/dlou/jou/zou to slon in the Slavic languages. In Indic languages, e.g. in Sanskrit gaja (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaja), Hindi hāthī; haathi (www.hamariweb), Tamil yāṉai (www.google+tamil), there is observed no match with European and Bantoid expressions for elephant. This is reminiscent of the lexicons concerning herding and animal husbandry and the vocabulary regarding cereal crops. In Sanskrit the words for animal husbandry are similar to the Slavic, while the Sanskrit words for grain cultivation are dissimilar from the Slavic (Skulj et al., 2006(Skulj et al., , 2008. This indicates that the Aryans, who arrived India about 3500 years ago, accepted the aboriginal Indic terminology regarding the animal elephant. In Southeast Asia, the Thai word is chang (http://adaythai). In Laos the word for elephant is sang  Jandáček, 2015). In travels by Jandáček through South East Asia in 2015 there was observed that the indigenous people categorically drop the <s> sound at the end of a word. When speaking English they say "pry" instead of "price", "how" instead of "house", "sick" instead of "six" or "whore" instead of "horse". This prompts to speculate that the original Khmer word for elephant used to be dambreys. Possible understanding of the word dramblys = the trumpeting animal. In Slovene: trobiti = to trumpet; tromba (oldfashioned) = the trumpet, the trump; trobec = elephant's nose.
In Czech: troubiti etc. Similar forms of the word are common throughout Europe.
While the words fil, feel, pil, peel, etc is evidently an import from Levant and Arabia, and elephant is a loanword from Sudan in Africa, slon/siong stands alone as a truly ancient Eurasian word. Perhaps the mammoth hunters used a variant of the word zaan > słaŋ or słəŋ > slon/siong. Mammoth ivory and bone decorated the living and the dead and were traded and marketed across the northern continents. The ancient mammoth habitat extended from Portugal across Eurasia and Beringia up to eastern Canada (Kahlke, 2015). This could mean that the word slon originally marked i.a. the animal mammoth and that it was not until later, when mammoths were gone for a long time, to start using it for the animal elephant. In tropical areas (eg India), however, they used different words for the animal elephant, which was not synonymous with mammoth.
Mammoths survived as isolated populations on islands until about 3750 to 4000 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrangel_Island). By 4000 years ago humankind was well into historical times and knowledge of the strange beasts and their ivory was common not only among the elites, but also among commoners.
Palaeoloxodons of Northern China (only 3000 years ago) were more closely related to African elephants (Loxodont) rather than to the Asian (Elephas). It is meaningful that Northern Chinese had experiential knowledge about elephants till very recently (http://phenomena; Li et al., 2012).
The extension of the slon-like words for elephant from the Slavic part of Europe across Central to East Asia observed here, parallels the extension of some of the ceramics and figurines in several cultures in Eastern Europe and China as well as the R1a haplotypes observed by Klyosov & Mironova (2013). This parallelism may indicate that the R1a people, the Aryans, extended the word slon to the east and possibly they were those who exterminated the Palaeoloxodons of Northern China about 3000 years ago.
As languages evolve and speciate they have a proclivity to simplify and abbreviate long words. Using this model, we can speculate that the Baltic languages indeed have retained very ancient and protracted words for the animal elephant.
The Tocharian words for the animal elephant onkalam, onkolmo are likely from the Slavic-like word for tusk = okel, keł or kel. Ngar is the Thai word for ivory. The <r> in it is semi silent and <ł> like, and ergo the word is close to ngał which embrace the słəŋ model as their word for the animal elephant include Tibetan-Burmese, Japonic-Ryukyuan, and Mon-Khmer. There are spillovers into Alaska and the NW coast of America in the Athapaskan languages, and into the Horn of Africa with Amharic.
In spite of the fact that we are dealing with eleven different Language Families and a plethora of individual languages, the words for the animal elephant categorically begin with a dental <s/z> and end with a nasal <n>, <ŋ> or <nj>, <ň>.
The middle part of słəŋ (łə) ranges in pronunciation from <a> or <o> or <uo>, <wo>, to an alveolar contact <l>, to Polish <ł>, to schwa = <ə>-as undifferentiated semivowels. Not surprisingly, in Eastern Asia, speakers avoid the <l> sound. Thus we are dealing with the fact that in Deep Structure the word słəŋ is ubiquitous. In local specific expression it is subject to ethnic modifiers.
