Double Speak

Spoiler alert: the title of this article does not refer to the perennial use of euphemism, ambiguity, or inversion of meaning so common in political language. It actually makes reference to a very common linguistic phenomenon called “reduplication” (in Armenian կրկնաւորում / gurgnavoroom ).

Reduplication happens when you repeat part or all of a word to express a meaning. You have plenty of examples in English, from “walkie-talkie” to “zig-zag,” which mostly appear in colloquial language and then sometimes go into a more formal expression.

Unlike English, in Armenian you have entire words repeated. For instance:

տեսակ - տեսակ պտուղներ (desag-desag budooghner) “variegated fruits”

զանազան մարդիկ (zanazan martig) “different people”

In the first case, you have an adjective repeated and connected with a hyphen. In the second, you have the suffix զան (zan) , meaning “form, way, mode,” loaned from Old Persian. The repeated word has been linked by the very common connective ա (a) .

You can also have two words that have meaning and rhyme with each other (“rhyming reduplication”), like English “super-duper.” However, the Armenian cases are more formal. For instance, the word ախ /akh (interjection of affliction) is combined with the word վախ /vakh “fear” and the result is ախ ու վախ (akh oo vakh) “sigh.”

There are various reduplicated words that are connected by prepositions from Classical Armenian. Such is the case of գոյնզգոյն /kooynuzkooyn “multicolor,” with the word գոյն /kooyn “color” repeated and glued by the connective զ /z , and խառնիխուռն /kharnikhoorn “mixed, confused, pell-mell,” where two words of relatively similar meaning ( խառն /kharn “mixed” and խուռն /khurn “confused”) are put together with the connective ի /i.

You have other cases that remain in the colloquial level and constitute the funny part of it. One of the components usually has no meaning: 

a)     The rhyming reduplication that comes from the use of the sound m, either by replacement or addition, as in գաւաթ - մաւաթ (kavat-mavat), with kavat meaning “glass, cup,” or արեւ - մարեւ (arev-marev), with arev  meaning “sun.” (In English, we have the case of shm-reduplication, as in “fancy-shmancy.”)

b)     The emphatic reduplication in nouns, like սեփ - սեւ ( sep-sev ), where sep turns sev (“black”), or adjectives, like ճիփ - ճիշդ (jeep-jeesht), with jeep underscoring jeesht (“precise, correct”).

These last cases have their parallel utilization in Turkish and should be regarded as part of the long coexistence of both languages in the Ottoman period.  

The Perils of Misspeaking

A translator or an interpreter has a very delicate function: to convey ideas into another language. That function is manifold, because it is not only about what you convey, but how you convey it. (Let’s leave aside why you convey it and to whom you convey it.)

The matter of “how” is always a thorny issue for someone who translates from Armenian into English or vice versa. We have previously referred to some tricky cases, such as the familiar idiomatic expression էշուն սատկած տեղը (eshoon sadgadz deghu), a figurative way to say “in a faraway place.” While we will leave to the reader the task of finding the appropriate English equivalent for this expression, we can only reassure him or her that it would be very unfortunate, not to say ridiculous, to translate it literally as “the place where the donkey died.”

The thorny issue, of course, also becomes painful to whoever speaks or writes in Armenian, when you find yourself struggling to offer a correct expression that does not smell as English translated into Armenian. Although such cases sometimes may pass inadvertently, in others what goes around, comes around, and you may become a laughing stock. Of course, communication is what matters and it is not polite to laugh or to chide someone for a language mistake. However, it also matters for a conscientious speaker that communication improves over time and does not remain forever on an elementary school level (public examples should be brushed aside as anomalies). Here are two examples—not literally reproduced—that sometimes appear in spoken language:

1) “I serve under…”

Unless you are self-employed, you always work or carry out responsibilities under someone else’s directions. The English language has an idiom for that: “to serve under” (“I served under General X”). We all understand that you served under the command of General X, even if it is not stated. Since this is an idiom, if you needed to express the same idea in Armenian, you should not translate it literally. If you said «Ես ծառայեցի զօրավար Ք.-ի տակ» (Yes dzarayetsee zoravar K-i dag), it would literally mean… that General X was standing or lying over your body while you served, which, incidentally, would probably lead to charges of sexual harassment or physical distress.

