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the text of the fable). The form tabrinni- in the Hurrian version of this text
corresponds to the Sumerogram SIMUG ‘blacksmith’ in its Hittite version.
Sumerograms are words that were written in Sumerian in an ancient text,
but pronounced in Hittite or another vernacular language, much like the
abbreviation lb. is pronounced "pound" in an English text. According to an
Assyriological convention, Sumerograms are capitalized in transliteration.
Another occurrence of the Sumerogram SIMUG in the Hittite version of
the same passage corresponds to Hurr. taballi-. Formally speaking, both
Hurrian words can be derived from the verbal stem tav- ‘to cast (metal)’,
which corresponds to Hitt. lahu-, otherwise attested with the meaning ‘to
pour (liquids)’. The stem alternation tav-/tab- in Hurrian can be compared
with the similar stem alternation tōb-/tōv- ‘incantate’ (Giorgieri 2002: 68:
fn. 5). It is possible that this alternation is merely graphic rather than phonetic,
cf. the Hurrian spelling ta-wa a -ar[-na] for the royal title Tabarna discussed
above (Bo 4790.9) , or the alternation between Hurr. ku-wa a -hi and
Hitt. ku-pa-hi ‘a type of head-gear’.
Yet another derivative of the same root, attested as Hurr. tabiri- ‘one
who casts’ was independently borrowed into Sumerian, yielding Sum. tabira
/ tibira ‘copper-worker’ (Wegner 2000: 15 with ref.). As for Hurr. taballi-
‘blacksmith’, this noun may well have been preserved in the Neo-
Assyrian toponym Tabal, used with reference to a Luwian Kingdom in Central
Anatolia that abounded in copper resources (thus Neu.1996: 150, fn.
410).
The Armenian form darbin could not be borrowed from Hurrian since
this language had secondarily devoiced its word-initial-stops, and therefore
one would expect **tarbin in Classical Armenian. A natural assumption
that can be made on historical grounds is that the Armenian form came from
the Urartean language, which is closely related to Hurrian. This hypothesis
renders the borrowing phonetically possible: we know that the cuneiform
signs for voiceless, voiced and "emphatic" stops were contrastively used in
Urartean orthography in word-initial position. Thus one can hypothesize
that Urartean contained the form *dabrinni (vel sim.) ‘blacksmith’ that was
borrowed into Pre-Classical Armenian, where it underwent the expected
metathesis –br- > *-rb- (on which see e.g. Schmitt 1981: 72-3). The list of
Urartean borrowings into Armenian, presented in Jahukian 1987: 427 ff.,
can be now extended by an additional item.
The comparison between the reconstructed IE. *dhabhro- (including
Arm. darbin), and Sum. tabira- / tibira- has been made in Whittaker 1998:
135. The author, who did not mention the Hurrian forms as a tertium comparationis,
used this comparison as one of many equations meant to demonstrate
that a considerable part of the Sumerian lexicon was borrowed from
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