A Reader in Nineteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics: On the Position of Armenian in the Sphere of the Indo-European Languages
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Front Matter
A Reader in Nineteenth CenturyHistorical Indo-European Linguistics
Winfred P. Lehmann
CHAPTER TWELVE
HEINRICH H?BSCHMANN
ON THE POSITION OF ARMENIAN IN THE SPHEREOF THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
"Ueber die Stellung des Armenischen im Kreise der
indogermanischen Sprachen," Zeitschrift für vergleichende
Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der Indogermanischen
Sprachen, 23.1 (1875), 5-49
Editor's Introduction
Hübschmann's is another of the
articles published in 1875 which indicate the maturing of
linguistics. Making use of the increased control over the
data in the Indo-European languages, and over linguistic
methodology, Hübschmann by this article established
Armenian as an independent branch of the Indo-European
Hübschmann's
minute attention to data enabled him to sort out the
evidence for distinguishing between native Armenian forms
and those borrowed from Iranian. In this way his is one
of the last important articles to deal with a problem
which vexed early Indo-European linguistics:
identification of the various strata in a language so
that its original relationships could be determined. By
sorting out the non-native forms, and establishing the
phonological correspondence between Germanic and the
other Indo-European languages, Grimm, Rask and the early
historical linguists laid down the methodological
principles for their field. Using these principles in a
more difficult area, Hübchmann at once demonstrated
their validity and gave a definitive solution to the
problem he was investigating.
It is clear
why Hübschmann's solution was so satisfactory: after
dealing with morphological characteristics he
concentrated on phonological correlations rather than on
the vocabulary. His procedure might still be emulated by
linguists seeking to establish genetic interrelationships
in other language groups.
Even with his
accomplishment, Hübschmann's understanding of
Indo-European phonology was not completely accurate.
Although he was aware of secondary palatalization in
Indo-Iranian, he still assumed a single short vowel
a for Proto-Indo-European, with a split into the
the European languages. The correct view became generally
apparent shortly after his article was published. Other
misconceptions in his article are obvious to the reader.
But since Hübschmann's aim was to determine the
relation of Armenian to the other dialects, his
conception Of Proto-Indo-European was not crucial in
achieving this aim.
Nor were some
of his methodological views, such as those on residues. A
few of these he dismisses as chance phenomena. The
sections of his long article with such comments are not
reproduced here. But it is to Hübschmann's credit
that he recognized before his article was printed that he
had slighted some of the material in Armenian.
Subsequently he rectified any omission by his
comprehensive Armenische Etymologie (Leipzig,
1897), the first part of his planned grammar of Armenian.
Moreover, residues are still being explained in Armenian
today, thanks to his solid work on its
phonology.
Hübschmann's concern with thorough descriptive
analysis enabled him to clarify other interrelationships,
such as that of Ossetic as well as that of Afghan (which
in his first excursus, pp. 43-46 [not included
here], he demonstrated to be an Iranian and not an
Indic language). The pioneering work that was necessary
in Iranian as well as Armenian may be recognized from the
preliminary note to his article, in which he deals with
the transcription for Armenian. Though he modified it, he
was unfortunately prevented by the editors of the
Zeitschrift from revising the transcription for
Iranian, which in the form he used suggests pronunciation
like that of Sanskrit.
Besides his
insistence on careful descriptive techniques,
Hübscmann's conception of the interrelationships
between the languages in one family was admirable. The
family tree model as proposed by earlier linguists seemed
far too rigid. His identification of shared
characteristics in Armenian and the European languages as
well as in Armenian and Indo-Iranian gave excellent
support to the wave theory which had been proposed three
years earlier by Schmidt. The resulting conception of the
position of the early Indo-European dialects prepared for
the more realistic view of interrelationship between
languages which followed further studies in dialect
geography.
The interest
in broadening the study of the Indo-European languages at
this time is strikingly illustrated by the editorial
comment at the beginning of the twenty-third
volume of the Zeitschrift, on its increased
scope beyond Germanic, Greek and Latin. Hübschmann's own
boldness concerning the Indo-European family may be
demonstrated by the concluding comment in the second
excursus to his article, pp. 46-49 (not included here).
After suggesting that Phrygian may have been closely
related to Armenian, he ends with the statement:
"Possibly these languages formed a separate branch with
other languages of Asia Minor, which in accordance with
our contributions on Armenian above, might be placed
between Iranian and Balto-Slavic. " The separate branch
has indeed been uncovered, but with a position in the
Indo-European family somewhat different from that which
Hübschmann had forecast. His concentration on
interpreting the Iranian and Armenian data permitted
little further speculation of this sort. But the
interpretations he provided of these data remain
permanent contributions on the position of these
languages.
Johann Heinrich Hübschmann (), after
a post-doctorate period of four years at Leipzig, spent
his entire career at Strasburg. Scornful of academic
jockeying, he rejected offers to move closer to the
contemporary centers of linguistic research. Though he
dealt with many of the Indo-European languages, his
concern with Armenian extended beyond linguistics to
Oriental studies. His primary achievement was in the
elucidation of Armenian. Though it has never been one of
the languages of central interest to Indo-Europeanists,
Hübschmann holds a position of great respect not only
as founder of scientific Armenian studies but also for
his capable application of linguistic method.
My attempt to
assign to the Armenian language its position among its
relatives is not the first. The Armenians themselves have
proposed views about it which flatter their national
vanity but lack every scientific foundation. And European
scholars of previous centuries have made everything of
this language since they could do nothing with it. But
immediately after the establishment of linguistics by
Bopp, Petermann in his Grammatica linguae
Armeniacae (Berlin, 1837), on the basis of
etymologies given at the beginning of it was able to
furnish the proof that Armenian is an Indo-European
language. Nine years later, in 1846, and independently of
the work of Petermann, Windischmann published in the
Abhandlungen of the Bavarian Academy
(IV, 2) an excellent treatise about Armenian, in
which he comes to the conclusion that Armenian goes back
to an older dialect which must have had great similarity
with Avestan and Old Persian but to which foreign
elements had been added early. But while Pott doubted
that Armenian is an Aryan language and only wanted to
admit a strong influence of Aryan on Armenian, Diefenbach
on the other hand observed that this assumption did not
suffice to explain the close relationship of Armenian to
Indic and Persian, a view which Gosche also adopted in
his dissertation: De Ariana linguae gentisque
Armeniacae indole (Berlin, 1847). Three years later in
the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenl?ndischen
Gesellschaft IV, p. 347 ff., under the title
"Vergleichung der armenischen consonanten mit
denen des Sanskrit" de Lagarde gave a list of 283
Armenian words with their etymologies (which he also had
found independently of Windischmann), without however dealing
in greater detail about the character of the language. In
the preface to the second edition of his Comparative
Grammar, 1857, Bopp designated Armenian as Iranian
and attempted, though without success, to explain its
inflectional elements. Fr. Müller, who since 1861
had busied himself successfully with the etymological and
grammatical explanation of Armenian in a series of treatises
(Sitzungsberichte der Wiener Akademie),
penetrated much more deeply in the essence of this
language, which he explained as certainly Iranian. In
general Patkanoff follows him in his summarizing treatise
"?ber die bildung der armenischen sprache,"
which was translated from Russian into French, Journal
asiatique, XVI, Série 6, 1870, p. 126 ff. Even though
de Lagarde in his Gesammelten Abhandlungen
(1866), p. 291, asserted that three components are to be
distinguished in Armenian: an Old
Iranian al and a similar New
Iranian, added after the founding of the Parthian
kingdom, nonetheless he did not give the distinguishing
characteristics of these three layers, and for this
reason his opinion has not been taken into further
consideration. In any case Müller's view, that
Armenian is Iranian, has not been disproved, and must be
designated as the best established and the prevailing one
at present.
