The Indo-European horses (updated)

The Indo-European word *h₁eḱw-o- 'horse' (Latin equus, Greek híppos)¹ has been used by defenders of the so-called Kurgan theory as part of the evidence supporting the speakers of PIE (i.e. the proto-language of the IE family)² were the people who first domesticated the animal in the Pontic-Caspian steppes around 4,000-3,500 BC³.

However, this appears to be a Wanderwort whose earliest form can be traced to North Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) *ɦɨ[n]tʃwi (^~ -e) 'horse' (NCED 211) and which also spread to Sumerian anše 'donkey' and Hurrian eššǝ 'horse'. As pointed out by Uralic *ki(n)tʃe/*ky(n)tʃe 'nail, fingernail, claw', my bet is this word would have first been originally to some Pleistocene ungulates.

As pigs, sheep and goats -which together with cattle made up the Near East Neolithic package- were first domesticated around 9,000-8,000 BC in the Taurus-Zagros mountains area, it's possible for Afrasian *ʕi(n)ʒ- 'sheep, goat' (Semitic, Cushitic) and *χu(n)ʒ(-ir-) 'pig' (Semitic, Chadic)'⁴ to be also related.

 
Incidentally, this is the time and space framework where the linguist Allan Bomhard placed his Proto-Nostratic⁵, which his collegue Kerns regarded as being part of the Dene-Caucasian phylum: I believe that Nostratic languages did not exist except as a part of Dene-Caucasian until the waning of the Würm glaciation, some 15,000 years ago⁶. However, in my view this wouldn't be the common ancestor (Mother Tongue) of a plethora of language families such as Indo-European, Afrasian or Kartvelian, but rather the source of several Neolithic Wanderwörter. 

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¹ Luwian *aššu-/*azzu- 'horse' and Georgian aču/ačua 'interjection for calling horses' are loanwords from Indo-Iranian.

² See J.P. Mallory (1989): In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Language, Archaeology and Myth, p. 143-185.

³ The domesticated horse (Equus ferus caballus) is a different subspecies than the wild horse of the Eurasian steppes (Equus ferus ferus), also called tarpan (a Turkic word). There is also another subspecies native to the Eurasian steppes, the so-called Przewalski's horse (Equus ferus Przewalski's), which has never been domesticated.

⁴ Whose specialization could have involved phonosymbolism in the initial fricativec

⁵ A. Bomhard (2008): Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic. Comparative Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary, vol. I, p. 235-241. 
⁶ A. Bomhard & J.C. Kerns (1994): The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship, p. 153.

Etruscan φersu 'masked character (in games)' (updated)

Etruscan φersu 'masked character (in games)'¹ can be analized as a derivative from an unattested form *φers 'husk', an agricultural term with correspondences in Hittite paršdu 'leaf, foliage'², linked in turn by Alexei Kassian to Kartvelian *purtś 'husk, foliage' (Georgian purcel ’leaf, foliage', Megrel purča 'chaff, husk', Laz purča 'sweet corn ear', purčumale 'a k. of weed'), *prtś-wn- 'to husk, to scale'³.

Presumably related to this etymology is the Greek theonym Perséphonē (Etruscan Φersipnei, Latin Proserpina), attested on several Attic vases from the 5th century BC as Persóphatta, P(h)erséphatta, Pherréphatta. Rudolf Wachter analyzes it as a compound whose second member would be derived from Indo-European *-gʷhn-t-jā < *gʷhen- 'to beat, to kill', and the first one related to Sanskrit parṣá- 'sheaf, bundle', Young Avestan parša- 'ear (of corn)', to which Michael Weiss -in a personal communication to Wachter- also adds Latin porrum and Greek práson 'leek', from a supposed Indo-European lexeme *pr̥s-o-'⁴. Thus the reconstructed meaning of the theonym would be 'sheaf-beater', i.e. 'threshing maiden'⁵. 

However, like most Indo-Iranian lexicon related to agriculture, *parš appears to be a substrate loanword from the language spoken by BMAC people⁶. On the other hand, for Slavic *proso- 'millet', Georg Holzer posited a loanword from a substrate language he called Temematic (Temematisch in German) after its proposed sound correspondences with PIE and where *r̥ > ro⁷. Although Holzer's theory has been discredited as a whole⁸, it could still explain the etymology of the Slavic word from IE *bhar(e)s 'a k. of cereal (millet, barley, spelt)' (Latin far, farris), a remnant of the languages spoken by the Neolithic farmers who colonized Europe from the Near East.

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¹ Latin persōna 'theatre mask' is a loanword from Etruscan *φersu-na.

² Wrongly translated by some authors as 'sprout, sprig'. See A. Kloekhorst (2008): Etymological Dictionary of Hittite, pp. 645-646. 

³ A. Kassian (2009): Anatolian lexical isolates and their external Nostratic cognates, in Orientalia et Classica, §48.

⁴ M. De Vaan (2008): Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages, pp. 481-482.

⁵ R. Wachter (2006): Persephone, the Threshing Maiden, in Die Sprache, vol. 47, no. 2 (2007-2008), pp.163-181.

⁶ M. Witzel (2003): Linguistic Evidence for Cultural Exchange in Prehistoric Western Central Asia, in Sino-Platonic Papers 129, p. 33.

⁷ G. Holzer (1989): Entlehnungen aus einer bisher unbekannten indogermanischen Sprach in Urslavischen und Urbaltischen, §2. See also F. Kortland (2003): An Indo-European substratum in Slavic?, in Languages in Prehistoric Europe, pp. 183-184.

⁸ R. Matasović (2013): Substratum words in Balto-Slavic, in Filologija 60, pp. 75-102.