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Armenian (was: question - Turco-Japanese)

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Saturday, November 27, 2004, 18:57
On Saturday, November 27, 2004, at 05:47 , Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Ray wrote: >>> (Armenian has long been associated with Caucasian languages, >> >> I think there can be no real doubt that Armenian is of IE origin - but it >> has clearly been influenced and indeed appears to have been subject to >> Iranian influence in early times. > > I realized after I wrote that that it could be misleading, and it > appears I have mislead.
Yes - "associated" is ambiguous in this context.
> What I meant was that Armenian has been > in the Caucasus for such a long time that it has acquired a number > of features from its neighbors, particularly lexical items.
Yes, I am sure it has acquired features from its neighbors over the centuries. But until the end of the 19th centrury, Armenia was not confined just to the southern Caucasus; it covered quite a bit of what is now eastern Turkey. In the middle ages IIRC Armenia stretched from the Caucasus down as far as modern Syria & Lebanon where, I understand, significant numbers of armenian speakers still live. IMO Armenian developed in this area - the frontier area between the Roman, later Byzantine, empire & the Persian Empire. I imagine all sorts of ingredients went into its development.
> I did > not mean to suggest that Armenian was not an IE language! ;( -sigh-
OK.
>> The language is thought to be connected with the Thraco-Phrygian IE >> languages. The Georgian name for the Armenians is 'Samekhi' where _Sa-_ >> is >> a prefix; > > It's actually <Somekhi>. Sa- is indeed affixual (as in _Sa-kartvel-o_ > 'Georgia'), but I rather doubt that So- here is felt to be separate.
I merely repeated what some people think. I know far too little Georgian to comment. [snip]
>> it is thought by some that -mekhi is derived from the name which >> appears in cuneiform records as 'Muski' - a people who reached the upper >> Euphrates at the beginning of 12th cent BCE. > > Do you have a citation on that?
Yes - W. B. Lockwood "A Panorama of Indo-European Languages" published by Hutchinson University Library. I am afraid I do not have the ISBN. Ray =============================================== http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com =============================================== Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]