The aim of the following is to investigate whether it is tenable.
It is a primary defect of Müller's investigations
that he has not undertaken to demonstrate that the
Armenian words which correspond phonologically with the
corresponding Persian are not borrowed from Persian. If
however the oldest Armenian that we know contains
loanwords from Aramaic and Greek, we may expect that
since the Armenians lived for centuries under the
influence of the mightier and more cultured Persians,
they also would have taken from their language no small
number of words."
If this is admitted, then one can also suspect a great number of
and if one has given way to this suspicion,
then faith in the Iranian
character of the language also disappears rapidly. And
this suspicion can be very easily supported. In numerous
Armenian compounds, for example, we find the word
dast 'hand',
while the usual word for 'hand' is
dzer'n; now
dast corresponds to
Persian dasta, which in contrast with
Av. zasta,
Skt hasta is demonstrated to be
specifically Persian through the sound change from z to
d, and accordingly must be a loanword in Armenian. Accordingly
also dastak,
dastakert are foreign words,
OP *dastaka,
*dastakarta.
It is further clear that Armenian regularly prefixes
a or e to words with originally initial r: for
this reason r'azm 'battle array, battle',
r'ah 'way',
r'ocik 'content',
which we also find in Persian, are loanwords from Persian, just
as all words beginning with r' in Armenian are foreign words,
cf. r'abbi 'master'. Further, since
final h in Persian corresponds to original ? or dental,
final h in Armenian to original s or tr (and original
? corresponds to Armenian s, original dental between vowels
to Armenian dental or y), final h in Persian is
accordingly etymologically different from that in
accordingly Arm. akah 'well-informed' =
gah 'throne, seat' =
zrah 'armor' =
Av. zr?dha,
NP zirih are loanwords from Persian.
Further, if below we find the sound law that Skt j =
Av. z = Arm. ts and accordingly
Skt jan 'be born' =
tsen), then
azat 'free' =
Pers. ?z?d,
Av. ?z?ta, from the root
zan, must be regarded as
a foreign word. Similarly if it is demonstrated below that
Av. jan in
accordance with the sound laws would have to be
represented in Armenian by
gan and is so represented,
then Arm. zen- 'slaughter, offer'
is suspected of being borrowed because it corresponds to
NP zan-. If in the same way
Skt aj in accordance with the sound laws is
Av. az, Arm. ats, then
gavazan 'stick' =
Av. gav?z cannot be
an original word -- it would have to be
kovatsan -- and also not
xarazan 'whip', instead of which
i?atsan would be expected. Finally,
Skt. yaj =
Av. yaz 'worship' in accordance
with the sound laws would have to be lats
or dzats in Armenian
(Skt. j = Av. z = Arm. ts,
originally initial y becomes Arm. l or dz,
z; where y is initial in Armenian, it is a newly
added prefix, as can be easily demonstrated); the form
however is yaz and
accordingly it is borrowed. The same is true of
ya?t 'offering' =
Av. yêsh'ti. Also
to be considered as loanwords:
Av. daêva,
instead of which tiv would be
expected in accordance with the laws of the sound shift
which ar likewise, I am convinced,
bag- 'god' =
Av. bagha, and
den 'religion' =
Av. daêna, words which
came to Armenia with the Zoroastrian religion. Likewise,
without being able to furnish proof, I would also like to
look on words like
Pers. t?shah 'viaticum',
Pers. anboh 'quantity',
Pers. zind?n 'jail'
as having come from Persia to A but of words like
'brocade' = Pers. d?b?h,
Arab. d?b?j,
crag 'candle' =
Pers. cir?gh,
Arab. sir?j,
thuthak 'parrot' =
Pers. t?tak,
kerpas 'silk' =
NPers. kirp?s,
Arab. kirb?s,
Skt karp?sa,
Gk. kárpasos
etc. there can be no doubt that they are foreign
material. If it has been so easy for me to separate as
loanwords no small number of the
treated by Fr. Müller, how greatly would this number be increased
if an expert like de Lagarde would undertake to separate
the foreign elements from the entire Armenian lexicon?
Possibly also two groups of these could be distinguished,
an older and a younger, and in this way the two layers
would be found which according to de Lagarde were
deposited on the Armenian basis.
If now we have
become suspicious of the lexicon, we may turn with
greater confi for in all living
languages this is surely the palladium that a foreign
influence cannot touch. How wild is the lexicon of Afghan
and New Persian, or English, and how clearly does the
grammar teach us that in the former we have Iranian at
hand, in the latter Germanic! And we may expect to find
clarification from the grammar much more readily in
Armenian, because it displays a relatively rich
inflection. For Armenian still has four cases of nouns
distinguished by endings
verbs, without considering the infinitive and
participles, it distinguishes by means of inflection
active and passive, indicative, subjunctive and
imperative, present, imperfect, simple and compound
aorist, and corresponding to these double futures. Since
I must treat of the grammar here briefly, it may be
permitted to adduce a paradigm for the inflection of the
noun and the verb:
Stem: mardo "human"
(Gk. broto-),
anwan "name"
(= anman).
mard, anun
z mard, z anun
mardoy, anwan
i mardoy, y anwanê
Dat. (pron. dcl.)
mardum&----
mardov, anwamb
b) Verb: ger-el 'take captive'
1. p. sg. pres. ind.
comp.&aor.
simple aor. ofgt-an-el "find"
gere?i?gti?
gere?ai?gtai?
m, s, y, mkh, ykh, n
serve as primary verbal endings, and i, ir, r,
akh, ikh, in as secondary.
If however one views the total structure of Armenian, it
gives the impression of a language which has undergone great
having lost much of the old material of stem and word formational
but it replaced what was lost by new inflectional elements.
In this way the subjunctive turns out to be a new formation
from the present stem and the subjunctive of the substantive verb:
em (pronounced yem) =
Lat. sim- accordingly
similarly, the future is formed from the aorist stem and
the aorist subjunctive, with little change of the coalescing
components: gere? +
instead of gere?i?em,
2. p. gere? +
instead of gere?i?es;
and the imperfect similarly might be a new formation from
the present stem and the imperfect of the substantive verb:
êi 'eram' -
gerêi, but
Fr. Müller claims to find a formation with the
suffix ya in the imperfect:
with reference to the a-class, which forms ayi not êi:
Moreover, the main factor in new linguistic formations,
analogy, has of course been powerfully effective, just as
it also essentially brought about the remodeling of the
Old Armenian inflection to the New Armenian. For example,
the passive marker is i; if it is added to present stems
in -u, wi results
pass. zenwi-l,
pass. lnwi-l); and
this wi, which of course was originally only
the present marker of the passive of a very limited
number of verbs, has become the general passive marker in
modern A cf.
NArm. kordzwil 'be done' =
OArm. gortsil,
act. gortsel. In this situation it
is readily understandable why the elements of the Armenian inflection
are still so obscure to us. I do not know how one is to
explain the ?
which forms the compound aorist and the ?
in i?em, etc.
If one identified with them the s of the Indo-European
aorist and the sy of syijn, the opt. of as,
then Armenian could not be Iranian, for in Iranian s
would have to be represented by h and sy by hy.