Czech works well to demonstrate how to mutate the <n> in slon into the <ň> (Slovenian <nj>, pronounce as <ny>) in derivatives of the word. Thus there is There is also another interesting point of view on the words for the animal elephant. Namely, there is a number of words for the giant elephant-like ogres, for example the Amerindian Mythological Elephantine Ogress tsonoqua, dzunnukwa, dzoo-noo-qua, dzoonokwa, tsunokwa, dzonokwa, etc., which appear at the first glance as a combination of the Russian slonikha and Amerindian squaw to form the word, which resembles a "Sloní Squaw". On the other hand, the Hebrew word siloni or silonit describes the Fourth Plague upon Egypt. These words deserve a separate study.
A rather speculative scenario of the develpoment of words in Table 2  There are essentially two ways to account for the fact that all Slavs have the same word for elephant. One way would be that the word slon is over 10,000 years old and was already ubiquitous throughout Europe including the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles.
The other scenario is less convincing. In the 19 th Century scholars promoted the idea that until the 6 th Century AD all Slavs were limited to the swamplands and marshes of the Pripyat River on the border between Belarus and Ukraine.
The theory proposes that millions of Slavs exploded from the swampland and occupied two thirds of Europe in the 6 th Century AD. While the Byzantine and Western Roman scribes mentioned every tiny clan, which was on the move, nobody noticed the Slavs entering Central Europe. Subsequently an individual must have coined the word slon and sent messengers to all corners of Slovandom to instruct people to use the word slon if they ever saw a very big animal with a very long nose and very big teeth.
Besides the similarity of folk expressions for elephant/mammoth, there are interesting also other similarities in the folk expressions, for example the similarities of the folk expressions for the dragonfly in which any kind of an association between the dragonfly and the snake is expressed (Kiauta, 2002).

Relation to the Y Chromosome Data
Previous results of the study of the words for the animal elephant (Jandaček, 2013a(Jandaček, , 2013b were commented from the point of view of DNA Genealogy. The DNA Genealogy data indicated at that time that the word słəŋ (slon) seems to be which arose around 55,000 years ago (Klyosov, 2013b).
The overview of new data till 2016 and their meaning has been published (Perdih, 2016) as well, but subsequently new important pieces of information were published. These shed additional light onto such questions. Especially important are the following pieces of data: 1) The ancestors of present humankind did not develop in Africa about 50,000 to 100,000 years ago but elsewhere (Klyosov & Rozhanskii, 2012b;Klyosov, 2014a, Fuss et al., 2017, Hublin et al., 2017, where they had common ancestors from which there split the Denisovans about 800,000 (657,000 to 973,000) years ago and Neanderthals about 400,000 (326,000 to 482,000) years ago (Fu et al., 2013, cf. also Meyer et al., 2016.
2) The trunk of the old genealogical tree of humankind (Klyosov, 2014c It is not yet clear whether it caused the Toba eruption or they were two independent events. However, the impact of a cosmic body in Russia about 40,000 years ago, which formed the Ladoga Lake and which ashes devastated the Russian Plane, caused the eruption of the Caucasian and Mediterranean vulcanos (Yurkovets, 2012(Yurkovets, , 2014.

5) Another important information was derived from the European skeletons
of about 30,000 years ago and later (Fu et al., 2016). In those skeletons (in the Czech Republic, Rumania, Russia, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Italy) there were discovered the Y Chromosome haplogroups BT, CT, C, F, I and the haplogroups HIJK and IJK, which derived from the haplogroup F and which are ancestors of haplogroup I.
Putting together these groups of data gives rise to the following conclusions. where this is the most frequent haplogroup.
The Y Chromosome haplogroup C seems to had been formed in Europe, since it has been discovered in some ancient skeletons in Europe (Fu et al., 2016), where it seems now to be extinct. The Y Chromosome haplogroup C is now characteristic for Mongols, some Amerindians and Australian Aborigins.
The Y Chromosome haplogroup F seems to had been the most successful one since from it formed the most extant haplogroups (G, H, I, J, K) and their descendants represent now the majority of humankind. The Y Chromosome haplogroup F has been discovered in ancient skeletons in Europe (Fu et al., 2016) but now it is rare. Also the Y Chromosome haplogroup I has been discovered in ancient skeletons in Europe (Fu et al., 2016). Its past and present situation presented Brandt et al. (2015) and Klyosov (2010aKlyosov ( , 2011aKlyosov ( , 2012bKlyosov ( , 2015b.