Since you want to avoid such costly misunderstandings, it would be more proper to say: «Ես ծառայեցի զօրավար Ք.-ի հրամանին տակ» (Yes dzarayetsee zoravar K-i huramaneen dag ). This would mean “I served under the command/orders of General X,” and it would save you a trial for defamation and/or a court-martial trial to the poor general.

2) “Connect me to…”

This one will appear, for instance, when you answer to a call and the caller, at some point, asks you to kindly patch the communication over to one of your colleagues. In English, of course, you would say “Please connect me to…” (or “Please transfer me too…”). In Armenian? Not quite so. If your interlocutor said «Հաճիս Պօղոսին կապէ»  (hajees Boghoseen gabeh), what did he mean? To go right away and tie Boghos to his desk? Although the phrase is grammatically inaccurate, because the verb կապել/gabel (“to tie, connect, link”) is transitive and the phrase should be «Հաճիս Պօղոսը կապէ» (Hajees Boghosuh gabeh ), the meaning does not change: “Please tie Boghos.” 



Thus, to avoid this absurdity, you need to use the correct sentence. Unlike English, it is not “connect me to…” but “connect me with …” The solution is: «Հաճիս Պօղոսին հետ կապէ» (Hajees Boghoseen hed gabeh), “Please connect me with Boghos.” Then you will be patched over to your colleague and Boghos will not be under any risk…

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.”



Republic: The State of and for All

If we understand democracy, as defined by Aristotle, as the direct government of the people, then, indeed, the United States is a republic and not a democracy. Of course, no one with a basic knowledge of words and political science would say that America is or should be a democracy in that sense of the word. Democracy is essentially understood as the system where the government derives its power from the people, which freely elect its representatives, and that system constitutes a republic. Therefore, the United States is a democratic republic, unlike other republics, where the government may have originally derived its power from the people, but the latter no longer elects its representatives in a free way.

The word “republic” comes, indeed, from the French république, which derived from Latin respublica. This is a compound word, where res means “entity” and publica, “belonging to the people.” However, the Armenian word for “republic,” հանրապետութիւն (hanrabedootioon ), is not a literal translation, since it has a different meaning in its two components. The first word, hanr, is a contraction of հանուր (hanoor), which means “all” and has generated words like հանրութիւն (hanrootioon) “public” (noun) and հանրային (hanrayin) “public” (adjective). The second word is պետութիւն (bedootioon ), which literally means “chiefdom” (պետ /bed “chief” + the suffix ութիւն /ootioon), and has come to mean “state” (in the sense of nation in one territory) in modern use. Thus, the word hanrabedootioon means “the state of/for all.”

The use of hanrabedootioon was consecrated in the Armenian language after the birth of the Republic of Armenia in 1918. It is interesting, however, that its use in Armenia had a hiatus during Soviet times. As part of the process of Russification of the language that was pursued under Stalin, a decree of 1940 imposed the use of ռեսպուբլիկա (respublica, a direct loan from Russian) instead of hanrabedootioon, together with other foreign words. Therefore, Soviet Armenia was called Հայկական Ռեսպուբլիկա (Haygagan Respublica) until 1966, when another decree restored most of the words that had been legally eliminated in 1940 and Soviet Armenia became again Հայկական Հանրապետութիւն (Haygagan Hanrabedootioon). After the declaration of independence released in August 1990, the name Հայաստանի Հանրապետութիւն (Hayastani Hanrabedootioon ) was officially restored.