Equally obscure are the seco on the other
hand the primary are clearer, among them m = mi,
n = nti, y = ti, mkh =
masi; accordingly ykh (= tkh) could go
back to tasi, the original Indo-European form assumed
by Schleicher, in contrast with which Sanskrit and Avestan
show tha. But ykh is probably an analogical formation
to mkh of the first person, and kh is to be regarded
as added on later, so that y likewise goes back to tha
or a similar form. The suffix of the 2. p. sg. s
refutes the Iranian character of Armenian, since Iranian
shows h rather than s; yet also Ossetic, certainly
an Iranian language, has s in the same form, for which
explanations must still be provided.
Among the case
forming suffixes of the plural, ?
too is unclear, kh probably goes back to as
(or in accordance with Fr. Müller to ?sas, Iran.
?hah) s to ans; in the instrumental we have
the instrumental marker of the singular, to which the plural
marker kh was added. Among the suffixes of the singular,
m of the dative-locative goes back to the pronominal
-hm?i, hmi; the ê of the ablative prepares
difficulties. Fr. Müller would like to derive it from
?dha, a shape of the ablative suffix found occasionally
in the A I would rather think of the adverbial suffix
tas = Av. t?, if ê can really not be =
at. The instrumental suffix b remains to be
considered. While this suffix was formerly identified
with the one suffix of the Indo-European instrumental
bhi, recently Fr. Müller and I have attempted to see
in it a new formation, to be sure for no other reason
than that this suffix contradicted the Iranian character
of Armenian which had been asserted by us. For like Aryan
in general, Iranian too does not know the instrumental
suffix bhi. Our conclusion was accordingly: because
Armenian is Iranian, it may not have the instrumental
suffix bhi. But suppose one should rather conclude:
because Armenian has this suffix, it is not Iranian. Now
in accordance with Armenian sound laws, b surely points
to bhi; and an original
martabhi had to become
Armenian anmanb,
martob, subsequently
mardov, as
the instrumental of
mard actually is attested.
And since in its function as well the case with b is a
pure instrumental, there can be no objection to the equation:
Arm. b = IE bhi. Some scholars have claimed to
find this suffix bhi in Greek, Germanic and Balto-Slavic.
could also be a reflex of the other suffixes compounded with
bhi (bhiam, bhiams, bhi?ms, bhis).
In Germanic the instrumental in mi = bhi is actually not
Accordingly it remains only in Balto-Slavic, where bhi
is found as OCS m?, Lith. mi. Accordingly
bhi as instrumental suffix of the singular can be assigned
with certainty only to Armenian and Balto-Slavic.
Result: In the
inflection of Armenian we cannot demonstrate any specific
Ira on the contrary it differs in an
important point with Aryan and agrees with Balto-Slavic.
inflection does not give us enough information about the
character of Armenian, we will turn to the phonology.
In order to decide whether or not Armenian is Iranian with
reference to its sounds, the question must first be
answered: what are the characteristic features of the
sound system of Iranian in contrast with the other
Indo-European languages?
They are as follows:
A.1. The dental s, when not protected by a directly
preceding following consonant, consistently becomes h,
2. correspondingly sv becomes hv,
3. but when i, u or ai, au
precedes, it becomes sh. In the latter point Iranian agrees
with Sanskrit (except for final position where Sanskrit
preserves the s); but Slavic between vowels always
develops instead of that sh the fricative ch
sraosha). In the change of s to
h on the other hand, Greek agrees with I but unlike
Iranian, in Greek this change is not carried through consistently.
Further, also in Celtic sv becomes hv, chw;
cf. Cornish huir,
Breton choar 'sister' =
NPers. khv?har;
Welsh chwech
(= sves) 'six'.
4. Iranian shows a disinclination for aspirates but
an inclination for the formation of spirants, of which it is
particularly fond of kh, gh, f and w.
Yet the oldest Iranian dialects, those of the Gathas and of the
Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions, do not yet know the voiced
spirants (gh, dh, w, which are present in the usual
and Ossetic has shifted the voiceless stops (k and t) to aspirates.
Baloci too knows aspirates (see at the end of this discussion),
but they probably arose through the influence of Indic.
5. In consonant clusters spirants arise from stops through
the influence of following t, sh, r, v;
accordingly original kt, pt, tt become kht,
ft, st; khsh, kra, pra, tra
become khra, fra, thra.
6. Notable is the lack of l in Old
the shift of ?v to sp, and in contrast with Indic the form
of the preposition pati
(= Skt prati), of the adverb
(= Skt ut,
ud, but similarly in Old Persian), words
like gaosha with the meaning 'ear',
B. The aspirated voiced stops are
lacking in I through loss of aspiration they fell
together with the voiced stops and like them often became
spirants subsequently. Balto-Slavic also merged voiced
stops and voiced aspirated stops.
C. The change of the original palato-velars k,
g, gh to the palatals c, j and
s, z must be considered a primary characteristic
of Iranian. But Sanskrit shares in the formation of palatals
from palato-velars, and Balto-Slavic in the change of the
palato-velars to slit fricatives.
Accordingly every single one of these
characteristics is found in other Indo-European
languages, and only the occurrence of all of them makes
up the character of an Iranian language. We ask now
whether all these characteristics occur in Armenian.
A.1. Original s generally appears in
Armenian as h; cf.
= Av. hana,
Lat. senex;
mahik, diminutive of
mah 'moon',
= Skt m?sa,
Av. m?o?ha;
this h is lost for example in the root
arb 'drink' =
original sarbh
(Lat. sorbeo,
Lith. srebiù),
evthn 'seven',
Ossetic awd = original
saptan. In inflection this h
shows up as kh (now pronounced as an aspirate),
just as also in Persian h is closed to the spirant
kh. s has been maintained as s in
amis 'month',
mis 'meat',
us 'shoulder',
in which the maintenance of s is explained by
an originally preceding n:
amis developed from
amsa. The s in the
accusative plural may probably be explained similarly:
mards (now
pronounced márt?s) developed from
martans. Accordingly the
maintenance of s in these cases would not contradict
the Iranian sound law set up above, even though Avestan would
also change s to h after n; cf.
mans, aorist stem of the root
man + s. In one case
to be sure (before original v) s seems to be
maintained even contrary to the sound law:
skesur 'mother-in-law', cf.
Avestan qapra 'father-in-law',
NPers. khusur;
here v may first have changed to
and this to k after the s on the pattern of
skund 'puppy' =
?van-. Windischmann,
Grundlage des Armenischen, p. 20, already
wanted to regard the colloquial by-form
kesur as the original form,
and derive k from kh = sv; s would
then have been added inorganically. But this explanation does
not seem probable to me.
2. sv becomes kh or v in Armenian, both probably having
arisen from hv: khoir,
now pronounced khuir,
NPers. khv?har,
pronounced kh?har, originally svasar, and
Welsh chwech.
3. Aryan sh = s after i,
u and their various grades is found in d? =
Av. duzh from
d?-goh 'discontented' and in
zgui? 'careful' =
*uzgaosha, actually 'with pricked up ears' --
two genuine Iranian formations, of which the latter
itself would prove the Iranian character of Armenian. And
zgui? is so well established
in Armenian that one cannot readily assume it to be borrowed.
