Etymologies And Phonologies

Doing phonology problems can actually be quite a bit of fun (especially since Phonology is not something I normally have to deal too much with). Since we always want to see the furthest potential in language and the most complex notions, textbooks will have lots of interesting examples from all sorts of languages, and sometimes I can pull out interesting finds. The other days I noticed the Greek word for money is xrima (χριμα, I would guess), which probably (is, or) has the same root as the Ukrainian грівна.

Wikipedia sez:

The word hryvnia is thought to derive from the Slavic griva; c.f. Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian грива / griva, "mane". Hryvnia may have indicated something valuable worn around the neck, usually made of silver or gold; c.f. Russian grif (гриф , "neck") or c.f. Bulgarian and Serbian grivna (гривна , "bracelet").

Not really sure where to go with this. Historically, griva seems to be a very reasonable root, the h-g change in Ukrainian is standard, but the H-R-I-N-A patter was quite striking to me, that I was all but positive right off of the bat. Now, I'm no slavicist (yet), but it is commonly known that roots of words are cryptic at best in many cases. I'd love to see some evidence of a transitionary form between any of the forms (maybe even for the Greek to have borrowed it from the Ukrainians! Anybody have a good Ancient Greek dictionary?)

One other catch I got was when looking at some Votic data, which is Finno-Ugric and is spoken in Russia by a scant few Votes. One of the words in the data was bočka, meaning "barrel." We have the same word in Ukrainian, and I bet probably in some other slavic languages. I couldn't find any similar words in Finnish or Hungarian, so I bet the Votic just used the local word. It's weird to see one word in a set of data like that. The same thing happened to me when I was going through a passage in Yakut and I believe the only recognizable word to me was the word for "Saturday." It's pretty clear that these are just borrowings from Slavic, but with the Greek example before, maybe it's just a coincidence, but I don't know for sure.