programa "logosi"

merous, our understanding of them is limited to the most stereotypical formulae
related to the military and building activities of the Urartean kings.
The identified Urartean substrate borrowings into Armenian are too few in
number to improve our understanding of the Urartean texts, but they are
quite significant for reconstructing Urartean phonology.
The second one is the case of Parthian, an Indo-European Iranian language
that was spoken in Northern Iran from around 300 BC to 300 AD.
Since the Armenian Arshakuni dynasty ruling in the early centuries of the
first millennium AD represented an offshoot of the Parthian Arsacid dynasty,
one can hypothesize that Parthian was the main language of the Armenian
court for quite a while. As a result of this situation, numerous Parthian
borrowings pertaining to all kinds of semantic domains have penetrated the
Armenian language. As a matter of fact, these loanwords reflect an earlier
stage of the Parthian language than bulk of the attested Parthian texts, which
were composed at the time after the Parthian Arsacid dynasty was forced to
yield its power over Iran to the Persian Sasanian dynasty. The number of
Parthian loanwords into Armenian is comparable with the number of lexemes
that are attested in genuine Parthian texts.
This presentation is called at extending the list of lexical borrowings into
Armenian, respectively from Urartean and Parthian. I am going to discuss
two Classical Armenian words that have been commonly regarded as a part
of the inherited Indo-European lexicon, and will try to show that in both
cases the hypothesis of a lexical borrowing appears to be more plausible.
1. Old Armenian darbin ‘(black)smith’ is routinely compared with Latin
faber ‘skillful ; craftsman, artisan’ and Old Church Slavic dobrъ ‘good’,
which both go back to the Indo-European proto-form *dhabhro- (see e.g. H.
Acharian, 1971: 1/ 636, B. Olsen 1999: 471). This etymology, however,
runs into several difficulties. On the one hand, it is not clear why the Armenian
form extended the reflex of *dhabhro- with the suffix –in, which is
productive only in adjectival derivation (Olsen, loc. cit., justly remarks that
"the stem formation is somewhat obscure"). On the other hand, it is a priori
unlikely that the Indo-Europeans, who did not excel in metal-working, nevertheless
retained the inherited word for a blacksmith after coming to Eastern
Anatolia, which is known to be one of the cradles of metal production.
The traditional etymology of darbin is further undermined by the fact
that its putative Latin and Slavic cognates appear to possess a convincing
root etymology that connects them with verbal forms attested in the Baltic/Slavic/Germanic
dialectal area, such as Goth. ga-dab-an ‘to be suitable,
appropriate’, OCS. po-dob-ati ‘to be necessary, appropriate’, Latv. dab-ât
‘to be pleasing; to favor’ etc. The adjective *dhabhro- ‘appropriate, conve-
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