This sh shows up also in
u? 'memory, reason' =
Av. ushi 'reason'. Elsewhere
this ? may indeed have developed further to s, e.g.
ls-el 'hear' =
Av. srush in
(Lith. klausà
OCS sluch?),
nist 'sitting' =
nishadah, as in Ossetic where in
ghos 'ear',
ars 'bear',
aχsawa 'night',
ast 'eight' s is found
instead of sh. Accordingly de Lagarde is probably right in deriving
gusan 'singer, musician' from the root
Skt ghush 'make noise, resound'. Yet this
material is not sufficient in order to discuss this point adequately.
4. Armenian is fond of the (voiceless) aspirates, of which
it possesses a complete set: kh, th, ph; but of the
voiceless spirants it knows only χ. Yet of the voiceless spirants
Afghan possesses only χ (kh), but not f, which is
frequent in Ossetic and Persian.
5. χt = original kt is found in
uχt 'vow, treaty',
Av. ukhti,
'suffering, sickness' =
Av. akhti; and
dstr 'daughter' (beside
Pers. dukht) may also be derived from
duχtr, when we find
bast beside
drast beside
draχt ('garden, paradise'
Pers. dirakht 'tree').
ft for original pt cannot be found in Armenian, since f
yet Avestan too still has pt instead of ft:
haptan, but
NPers. giriftah,
haft. For the
change of tt to st I do not find an example,
but it seems certain because of
Arm. azd 'information' =
OPers. azd?,
Skt addh? 'certainly'.
Aryan ksh = Iran. khsh appears metathesized in
Armenian as ?χ:
i?χel 'govern' =
Av. khshi;
ba?χel 'distribute' =
Av. bakhsh;
a?χarh 'land' =
Av. khshathra.
Iranian khra appears as Arm. χra in
χrat 'theme'
χratu 'admonition, counsel',
Av. khratu,
NPers. khirad;
Iran. fr as Arm. hr: hra = pra,
Av. fra; Iran. thr as Arm. rh:
a?χarh 'land' =
Av. khshathra.
6. l is not absent in A but it also
occurs in all contemporary Iranian languages, so that the
presence of l in Armenian would prove nothing of itself.
But we will see later that Armenian is distinct from Iranian
by the manner of occurrence of l ....
B. As far as
the aspirated voiced stops are concerned, we might assume
that the original Iranian language had already given up
aspiration and merged the aspirated voiced stops with the
voiced stops. Before this happened, Armenian must have
separated from Iranian (if we set up a family tree); for
in Armenian voiced stops and aspirated voiced stops do
not fall together but rather have always been kept
distinct. For while the aspirated voiced stops were
shifted to voiced stops, the voiced stops developed to
the voiceless stops however remained
unchanged or became aspirates or spirants. Accordingly
the original series
undergo in Armenian a conversion to:
Examples are as follows:
a. Dental series:
Arm. d = original dh:
Arm. d-ne-l =
original dh? 'set, do' ...
(Other examples follow.)
Arm. t = original d:
(a-ta-mn) 'tooth' =
dant. (Other examples follow.)
Original t was maintained when
protected by neighboring consonants:
ast? 'star',
dustr 'daughter'; or it developed to d:
leard 'liver' =
mard 'human being' =
?d 'wind' =
v?ta; or it developed to an aspirate:
tharm 'fresh, young' =
Skt taru?a;
thar?am 'wilted' (in
an-thar?am 'not wilting',
thar?ame?u?anel 'wilt' trans.),
root tars,
Lat. torreo,
evethn 'seven' =
uth 'eight' =
thandzr 'thick'
root ta?c;
artsath 'silver' =
Skt rajata;
or between vowels it developed to y:
(written hayr) 'father';
mair 'mother';
berê 'he bears' =
b. Labial series:
Arm. b = original bh:
bant 'prison',
root bhandh...
(Other examples follow.)
p is maintained as voiceless stop in
(stem partu-) 'debt',
Av. par (in
peretha) 'involve in debt, forfeit through debt';
p?nul 'observe' =
patmel 'narrate'
m?, it was shifted to an
in pho?i 'dust' =
Av. p?snu;
NHG Feder;
phut 'foul' =
Skt p?ti 'foul, stinking',
Phl. p?tak; and
initially it went over to h in:
hair 'father' =
hing 'five' =
har?anel 'question' =
NPers. purs-?dan;
heru 'last year' =
Osset. f?re 'in the previous year',
(= farf?re) 'in the second last year',
Pers. p?r 'the past year'.
c. Palato-velar series: (H's term: Gutturalreihe)
Arm. g = original gh:
gari 'barley' =
hordeum, originally
Phl. jurd?k 'grain, barley',
Baloci zurth-?n? 'a kind of grain';
mêg 'mist' =
vagr 'tiger' =
Skt vy?ghra.
Arm. k = original g:
kov 'cow' =
klanel 'devour',
keri 'I ate',
keal 'life',
kin 'woman' =
kr'unk 'crane' =
eki 'I came',
root ga, of which the present however is
gravel too does not agree with
Skt grabh,
Av. garb; yet the same irregular shift occurs in
Goth. greipan. For further details, see below.
(not included here) The voiceless stop was maintained as k in
akn 'eye';
kam-il 'desire'
Skt. k?ma;
Lat. corpus;
Lat. capere; in final position it became g:
erg 'song' =
Skt arka; infrequently it became an aspirate:
khar?el 'pull' =
Av. karesh;
khên 'hatred, revenge' =
Av. kaêna,
NPers. k?n;
khandel 'destroy'
(khand-el denominative ?) from
On the shift of another series (g? -- gh?) see below.
This is the first sound shift of
Armenian. The New Armenian of the west has undergone a
second: the relationship of voiced and voiceless stops,
as established after the first sound shift, is reversed,
so that the original voiced aspirates are now voiceless
Stops, the original voiced stops as well as a part of the
original voiceless stops are now voiced stops, but the
aspirates and h-sounds remained unshifted. In Armenian
accordingly, voiced stops and asPirated voiced stops did
not fall together as in Iranian.
C. The last point remains to be
discussed, the development of spirants from original
palato-velars. In this point Iranian and
Balto-Slavic have much in
common, so that Johannes Schmidt protested with this
support against a separation of Iranian and Slavic and of
Aryan and European and he overthrew
the family tree of the Indo-European languages which has
been proposed up to now. For not only in the split of
original k to k and k? = ?, s do Balto-Slavic and Aryan
agree closely,
but also in accordance with Ascoli's demonstration in that
of g to g and g? = Iranian, Balto-Slavic ?, z
and that of gh to gh and gh? = Iranian,
Balto-Slavic ?, z. This knowledge however is not
adequate for our following purpose, and in order to be able to
compare the split of the palato-velars in Armenian with
that in Aryan and Balto-Slavic we have to set up these
series of splits completely, as I now do.
I. Split of g to g and g?.
a. g appears in Sanskrit as g, in
Avestan as g, Armenian k, Balto-Slavic g.
Skt. g?, gam 'go',
Av. g? in g?ma,
ga in gata,
gam in ja-ghm-a?,
aib?-gemen,
Arm. eki 'I came',
ek 'the stranger'
(baínō, venio)...
(Other examples follow.)
The g above we see developing to j in
thus beside
Av. g? even the root
and present stem appear as
jas, though the
original g was maintained where it was protected by a consonant:
jaghma? ... Beside
Skt. yuga :
yuj we find
Av. yuj. So we may also posit original g
= Skt. j = Av. j = Arm. k, BaltoSlavic g; note
Skt. rajas 'sphere of air, fog, darkness', =
Arm. erek 'evening',
Gk. ?rebos,
Goth. riqis. ... The complete g-series
accordingly shows up as follows:
Balto-Slavic
b. g? appears in Sanskrit as j, Avestan z,
Arm. ts, Slav. z, Lith. z.
cf. Skt. aja,
aj? 'buck, goat',
Arm. aits,
Lith o??s 'buck',
aíks ... (Other examples follow.)
