Many
readers most probably are regular users of trousers or pants. As it
happens with other words in the English language, the word “pants” is
one of those shortened terms whose origin has been forgotten over time.
First used in 1840, it was associated with a silly old man in Italian
comedy, Pantaloun, whose name was derived from Italian Pantalone. (The Spanish word for “trousers” is, coincidentally, pantalón or pantalones.).
You may assume that panties is
also related to “pants.” Indeed, it is its diminutive. It was a
derogatory term used for men’s underpants in the nineteenth century, and
took its current meaning of underwear for women or children in the
early twentieth century.
Despite
their distance, languages sometimes have curious analogies. The case
for pants and panties in Armenian is not very far from English. The word
վարտիք (vardik),
meaning “pants,” was borrowed in Classical Armenian from Pahlavi (the
language used by the Parthian dynasty of the Arsacids in Persia, from
the third century B.C. to the third century A.D.), where varti meant “pants” and composed the form andarvarti (“outside pants”), which became անդրավարտիք (andravartik, pronounced antravardik in Western Armenian). The ք (k) was, of course, the Classical Armenian plural form (like pant-s). The word was used in both forms antravardik and vardik, and there was also the form անվարտի (anvardi), meaning “pant-less.”
What happened in Modern Armenian? The word antravardik has
kept its meaning “pants” in Eastern Armenian until today. However,
Western Armenian left it aside and adopted a term of unknown origin, տաբատ (dapad), scantily used in Classical Armenian, meaning “pants.” On the other hand, vardik (without the prefix antr)
became “underwear” in both Western and Eastern Armenian, which means
that, like in English, pants became the origin for panties.
We have seen many times how certain words have unexpected origins. For instance, the Proto-Indo-European word *ar (“to fit together, to join”) generated a derivative word *ar-ti, which gave origin to a series of cognate terms in various Indo-European languages, including Latin ars (“work of art; practical skill; a business, craft”). The latter’s declined form artem entered Old French as art and then reached English as the same word, which
meant “skill as a result of learning or practice” in the thirteenth
century and started being used with the meaning “skill in creative arts”
three centuries later.
However, despite what you might think, the Armenian word արուեստ (arvesd) does not come from the same root *ar. This word was abundantly used in Classical Armenian (pronounced arwest),
starting in the fifth century, with different meanings, such as “skill,
mental or manual art,” “handicraft, object skillfully made,” “miracle,”
and “deceptive trick.” Much later, the parallel form արհեստ (arhesd) appeared. In Modern Armenian, arvesd and arhesd went separate ways: arvesd means “art” and arhesd means “craft.” Today, we know that a sculptor is an արուեստագէտ (arvesdaked “artist”), and a carpenter is an արհեստաւոր (arhesdavor “craftsman”).
Where does arvesd come
from, then? There is not a definite answer, but it is probable that the
source was Iran, as it happened for many words borrowed into the
Armenian language after millennia of political domination and/or
cultural interaction. Old Persian language, at the time of the
Achaemenid dynasty, had the word aruastam, whose meaning is
debatable, but probably meant “activity, physical prowess,” and Pahlavi
(during the Arsacid dynasty, which later had a branch in Armenia) had
the word rwst (vowels were not represented), which meant “virtue.” It is possible that rwst actually sounded arwest, and the distance from “virtue” to “skill” was not very big.
