programa "logosi"

the hereto unknown Indo-European language, the so-called "Euphratic"
originally spoken in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. While the
destiny of this obviously controversial claim remains uncertain for the time
being, some of the suggested equations are amenable to the reinterpretation
as borrowings from a third source. Among these, Arm. darbin vs. Sum.
tabira / tibira represents the most obvious case.
2. The survey of possible Indo-European etymologies of Old Armenian
hiwand ‘ill’ is given in Jahukian, 1987: 185. Out of the three suggested
proto-forms, *pēp…to-, pēiw…to-, and pēim…to-, none is backed by good
Indo-European lexical cognates. The root level comparison with Sanskrit
pāpman- ‘evil, suffering, sickness, sin, demon’ is not precise enough, while
Greek. ’α-πήμαντος ‘un-harmed, un-hurt’ can be adduced only on the assumption
of the irregular sound change *-m- > -w- in Armenian.
The Iranian comparanda of this form include MPers. hy(w)ndkyh
/xindagīh/ ‘illness’, an equivalent of Av. axti- ‘illness’ preserved in the
Middle Persian translation of the Avesta, as well as Manichean Middle Persian
xyndg ‘sick, ill’. After the Middle Persian forms were identified by a
Saint-Petersburg Iranologist Karl Salemann around 1908, his colleague
Nikolaj Marr immediately suggested that they display the same contraction
of the intervocalic –w- as MPers. zindag ‘alive’, presumably going back to
the Iranian root √ jīw ‘to be alive’, while the Armenian borrowing hiwand
preserves to us a more archaic formation (Salemann 1908: 92-3). Unfortunately,
N. Marr is mainly known not through his important philological
work, which he mostly conducted during the early period of his life, but
rather due to his later "New Linguistic Doctrine", a bizarre theory that denied
the comparative-historical method in linguistics and linked language
history with social progress and class struggle. According to this theory, all
the languages of the world ultimately the result of the interplay of four diffuse
elements SAL, BER, YON and ROŠ.
Marr’s adherence to these peculiar views brought about the prejudice
against his earlier work on the part of many Armenologists. For the most
part of the 20 th century, Arm. hiwand continued to be assigned to the Indo-
European stock, and only the recent book by Olsen 1999 (p. 303, fn. 229)
has re-established the Iranian connection of the Armenian word, without
mentioning the original author of this suggestion. This comparison precludes
Indo-European proto-forms beginning with p- since the sound change
*p-> h- is not attested in Iranian. Olsen did not clarify, however, either the
precise origin of the Armenian borrowing, or its etymology within Iranian.
I suggest that the Armenian word was borrowed from Parthian, rather
than Middle Persian. The contrast between Parth. žīwandag attested in Ma-
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