II. Split of the gh to gh and gh?.
a. gh appears in Sanskrit as gh, Av. g, gh,
Arm. g, Balto-Slavic g.
cf. Skt. megha =
Av. maêgha 'cloud',
Osset. miegha 'fog, cloud',
Arm. mêg 'fog',
Lith. miglá,
OCS m?gla 'fog, clouds'... (Other examples follow.)
occasionally became j in Sanskrit and j, zh in Avestan,
so gh occasionally becomes h in Sanskrit, j, zh in
Avestan, ? in Armenian.
Skt. druh 'vex',
drogha 'insult',
druzh 'lie, deceive'
beside draogha 'deceitful',
Arm. d?r-el,
dr?-el 'deceive, miss, offend'
... (Other examples follow.)
Accordingly the gh-series shows up as:
Balto-Slavic
b. gh? = Skt h, Av. z,
Arm. z, dz, Slavic z, Lith ?.
Skt. aham 'I',
Arm. es from ez),
Lith a? (asz)...
(Other examples follow.)
Some apparent
anomalies must be noted here, from which the relation of
g to g?, gh to gh? becomes clear.
We saw above that
Skt. yuj =
Av. yuj must go back to a
root yug, the g of which must have been
present in Armenian as palato-velar, as it is actually found that
*y?ga. Now we also find however
lts-el 'hitch up in a yoke',
which goes back to original yug?
(which is not present in Sanskrit and Avestan); and
accordingly we must posit for Armenian two roots,
yug and yug?,
which of course were identical originally. Then the two g's
are not originally different, but the one g has split in two,
in part remaining g, in part becoming g?. The same is
true of Aryan g in the root gabh
(and of forms with gh and k that H. cites).
... This can only mean: originally there was only one k,
one g, one gh, which later split to k, k?,
g, g?, gh, gh?....
If one now compares the k series with the g
and gh series, in
accordance with the previous investigations:
Balto-Slavic k
Slav. s, Lith. sz
Slav. z, Lith. ?
Slav. z, Lith. ?
there is complete agreement between these series, from which it must
be concluded that in the original period of the Aryans, Armenians,
and Balto-Slavics speakers were in especially close contact with one
another. For this common development of the palato-velars k,
g, gh in two directions: to k, g, gh
and k?, g?, gh? cannot be purely accidental --
or if it is, all characteristics of languages, by which we determine
their conditions of relationship, must be purely accidental.
If we consider especially the relationship of Armenian
to Aryan and Balto-Slavic, it turns out first of all that
by its strict distinction of g (= k and
ts) and gh (= g and z, dz)
it is at an older stage than Balto-Slavic and Iranian, which
as may be seen from the above tahle have merged both of
these. This phenomenon agrees totally with the other
phonological relationships of these languages. For if
Sanskrit and Armenian in general maintain the distinction
between voiced aspirated stops and simple voiced stops
(gh-g, dh-d), which Iranian and Balto-Slavic
have abandoned, then we must also expect that the two
first-named languages retained the distinction between
original gh? and g?, and the last named
language groups gave it up, i.e. they merged gh? and
g? to g? and developed this to a spirant
(Av. z = Slav. z = Lith. ?).
On their part Sanskrit and Armenian are differentiated
because Sanskrit, in contrast with Avestan and Balto-Slavic,
merges part of the original g, gh with g?,
gh? (so that Sanskrit j = g and g?,
Sanskrit h = gh and gh?); Armenian on the
other hand not only continues the distinction of voiced stops
and voiced aspirates, but also g, gh and g?,
gh?, and accordingly in this respect it maintains the
original phonological relationship more faithfully than Aryan
and Balto-Slavic.
But we must also examine
the relationship of Armenian to Aryan and Balto-Slavic in
another and more important area. For the chief difference
between the language families named above consists in
this that Balto-Slavic at first maintains its palato-velars
(g, k) unchanged, Aryan on the other hand
changes them to palatals. For the Old Aryan sounds k,
g, gh in part remained velars, in part also
developed to the palatals: Skt c, j, h
(h from jh) and Av. c, zh, j,
primarily in three cases: 1. if i or y followed
them originally, e.g j?v 'live'; 2.
in the re 3. in root final position, when
they were not protected by a following consonant, or when they
were maintained unchanged before vowels in nominal derivations,
as happened in part, e.g. pac 'cook',
vac 'speak', but p?ka
and ukta. But palatalization has
also taken place beyond these limits, if not widely, and
in this situation k has been affected more frequetly, and
g and gh less: cf.
Aryan ca 'and',
catvar 'four',
car 'go, drive',
pa?can 'five',
Skt jasshara 'belly',
Av. jan 'strike'.
The agreement with which Indic and Iranian have carried out this
process of palatalization provides certain proof that it took
place already in the common Aryan period. And since it did not
occur in this way in any other Indo-European group, this
formation of palatals is particularly characteristic for
Aryan. For that reason it must also serve as a test to
determine whether Armenian is Iranian or not.
Now we have already noted (in a portion not given here) that:
Aryan aujas,
bhuj, possibly also
and dr?el,
Av. druzh,
(NPers. arz?n), and may
because of these examples designate Armenian as Aryan. But
only one thing is unclear: why do we find in
bu? the sound ?
corresponding to Aryan j, since in accordance with
the sound shift we would expect c? No
example at all has been found for Arm. j =
Aryan jh and Arm. c = Aryan j;
for this reason one must assume first of all that
j and c arose only late in the separate
existence of
(accordingly ? would have arisen for j and c in Aryan times?).
Arm. c = Pers. c is found f
cang 'hook' =
NPers. cang;
ca? 'eat' with its derivatives:
ca?akel 'taste' =
NPers. cash?dan;
NPers. c?buk 'nimble';
carp 'fat' =
Phl. carp;
NPers. cir?gh 'lamp';
vcar- 'solvere' =
NPers. guz?r (from
r'ocik 'support' =
NPers. r?zeh;
Av. roca?h 'day', etc.
But these exa the
agreement with Persian is here too great, for otherwise
we find no trace of such agreement. And since words like
r'ocik are certainly
borrowed (they are also found in Georgian), the above words
other than these are probably also loanwords. The same is
probably true of patmucan =
Phl. patmucan 'dress',
while the c of mucak =
NPers. m?zah could only have
arisen from the k of the underlying word
muik 'shoe' =
(Afghan moc-a??ah f. 'shoe')
in Armenian.
But in accordance with the sound shift, the Aryan
palatal c is found in Armenian as ch in:
'four' = catvar;
gochel 'scream',
kochel 'name'
Lat. vocare; and it has become a dental in
mr?-il 'battle, fight'
Av. mere?c, nasalized from
marc (for the meaning, cf.
márnatai 'he fights' =
Skt m?r??ti 'he crushes'),
ha? 'bread' =
(from than?r 'thick',
Av. ta?icish'ta), and finally in
luis 'light' =
Av. raocanh,
NPers. r?z.
Is Armenian then Aryan?
