ܒܳܙܺܝ bzy bāzī hawk
MP *bāzē? Cf. NP bāzē one falcon (sic! Steingass 146; according to Dihxudā 8, 407 f., Arabic form of NP bāz, plur. buzāt, abʾuz, buʾūz); Arm. LW bazē, or bazay falcon (Hübschmann AG 114, no. 87); Kurd. bāzī id. — JBA bzʾy falcon, in the phrase škar bzʾy (Sokoloff 2002, 1146); Arab. LW bāzī ● KwD 31, 9 ◆ LS 63b
The Syr. word is an old loanword, and consequently cannot have been directly borrowed from NP. The Ir. suffix attested in NP and Kurd., and reflected in the Arm., Syr., and Arab. loanwords, is not clear. As regards Arm. LW bazē, or bazay, Hübschmann, cit., holds that the original form should be Arm. *bazeay, which may produce Gen. bazēi; a similar structure is not common and Hübschmann only compares Arm. LW ašteay, Gen. aštēi, lance, spear (← OP aršti- id.; see also Bolognesi 1960, 26). Schapka (1972, 13 f., no. 49) does not add anything about the suffix of the Ir. word. Surely it cannot be the figure 1, nor the enclitic indefinite article -ē [the figure 1; -ʾy, -y, -yh] (Nyberg 70), as Steingass—who translates NP bāzē as "one falcon"—has it. Nyberg 70 points out that sometimes the figure 1 is erroneously used for other suffixes -ē (for example, the oblique case). Perhaps we are dealing with the rare MP suffix -āy -ʾy], attested for example in MP bāzāy "arm" and nasāy "corpse" (Salemann 1895, 279; in MacKenzie's transcription bāzā and nasā)? However, the two words quoted by Salemann derive from OIr. u-stems (cf. respectively Av. bāzu- arm and nasu- corpse), and moreover the NP outcome of this MP suffix is -ā, not -ē. Finally, it seems out of the question that this Ir. suffix may be connected with the hypochoristic MP suffix -ē, whose existence is rather dubious and which was singled out by Nöldeke 1888, 29–31 in proper names handed down in parallel traditions (on this presumed hypochoristic suffix see also Meier 1981,155–156; Horn 1898, 180; Eilers 1956, 208–209). Incidentally, note that the correspondence of Syr. bzy with Arm. bazē, bazay, NP bāzē, Kurd. bāzī rules out the hypothesis put forward by Shaked 2005, 175, according to whom JBA škar bzʾy could possibly reflect MP *škār bāzīh falcon hunting, with an inverted order of elements in the compound: in JBA bzʾy, like in the other mentioned forms of the words, the MP abstract suffix -īh is not involved.