programa "logosi"

Ilya Yakubovich (Chicago)
TWO ARMENIAN ETYMOLOGIES
The Armenian lexicon can be unsurprisingly divided into a stock of inherited
lexemes, displaying regular correspondences with their Indo-
European cognates, whose original shape must be reconstructed by the
comparative method, and a stock of loanwords that were borrowed at various
periods following the separation of Armenian from the Common Indo-
European. What distinguishes Armenian from most other Indo-European
languages is the unusually high proportion of early lexical borrowings. This
is perhaps the reason why no Armenian etymological dictionary has been
compiled so far in a Western language. A linguist wishing to undertake such
a project would inevitably face a daunting task of browsing through the
lexical corpora of all the linguistic neighbors of the Armenians, both past
and present, Indo-European and non-Indo-European, in search of likely
sources of loanwords. Only upon completing this task can one embark on
the comparative analysis of the inherited Armenian lexicon.
Historically speaking, the etymological study of the Armenian lexicon
developed in a somewhat different way. While Comparative Indo-European
Linguistics represents a scholarly area with some two hundred years of unbroken
research tradition and the standards of rigor that raise envy of comparative
linguists dealing with other language families, several languages
that have been spoken side by side with Armenian have been identified only
in the twentieth century. Although the study of linguistic contacts between
Armenian and its neighbors frequently prompts the rejection of old constructs
advocated by the Indo-Europeanists, the paucity of scholars studying
the Caucasus and Eastern Anatolia as a linguistic area, sometimes multiplied
by their dubious reputation, slows down the recognition of their discoveries.
This is rather unfortunate since there are cases, where the analysis of
lexical borrowings into Armenian does not only succeed in restricting the
stock of inherited Indo-European lexemes, but can also extend our knowledge
of the respective source languages.
The first case is that of Urartean, a non-Indo-European language spoken
during the first millennium BC in the mountains of Eastern Anatolia, roughly
in the same area where Armenians lived up to 1915. After the kingdom of
Urartu collapsed around 600 AD, the Urartean speakers were gradually
assimilated by the Armenians who, in all probability, had migrated to this
area from the west. Although the Urartean royal inscriptions, whose complete
corpus is now available in Russian (Arutiunian 2001), are quite nu-
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