Compare now the Armenian words
eki 'I came',
keal 'life',
kov 'cow',
kin 'woman',
erek 'evening',
bek 'broken',
gan 'strike' with
their Aryan related words as well as
(from penkan) 'five' with
Aryan pa?can and
lkh-anel 'leave' with
(erg 'song' =
root arc and
Lat. quarn,
Av. cva?t,
NPers. cand do not
come into consideration); it then turns out that
precisely in those forms to which especially value is to
be ascribed after Ascoli's splendid studies concerning
the Aryan palatals, Armenian is decisively separated
from Aryan and agrees with Balto-Slavic.
After the above remarks we can now complete the
k-series set up above as follows:
Balto-Slavic k
and the parallelism with the g and gh series is now
completely established.
From the whole preceding investigation we obtain
as total result:
In accordance with its development of original palato-velars
to spirants Armenian belongs to the sphere of the Aryan
and Balto-Slavic languages. It agrees in part with the
Aryan languages in the palatalization of the
palato-velars, but in another area it also preserves
palato-velars unchanged, like Balto-S for this
reason it can neither be subordinated to Aryan (in the
usual sense) nor be taken away from it. For this reason
too it cannot be designated as Iranian, even though it
like Iranian changes s to h and treats many
consonants and groups of consonants (like
Arm. ?χ = Iran. χ? = Aryan k?) in a
similar or in the same way. For this reason it must be set
up as an independent branch between Iranian and Balto-Slavic.
If however Armenian stands between Iranian and Slavic,
that is between Aryan and European, we must still examine
its position to the special peculiarities of the European
languages, through which these are sharply separated from
the A that is, we must examine whether
Armenian knows the European split of a to a
and e, that of r to r and l,
and whether or not it presents important points of contact
in vocabulary with European. We will proceed at once to
answer these questions.
1. Split of a to a and e.
Nothing is more correct than Fick's view that the most
important difference between European and Aryan in vocalism
consists in the split and non-split of a to a
and e. It is certain that no Indic and no Iranian
language knows this split. To be sure we write numerous
e, i.e. short ?, in New Persian words, but
short a simply becomes ? throughout (pronounced
as pure a in India),
and of a split there is no question here. Ossetic, in the
Caucasus, has o and e for and beside a,
but e is rar it appears beside
? and both beside a, which a stricter, and
older, manner o and also o =
a seems to be only a later darkening of the a
in the neighborhood of n and r,
but does not enter into consideration here at all. Accordingly
Aryan does not know this split.
Armenian on the other hand splits the a completely
to a, e, o in the European manner, and
is thereby distinguished sharply from the
Aryan related languages, even if
it may not coincide in individual examples with the
European. But in order to be able to undertake a
comparison of the individual examples, we must first
survey the vocalism of Armenian in general. The scheme
for it is:
Basic Vowel
Lengthening
e, i, zero
o, u, zero
and the accentual law which controls the vocalism is as
follows: the accent moved to the penultimate syllable of
the word and caused the loss of the last, or the loss of
its vowel, so that now the last syllable always has the
accent. Short i and u as well as their lengthened
forms ê and ui can be maintained only by the accent,
that is, if they stand in t if however
they lose the accent through the addition of a new
syllable, then ê becomes ?, ui becomes
?, i and u on the other hand are lost.
e.g. i: root
vid 'find' =
Arm. git, but in the infinitive
original vin?? =
NPers. gun?h =
Arm. vn?s; lengthening:
mêg 'fog',
root migh;
mêz 'urine',
root migh?,
Skt mih, but in the genitive:
u: root yuj,
Arm. luts, infinitive
ltsel 'yoke'; lengthening:
luis 'light' from
root ruc, but in the genitive
l?sóy. From this it is clear at once that
gitém 'I know',
lizem 'I lick' go back to
gêt-em, lêz- em,
that is, that in these verbs the lengthened present stem occurs
(gêt-em = vêda +
later added em = ?mi,
lêzem = leigh?-?mi),
except when we deal with denominative verbs, as may be true of
mizel 'urinate'
beside mêz 'urine'. On the other hand
a, ? cannot be changed:
bazúm 'much' =
bazúk 'arm' =
asél 'say',
Skt. ah. The same is true of
cf. gochél 'cry',
gortsél 'do' beside
gorts 'work' =
wérgon. e too generally remains,
cf. mets 'great',
Gk mégas,
genitive: metsi; but
it has dropped out occasionally, e.g.
vtak 'rivulet'
beside get 'river';
ast? 'star' =
tagr 'brother-in-law' =
dawer, genitive =
tagér. But if this e comes to
stand before nasals and double consonants, it regularly goes
over to i,
hin 'alt [old]' =
Herz; and like original i,
this i is elided when it loses the accent:
hin 'old',
hn-anal 'become old';
sirt 'heart',
gen. srti.
Accordingly e must be assumed everywhere in Armenian
where instead of the a-vowel to be expected in accordance
with the etymology, e, i or total loss of the vowel
has occurred. Accordingly, if Armenian is to take part in the
chief characteristic of European, we have to expect to find a)
Arm. a (o) = European a (o) and b)
Arm. e, i, zero = European e.
Arm. a (o) = European a (o).
For this correspondence it is adequate to cite few examples:
akn 'eye',
Lith. akís,
tal 'give' =
chorkh 'four' =
kov 'cow' =
ordz 'testicle' =
orb 'orphan' =
orphanós.
In addition one should note for inflection
that the a-stems -- apart from proper names
-- went completely over to o- for this
reason original marta-,
Gk broto- appears in Armenian as
mardo-, cf.
gen. dat. mardoy,
instr. mardov,
gen. pl. mardo?,
instr. mardovkh.
In this respect Armenian agrees with Latin and Greek.
b. Arm. e = European e. In his book,
Die ehemalige spracheinheit der Indo-germanen
Europas, p. 425, Fick listed the original European
words to which e must be ascribed. Of these I find the
following in Armenian:
Arm. sirt =
Eur. k?erd 'heart';
tsen-?t) =
genu 'chin';
invan from
nevan 'nine';
penkan 'five';
mega 'large';
mêj (from
medhia 'middle';
melr 'honey',
melu 'bee'
(mélissa) =
melita 'honey';
ni-sedas) =
Eur. sedas 'seat';
sena 'old';
septan 'seven';
ast? 'star' =
skesur 'mother-in-law' =
sved?r? 'in-law';
sveks 'six' ....
For inflection e is important in nominal suffixes like
ter = original
tar, therefore
dústr 'daughter',
gen. dstér; in verbs as
the stem-forming verb of the most widely distributed class:
berê, etc.;
as augment, to the extent it appears:
eki 'I came',
edi 'I set',
etu 'I gave',
etes 'he saw',
egit 'he found'....
2. Split of the r to r and l.
l is found in Armenian beside two r sounds
(r' and r) and an ?, which is now
pronounced by the western Armenians as γ, but in
former days transcribes Gk. l. In European l
also corresponds to the first l, while r is
found in European corresponding to the r', r
a. l = European l:
lal 'bewail, weep'
root l?... (Other examples follow.)
b. Arm. r, r', ? = European r:
sirt 'heart' =
cor... (Other examples follow.)
3. There are various words which
go back to a dffferent phonological structure in the
European languages than in the Aryan.... (Of the twelve
found in Armenian) the Aryan forms compare with the
European in the proportion of 3 : 9 = 1 : 3.
4. The last point to be
discussed here, the question about the relationship of
the Armenian vocabulary to that of the European
languages, I have to leave untouched for the time being,
because the greater part of the Armenian words are still
not yet etymologically clarified.... But in future
studies numerous "European" words will be demonstrated to
exist in Armenian.