The use and misuse of words indicate the difference that may exist between an actual democracy (where people supply the power of the government) and a democracy in name only, where words do not matter and anyone who does not toe the line of the government may be declared—as the experience of the Soviet Union in the 1930s showed—an “enemy of the people” and claimed to deserve punishment or death on behalf of that same people.  

In the Beginning, the Ass Was a Horse

Asses have had bad publicity since ancient Greek times, and anyone with some exposure to English colloquial language may hear one of many combinations of the word “ass” (or the word itself) on a daily basis to typify clumsiness and stupidity. The same happens with Armenian speakers, even though there are not that many combinations of the word էշ ( esh). However, you may find a wide (someone would also say fine) collection of phrases including esh in Armenian. One should add that asses were highly esteemed in ancient Armenia for their usefulness.

Intriguingly, “ass” and esh do not sound that far from each other. The English word is cognate with a series of Germanic and Slavic languages, and it is likely that all of them ultimately derive from Latin asinus (e.g. Spanish asno, Old French asne ). Apparently, the form of the Latin word indicates that the ultimate source was a language of Asia Minor. On the other hand, the Sumerian language (a non-Indo-European, non-Semitic language spoken in southern Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C.) had the word anshe (“ass”).

The Armenian word esh is native Indo-European. It comes from the Proto-Indo-European word ek’wo (“horse”), from which we have, among others, the Latin word equus (“horse”; compare English “equestrian,” “equine,” and other horse-related terms). If you are puzzled by the transformation of k’ into sh, we also have Sanskrit ashva and Farsi asp (both “horse) , among others.

Despite their formal closeness and meaning, Armenian esh is not the source for Turkish eshek (“ass”), which had its cognates in other Turkic languages of Central Asia. However, it is not impossible that it could have been the unidentified language of Asia Minor that became the initial source for Latin asinus and, in the end, for English “ass.”

There is another puzzle to conclude: Armenian esh did not keep the original meaning of “horse,” for which we have another word of Indo-European origin, ձի (tzi).

As Mr. Spock, of “Star Trek” fame, would have said, “fascinating.”

Walking Around the Lyceum

Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher, allegedly used to walk while lecturing. Since he was not a citizen of Athens, he could not own property. Like another famous philosopher, Socrates, he and his colleagues used the grounds of the Lykeion (Latin Lyceum ), the name of a gymnasium dedicated to Apollo Lyceus (the term lyceus was applied to the type of statue that represented Apollo with his arm resting on his head).

This happened around 335 B.C. and the Lyceum actually became an informal institution where Aristotle’s followers conducted philosophical and scientific inquiries, rather than being a formal school. Nevertheless, those followers were known as the Peripatetic school (the Greek word περιπατητικός [ peripatêtikos ] meant “given to walking about”), and Aristotle’s school came to be named Peripatos because of the peripatoi (“covered walkways”) of the Lyceum.

The word lyceum entered many languages, like English and Armenian, where sometimes the word Լիկէոն ( likeon ), used to translate Aristotle’s Lyceum, has been used to denote the high school section of a school. This happened, for instance, in the case of a famous Mekhitarist school, the Mourad-Raphael school of Venice, which existed from 1836 to the 1990s.

