Armenian (was: question - Turco-Japanese)

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
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