Through the last part of our
investigation, such a tight bond has without question
been constructed between Armenian and European that it
would be easier to tear Armenian from Aryan than from
European. Among the European languages it stands closest
to Balto-Slavic because of the spirants, with which it
was also especially connected by the instrumental suffix
bhi, which is common to only these two. In this
situation, friends of the family tree, like Fick, will
certainly be inclined to separate Armenian completely
from Aryan and make it a purely European language.
Against this view I might first refer to the fact that
Armenian does not take part completely in the split of
a and r. ...
The result of my entire investigation is accordingly as follows:
Armenian stands in the sphere of
the Aryan-Balto-Slavic languages between Iranian and
Balto-Slavic.
If further research makes this
preliminary conclusion definitive, then the impossibility
of setting up a family tree of the Indo-European
languages would be strikingly demonstrated. For Armenian
would be the connecting ring of both parts in the chain
of the Aryan-Balto-Slavic languages, not a branch between
two branches. And then too the family tree, which
Johannes Schmidt's vigorous might has overturned, would
remain lying forever.
But if Armenian is to be the connecting member between
Iranian and Balto-Slavic, between Aryan and European, then
in my opinion it must have played the role of an intermediary
at a time when they were still very similar to one
another, when the historical period had not yet drawn the
present sharp boundary between them, but when they were
still related to one another as dialects. Just as Upper
Italian folk dialects with their nasal vowels, with ü
instead of u and with other characteristics approach
French, so that one might expect that Italian at the boundary
of France is almost an intermediate between French and
Italian, in the same way Armenian might once have been
intermediate between the Aryan and the European dialects
and therefore have taken part in the characteristics of
both. For if we see that the archaic languages of the
Avesta and the Veda still stand quite close to one
another and that a reconstructed Iranian and an Indic
Proto-language would be related to each other in the very
same way as dialects, why shouldn't the European
languages once have stood in this relationship to one
another and Armenian as intermediate dialect between the
two types? In this way the peculiar hybrid structure of
Armenian can easily be explained. After the wave of the
splitting of a and r had arisen in the Western
dialects and that of the splitting of the palato-velars in
the Eastern, the former penetrated beyond Balto-Slavic and
spread further over Armenian, while the latter penetrated
outside of Armenian and spread further over Balto-Slavic.
The former changed, whether
directly or through a subsequent effect, the a of
the Indo-European numeral dakan
to e in Balto-Slavic, and the latter changed the
k of the same word to k?, so that instead of
the IE dakan the
Balto-Slavic basic form dek?an
resulted. When later in Aryan the wave of the
subsequent split of the palato-velars (to velars and
palatals) arose, it was still able, whether it was of
itself too weak or whether the dialects had already begun
to separate more and more, to spread completely over
Iranian, but only over Armenian in some offshoots, so
that we find to be sure
catvar, but also
However that may be, if we must view the development
of Skt c, j, h and Av. c,
j from k, g, gh in the same
forms as proof for the connection of
the Aryan languages, then also the development in the
table below must be viewed as proof for the connection of
Aryan with Armenian and Balto-Slavic:
Aryan-Arm.-Balto-Slavic
It is obvious that the minute difference between sounds
in the individual languages proves nothing against this
conclusion, for only the later phonological
propensities
of the individual languages are responsible for their
existence. For Gothic even confronts the European e
with i; and the l of the individual languages
which has arisen from European l is certainly not the
same everywhere, as the Gk. l in Armenian transcription
is always given by ? (etymologically = r, now =
γ), never by l. If nonetheless we prove the original
connection of the European languages with this e and
l, we must also prove through those spirants the former
connection of Aryan, Armenian and Balto-Slavic. What's
sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. And finally,
as compelled as we are to derive the Aryan palatals from
the pre-Aryan palato-velars, we are equally justified in
deriving the series of the Aryan-Armenian-Balto-Slavic
sounds k?, g?, gh?, to
which we take back those spirants, from the series of the
Indo-European palato-velars. For a split of the
palato-velars took place twice in a similar manner but in
dffferent extent.
But if one might claim both series for the Indo-European
original language, as Fick did with k and k?,
then our argumentation would be untenable and no closer
relationship would be proved between Aryan, Armenian and
Balto-S yet even so the common formation of the
palatals in Aryan, in which Armenian participates,
if only in part, would prove nothing for the closer
connection of Indic-Iranian-Armenian:
But then, to be just and consistent, one ought also
declare meaningless the few reasons for which
Balto-Slavic and Germanic as well as Greek and
Italic or Italo-Greek and Celtic have been generally
ass for they are by no means of
greater significance than those by which one can connect
Aryan with Balto-Slavic or Armenian with both of these.
Then we would arrive at a skeptical point of view, and
would hold that European e and l too prove
nothing: just as in the one group spirants would arise from
palato-velars in certain cases without motivation, so in
the other a would become e and r would
become l in certain cases without motivation. Or if
one assumes two basically different k for
Indo-European, why not also two originally different
a and r, which had fallen together in Aryan
just as randomly as often happened in European with Fick's
k and k?? No one can claim that this point
of only Fick will not be inclined to
From this point of view there
would be nothing further to say about Armenian than that
it is an individual branch of Indo-European. And as such
we will also have to view it from the other point of
view, however its relationship to European and Iranian is
to be conceived. Unfortunately -- and to this
I'd like to point in conclusion -- the
etymological investigation of Armenian is still in its
beginning, and we are working with such a minute portion
of the Armenian vocabulary that we cannot foresee what
further investi and it was probably
unjustified to erect at this time such bold constructions
on such an uncertain basis as was done above. It is by
far most important to separate the Iranian loanwords from
Armenian and to arrive at pure Armenian material. Only
when this has been done can one determine the more
precise phonological characteristics of Armenian and
thereupon loosen or tighten the bond that connects it
with Iranian. But whether this bond is firm or slack, the
close connection of Armenian to European remains
undeniable, such as the formation of the instrumental
singular with original bhi, the (partial) preservation
of the palato-velars in contrast with the Aryan palatals,
and the split of a to a and e, that
of r to r and l demonstrate. For the
time being there are not yet many deviations and agreements
in the vocabulary to be given, since up to now neither
Armenian nor Iranian has been investigated enough
etymologically. Therefore the question of the lexical
relationship of Armenian to
Iranian and Slavic must still be viewed as quite open,
just as we have intended to broach the question of the
position of Armenian in the sphere of the Indo-European
languages, not to have settled it decisively.
Fr. Müller also admits this in
general, since in a friendly letter (28 July 1874), in which
he wants to have Armenian energetically reclaimed for Iranian
and not viewed as a transitional language, he writes: "That
there are many foreign words in Armenian which have penetrated
from Proto-Pehlev I fear however
that many a word that is good Armenian is regarded as a
foreign word only to be able to deny the Iranian
character of Armenian." But it is not adequate to admit
if one wishes to judge about the
character of a language, one must be certain in every
individual instance that the material with which one
works is not foreign stuff. Moreover, in the interest of
the theory which is presented below I would like very
much to have Fr. Müller prove to me that I have gone
too far in the assumption of loanwords.
Pers. r?z?
to which l?sik and not
r'ocik would have to
correspond in Armenian, since
Pers. r?z 'day' =
Arm. luis. []
Alike only if both go
back to s:
Arm. mah-ik =
NPers. m?h 'moon',
from m?sa. []
Also designated as Persian
in the Armenian-Italian dictionary of Caχcaχ.