There is a general opinion that the Y Chromosome haplogroup N people (Finno-Ugric) were the aboriginal inhabitants of the northern Europe. Haplogroup data, e.g. Brandt et al. (2015), Klyosov (2011cKlyosov ( , 2015cKlyosov ( , 2015d (Klyosov, 2011c(Klyosov, , 2015c(Klyosov, , 2015d and that exactly in Lithuania it is the major haplogroup, this similarity is less surprising. In the nearby Latvia, where the frequency of the Y Chromosome haplogroup N is somewhat lower, the word for elephant is zilonis and it is more Slavic-like than that in Lithuania. It is interesting also that in Latvian there can be observed many Slovene dialectal words (Nikčević, 2006).
In view of data collected above, the widespread similarity of words for the animal elephant is not surprising. They seem to derive from the ancient mammoth habitat and on expansion of humankind tens of millenia ago, Figure 1.
There are, however, also other derivatives of these data.  This opens also the question, which was the aboriginal Proto-Indo-European.
In view of the presented DNA Genealogy data it would be interesting to re-evaluate the explanation by Warnow et al. (1996) that "It appears to point to a situation in which Germanic began to develop within the Satem Core (as evidenced by its morphology) but moved away before the final satem innovations.
It then moved into close contact with the "western" languages (Celtic and Italic) and borrowed much of its distinctive vocabulary from them".
According to the data known at present, especially the DNA Genealogy data, but also the data presented by Lie (1991) about the similarities between German and Korean, the data by Chang (1988) about the similarities between German and Chinese, which are both Kentum, as well as the -ng (-ŋ) ending in both Germanic and Oriental languages and the including policy of the Germanic leaders at the beginning of AD, the explanation by Warnow et al. (1996) would mean that some of the ancestors of present Germanic people originated in Europe among (or as) the Proto-Slavic speakers, then left Europe about 4500 years ago as Aryans, moving east reaching northern China about 3500 years ago (Rozhanskii & Klyosov, 2009, 2012Klyosov & Rozhanskii, 2012a;Klyosov, 2014cKlyosov, , 2015aKlyosov, , 2016aKlyosov, , 2016b Around 68,000 -62,000 and 43,000 -36,000 years ago (Yurkovets, 2011: p. 1641) glaciation exposed new land bridges to mammoth and human migrations.
In the first case, i.e. after the cataclysm of around 68,000 ago, in the areas once flooded, land biota had to establish itself. Subsequently, mammoths and humans followed. In the second case, i.e. around 43,000 -36,000 years ago, again the newly exposed land bridges allowed for the expansion of mammoth and human migration into the "new world" lands.
The people, who would expand across the mammoth hunting grounds around 62,000 years ago could include besides those having had the Y Chromosome haplogroups BT and CT also those having had the Y Chromosome haplogroups C and D.
During the next cooling, i.e. prior to about 36,000 years ago, along with them the people having Y Chromosome haplogroups G, I, K and P could had occupied the area. The ancestors of the majority of present humankind survived the catastrophe of about 68,000 years ago in Europe and expanded subsequently all over the world, some also circulating around. Thus it is not surprising that the word for an animal known in one or another form to all of them has similarities all over the world.
All these explanations based on the latest DNA Genealogical and geophysical data are to be thorougly re-evaluated also from the points of view of other data, e.g. archaeologic, linguistic, etc, taking as arguments not the interpretations considered valid till now but data, and the new evaluation has to be based on data only and not on obsolete interpretations.

Conclusion
Patterns of haplogroups of human populations are evident in the Arctic, Subarc- Evidently, in the past this included the semi-continent of Beringia. In a like manner, lexicons referring to mammoths suggest that the mammoths were an important resource for the survival, development and expansion of humans.
Mammoth hunters spread their genes, mammoth products, and jargon of their trade in the late Paleolithic. Słəŋ is the "magic word" which binds the extant human populations of the region.
Thus there appear to be correlations between the local nuances of the word słəŋ and the geographical distributions of haplogroups in Eurasia. With further genetic research and additional linguistic finds more correlations are likely to be observed.