Hratchmartirosyan2012

Հրաչ Մարտիրոսյան 2012

H

RACH

M

ARTIROSYAN

1

European and Mediterranean substrate words in Armenian

University of Leiden

1. In recent years, the methodology of dealing with substrate words has been developed and applied by several scholars.2 It has been pointed out that an etymon is likely to be a loanword if it is characterized by some of the following features: (1) limited geographical distribution; (2) unusual phonology and word formation; (3) specific semantics.3

The Armenian words that are frequently considered to be of Mediterranean origin are: gini ‘wine’, ewɫ/iwɫ ‘oil’, t‘uz ‘fig’, spung ‘sponge’, sring ‘pipe, fife’, sunk/g(n) ‘mushroom’.4 The actual number is much higher. In the paper Martirosyan 2007 and 2010, I have applied the aforementioned methodology to a number of such words, mostly plant names, animal names and cultural words. In these cases, an etymon is attested in Armenian, Greek, Latin and/or another Indo-European language of SE Europe (like Albanian, Phrygian etc.) or Anatolian, but the phonological or word-formative correspondences are irregular with respect to the Indo-European system, and they cannot be considered loanwords from one another.

Bearing in mind that Greek and Latin on the one hand and Armenian on the other are historically located on the opposite sides of the Black Sea, as well as that in some cases Mediterranean words have related forms in the Caucasus and Near East, I prefer not to confine myself strictly to the notion of so-called Balkan Indo-European. I conventionally use a term Mediterranean-Pontic Substrate. In some cases (e.g. Arm. pal ‘rock’ vs. Gr. πέλλα ‘rock’, OIr. ail ‘cliff’ < *pal-i-, MIr. all < -, OIc. fell ‘mountain, rock’, OHG felisa ‘rock, cliff’ prob. from *palis-), an etymon is also present in other European branches, such as Celtic and Germanic, thus we are faced with the European Substrate in terms of Beekes 2000. Whether the Mediterranean-Pontic and European substrata are identical or related is...