To these must still be
added the foreign personal names, which are sharply
distinguished from the real Armenian ones: the latter
have a very characteristic sound and are etymologically
the former are old acquaintances from Persian,
like Artavan =
Av. ashavan, and
accordingly OPers. *artavan;
Artavazd =
Av. ashavaz-da?h, and accordingly
OPers. *artavazdah (the former =
Gk Artábanos Artabanus, the latter =
Gk Artabázēs or
Artaouásdēs, Artavasdes) etc.
Therefore it is unfortunate to claim to prove merely from proper names
the Iranian character of a people who are neighbors to the Persians.
In the modern dialect of
Tiflis, um, which can
only be pronominal in origin, consistently forms the locative,
while the genitive and dative have fallen together. This New
Armenian therefore has one case more in nominal inflection --
to be sure one newly formed -- than Classical Armenian.
One example may demonstrate
this: the pronoun of the second person plural is
dukh 'you', formed
from the singular du = 'thou'
with the plural sign of nouns kh = as originally.
Probably no other Indo-European language has gone so far.
etc. would remain unexplained, while in this way we
could assume that this imperfect of ah has
gone over to the analogical influenc
this is also true in part for the present, where
ê 'is' is not explained from
asti, but probably through
analogy from berê 'he bears' =
? is emphatic ts,
just as ch is emphatic t? (c).
On the Old High German
instrumental in u, see Braune, "Ueber
die quantit?t der ahd. endsilben," p. 40.
For further information see
Spiegel, Grammar p. 345. []
That Old Iranian had no
l is clear from the fact that the modern Iranian
languages do not agree in the use of l; compare
for example the following examples:
Ossetic stal 'star',
khalm 'crawling animal (snake)',
nal 'man',
malin 'die' with
NPers. sit?rah,
murdan; and conversely:
NPers. gul?
(gula 'throat') with
Ossetic qur =
Afghan gh??ah, fem. 'throat';
NPers. talkh 'bitter' with
Afghan tr?χ,
fem. tarχah,
NPers. kul?gh =
Baloci gur?gh 'crow'
(Afghan k?rgh*h 'crow' ?).
For this reason, in spite of Oppert's objections, Revue
de linguistique IV, p. 209), l will have to be denied
for Old Iranian. []
This change is frequent:
gail 'wolf' =
European valka;
get 'river' beside
gin 'price'
venum, original
gini 'wine',
gitel 'know',
gtanel 'find',
gortsel 'work',
Av. verez,
tagr 'brother-in-law',
gochel 'cry' =
garun 'spring' =
Av. vahra,
gier 'night' =
gar'n 'lamb' =
Old Persian too causes v to change to g,
cf. gurg 'wolf' =
Arm. gail; but
otherwise in different forms than in Armenian:
gul 'rose' =
Arm. vard,
gun?h 'pass' =
vnas, etc. Both languages have
carried out this change quite independently of each
Found also in loanwords:
phartham 'rich',
Phl. fratum;
phurir?i?s 'process' =
Pers. pursish;
phi? 'elephant' =
Pers. p?l. In loanwords
however which had initial f rather than p,
Armenian substituted the similar h, since it had no f:
Arab. farsac,
Pers. farsang 'parasang';
hraman 'order' =
Pers. farm?n;
hretak 'envoy, angel' =
Pers. firishtah.
The Kurds too have changed their f to h, but
maintained it in loanwords, e.g. in
firman (Justi, Die
kurdischen Spiranten, p. 15). The Ossetes on the other hand
change initial p consistently to f:
farsun 'ask',
fondz 'five',
fathan 'broad', so that
p is initial still only in loanwords, while Afghan
substitutes v for f and uses f
only in Arabic and Persian loanwords.
The series are: original
k = Skt k, Iran. k, Arm. k
(kh), Balto-Slavic k; and k? =
Skt ?, Iran s, Arm. s, Slav. s,
Lith sz. Armenian agrees with Iranian and Slavic, cf.
tasn 'ten'. Occasionally
however ? is found instead of s, as in
?un 'dog' =
p?-nul 'observe',
Skt pa?, as in
NPers. sh?kh 'twig'
instead of s?kh =
shustan 'purify' =
?udh, an indication that
the sharp s of Iranian stands very close to the
sh = Skt ?. And when for that reason sz
is found in Lithuanian as opposed to Slav. s =
k?, and Indic ?, now pronounced sh,
as opposed to Iranian s = k', we will consider
this difference irrelevant, with Johannes Schmidt against
Fick. From the sole
Aryan-Balto-Slavic ?van,
?uni arose only late the various
gen. ?unas,
Old Prussian sunis,
Lith. sz?,
gen. szùns. But whatever is
valid for Slavic s = Lith. sz must also be valid
for Slavic z = Lith. z, original g?
and gh?. []
Through secondary
palatalization in the separate existence of Armenian
there arose: jerm 'warm' =
Skt gharma,
NPers. garm and
?eram 'silkworm' =
Phl. kirm.
The secondary form
khar' is related to
chor- as is
Av. t?irya to
Av. cathware,
tvar-ya and
kh = tv as in
khsan 'twenty' =
dvi-?anti.
Add to this: Arm. ch =
Skt ch = original sk in the present stem forming
sk = Gk sk:
Arm. can-ach-em =
gign?skō,
Aor. tsaneay, and in
chu 'walking' =
original sku, Ascoli,
Vorles. p. 189.
Accordingly in this
essay I have written instead of ?, as it is now
pronounced in Persia itself, the older a, from which
it developed. []
barzond 'high',
zarond 'old' =
zund 'knowledge',
z?nun 'know',
fondz 'five',
dzorun 'speak',
χor 'sun'
corun 'eat'
(= svar-).
How little o means here is shown by
Av. karana,
which forms in the plural:
Tagauric kharatth?,
Digoric kharanth?.
I should like to note that
the quantity of vowels is not marked in the Armenian
therefore elsewhere as well I have not
indicated a long mark. But this is only a shortcoming of
the writing system, with reference to which it must be
noted that a, i, u, where they are
lengthened forms of the basic vowels a, i,
u, must have formerly counted as long or still
do. Only e and o are always short.
I write here ?,
as in the following ?; for from
mzí would have had to develop,
and similarly from
Petermann, Grammar
p. 37: "omnium vocalium constantissima, quae
fere nunquam abjicitur seu mutatur." (The most constant
of all vowels, which almost never is lost or changed.)
This change of e to
i has been carried through completely in the modern
dialect of Tiflis, in which o has also become u
throughout. In older Armenian u from o = a
is found more infrequently: a sure example is probably the
suffix forming the decades:
gen. -sni, e.g.
gen. inn?sni '90' =
enen?konta.
The present is
d-ne-l, which according to the sound
laws must go back to de-ne-l.
If one compares this with the present
tal 'give',
then the equation results:
Arm. de 'set':
ta 'give' =
Consider how s in
Sanskrit, where it was to be voiced, develops to everything,
only not z, and how jh, instead of which
h shows up, is almost prohibited. It is therefore not
remarkable that we do not find in Sanskrit z, to
which it was completely opposed, instead of the original
g?. Notable is the preference of Iranian, Armenian
and Slavic (in their oldest form) for the dental spirants
over against the palatals of Sanskrit and the linguals of
L but nothing is proved by this about the closer
relationship of these languages to one another.