However, the Armenian language found a way to give the concept of “lyceum” (or “Academy,” as Aristotle’s teacher Plato called his own school) with a word of its own. Following the idea of the peripatetic school, it used the root ճեմ ( jemel “walk”), derived from an Iranian source, from which derived ճեմարան ( jemaran “walking place”). In the eleventh century, the word was also used to call the schools founded by another important writer, Grigor Magistros, in Ani, Sanahin, and Bjni. Later on, the school of the monastery of the Holy Cross, in Crimea (fourteenth-seventeenth centuries) received the name of jemaran.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several important educational institutions took the name of jemaran, meaning “academy” or “lyceum,” such as the Lazarian Academy of Moscow (1814-1918), the Scutari Lyceum in Constantinople (from 1838), the Gevorgian Lyceum in Etchmiadzin (1874-1917), the Academy of Marash (1891-1915), the Cilician Lyceum of Aintab (1891-1915), and others. The name was continued in Armenia when the Seminary ( հոգեւոր ճեմարան/hokevor jemaran ) of Etchmiadzin was reopened in 1945. However, it was more consistently used in the Diaspora. For many decades, the name Jemaran became synonymous with the school founded in Beirut (1930) by the Hamazkayin Armenian Cultural and Education Society, first known as “Armenian College,” then as “Nshan Palanjian College,” and currently as “Melanchton and Haig Arslanian College” (the word college is used in the French and not the American sense of the word). Nevertheless, other jemarans had existed before, such as the Mesrobian Academy in Sofia (1921), and later, such as the Karen Jeppe College (1947) and the Cilician College (1960), both in Aleppo, for instance.

On a side note: for decades, the Armenian American community did not have a daily school of its own, thinking that it was not important for its survival. It used to think that it was more important to do fundraisers to benefit “the” Jemaran, the one in Beirut. This went on and on until the 1960s, when a new generation arrived in this country, conscious of the importance of Armenian daily schools to ensure not only the future of the Armenian language in the United States, but also of the community. Then, the fundraisers continued, but with a different goal.

About Repentance

If you feel regret or changed your mind about something, then you repent. If you dedicate yourself to amend your life by turning away from sin, then you repent too. The former is a common word, while the latter is a theological concept that implies a change of heart and mind that brings you closer to God.

 

Unlike English, the Armenian language has two different words for “repent.” The common idea of changing your mind about something is called զղջալ (zughchal), and the noun that indicates this change of mind is զղջում (zughchoom). The idea of repentance by turning away from sin is known with the name of ապաշխարութիւն (abashkharootioon), and the action is ապաշխարել (abashkharil).

If you know some Armenian, you may have come across the word աշխարհ (ashkharh “world”) and the negative prefix ապ (ab) or ապա (aba), equivalent to English “de” (“denationalization”) or “des” (“disinformation”). (It has nothing to do with the adverb ապա /aba “then, afterwards”.)

If you put together ab and ashkharh, you might conclude that their combination created the word abashkharil, which literally would mean something akin to “to deprive [someone] from the world,” which is what you do when you get closer to God and farther removed from the sins of this world. That is fairly possible, especially since you would not be the first to arrive to that conclusion. The Mekhitarist fathers who compiled the famous New Dictionary of the Armenian Language (Նոր Բառարան Հայկազեան Լեզուի – Nor Parraran Haigazian Lezvi ), published in 1836-1837 as the ultimate source for the vocabulary of Classical Armenian, had already come to that idea long ago.

This is, however, what linguists have labelled as “popular etymology.” Popular etymologies are those created to explain away the meaning of a common or proper noun by analyzing its components. They do not take into account either similar words in other languages or the degree of reasonability of their hypothesis. (Years ago, the former dictator of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, had claimed that William Shakespeare was of Arabic origin, since his name could be explained as Sheik Spiro, a claim that is still held in some quarters.)

Actually, the word abashkharel has nothing to do with ashkharh. First of all, one should explain why the word ashkharh would have lost the final h to become ab-ashkhar-el or ab-ashkhar-ootioon , given that ashkharh does not lose the h in any other case (e.g. աշխարհամարտ /ashkharhamard “world war”). Secondly, the word abashkhar (pronounced apashkhar in Classical Armenian) has its source in the Iranian languages.

It is interesting to mention that Armenian loaned words from Iranian turn the original khsh into shkh. Thus, we have abakhshah in Pahlevi, abakhshad/abakhshay in Middle Persian, and bakhshay in Persian, all meaning “to pardon” and going back to a reconstructed original word *apakhshad .

To repent, in the end, also means that your sins are pardoned, but you do not come out of this world.