The “Art” of “Ironing” Out the Issues for the Sake of “Justice”

Would you ever think that the English word “art” is related to the Armenian word for “iron”? For once, art and artug (արդուկ “handheld implement to smooth clothes”) sound similar and have a relationship. In the same way, artug and artarutiun (արդարութիւն “justice”) are also related.

You will probably ask in your most casual way: “Stop. Are you kidding me?”

No, it is not a joke. As many times in the past, we go once and again to the fact that both Armenian and English are Indo-European languages, and thus, they share some common vocabulary, which may produce either similar words with a similar meaning or, in this case, words with a totally disparate meaning.

Of course, like so much English vocabulary, “art” derives from Old French art , and like so much French vocabulary, the source was a Latin word, artem (you may be familiar with the nominative form, ars, as in ars nova “new art”), meaning "work of art; practical skill; a business, craft.” The Latin word itself stemmed from a Proto-Indo-European word, * ar(ə)-ti -, whose root was *ar (“to fit together”). To have a skill is to be able to fit something together, right?

The root for the Latin word was also the source for the Sanskrit word rtih (“manner, mode”) and the Greek ártus (“order”), among others. Among those “others” was the Armenian word արդ (Classical/Eastern Armenian ard, Western Armenian art ), with a wide collection of meanings: “manner, mode, order, form, done work, production.” This Armenian term left a very prolific set of derivations, both at the beginning and at the end of words (such as the interesting compound word խորանարդ / khoranart “cube,” which literally means “that has the form (art ) of an altar (khoran )”).

After you wash a shirt, you need to give “form” and “order” to the clean, but yet wrinkled piece of cloth. You need an artug to do that. 

What about artarutiun? This is even clearer. Justice is the way to make a decision about those issues that have turned to be against established order. Therefore, justice is called to establish “order.”



How Art and Craft Came Together

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.