How a Star Was Born

Has it occurred to you that the English “star” and its Armenian translation աստղ (asdgh) are also cousins?

The Armenian name Աստղիկ (Asdghig) is sometimes translated as Stella because of their formal resemblance, even though Asdghig was the goddess of love and fertility in Armenian pagan mythology and Stella Maris (“star of the sea”) was actually one of the Latin names for the Virgin Mary.

Actually, Asdghig was the Armenian counterpart for a goddess well-known in various Near Eastern mythologies. The ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna, associated with love, fertility, and other attributes, was later worshipped by the Semitic civilizations of Mesopotamia (Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians) as Ishtar. Ishtar was adored in adjacent lands of Semitic population like Syria and Canaan as Ashtart, which became in Hebrew Ashtoret, better known under the Hellenized form Astarte. The symbol of Inanna-Ishtar-Ashtart was the planet Venus, the most brilliant star in the sky.

It has been suggested that, ultimately, the name Ishtar was derived from the Proto-Semitic feminine noun *attar “heaven, star,” which may share a common origin with the Proto-Indo-European word *h-ster.

This reconstructed word was the common source for most Indo-European languages. Think of Greek aster (compare English “astronomy, astronaut,”), Iranian star, Latin stella (compare English “stellar”), German stern, and many other lesser known words. The Armenian word asdgh (also spelled աստեղ/asdegh in Classical Armenian) seems to be in the middle of its Greek and Latin counterparts, and not that far from English.

Let’s note that the suffix –իկ (ig) has a diminutive, but also endearing quality. Think of the Armenian common word asdghig with the meaning “small star,” equivalent to the English word “starlet.”  

The “No” Came First

When you ask for something, a negative answer is always likely, but a positive answer does not fall out of the realm of possibility.

 

The “no” came first, at least in Armenian, where the word ոչ (voch) is original to the language, while այո (ayo “yes”) does not have a recognized explanation, even though it appeared as early as the Armenian translation of the Bible (fifth century A.D.).

 

The compound word voch (literally “no one, none”) is formed by the negative particle ո (vo) and the sign of indefinite, չ (ch ). The combination of ոչ (voch “no”) and ինչ (eench “thing”) yielded the word ոչինչ (vocheench “nothing”). Voch later transformed into the other negative word, չէ (che), formed by the sum of չ (ch ) and է (“to be”).

 

The Armenian ayo sounds very close to aye in English (“Aye, captain”) or even to yes, but actually, according to the great linguist Hrachia Ajarian, it is an onomatopoetic word, unrelated to its English, German (ja ) or French (oui) counterparts . The word “yes” did not even exist in Greek or Latin. Actually, it was absent from the mother language, and thus, there is not a common word for the family of Indo-European languages.

 

Most strikingly, ayo had fallen from usage by the twelfth century, when it was replaced by its equivalent հա (ha). The Armenian jurist Mekhitar Gosh, the author of the first codification of Armenian laws, Tadasdanakirk (“Legal Corpus”), was even forced to explain that ayo meant ha to make it understandable to his readers.  

 

The word ha entered Armenian dialects, where (for instance in Van) it was pronounced խա (kha) –the dialect aspired the h like a kh (hats “bread” > khats)--and became abbreviated into խ (kh). So, when they asked a Vanetsi, “Are you OK?,” he answered, “Kh.”

 

In modern times, ayo made a comeback. Today we normally use it as “yes,” while ha has become a colloquial way to answer affirmatively (like the English “yeah”), but not very well regarded when it comes to polite use. However, when you answer negatively, you can say either voch or che, and both will work equally well.

 

In the end, it is always harder to say “yes” to anything, isn’t it?

 

Dealing with In-Laws (2)

As we said in our last column, the English language deals in an easy way with relatives by the use of “in-law.” This indicates that some of the kinship terms common to Indo-European languages were lost over time, as in other sister languages too.

The Armenian language has a collection of terms for each “in-law” on both sides of the aisle. We previously discussed the in-laws for the case of fathers and mothers. Now we will deal with brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law:

Groom
Brother-in-law (wife’s brother): աներձագ (anertzak)
Brother-in-law (sister’s husband): քեռայր (kerayr)
Sister-in-law (wife’s sister): քենի (keni)
Sister-in-law (brother’s wife): հարս (hars).
Bride
Brother-in-law (husband’s brother): տագր (dakur)
Brother-in-law (sister’s husband): քեռայր (kerayr)
Sister-in-law (husband’s sister): տալ (dal)
Sister-in-law (brother's wife): հարս (hars)
As you will notice, some of these terms are repeated: the sister’s husband (kerayr) and the brother’s wife (hars) are identified in the same way on both sides. The word kerayr is a compound word: քեռ (ker) derives from քոյր (kooyr “sister”) and այր (ayr) means “husband.” On the other hand, hars is the word for “bride,” which probably indicates that the term for “sister-in-law” was lost in the mist of time.

While other terms like keni, dakur, and dal are specific root words, it is not the same for the groom’s brother-in-law. The word anertzak is compound (aner + tzak): it means “father-in-law’s child.”
We can also throw a couple of more terms in the mix:

a) Groom’s sister-in-law’s husband: քենեկալ (kenegal). Etymologically, it refers to the “sister-in-law’s holder” (keni + gal root of the verb galel “to hold”);
b) Bride’s brother-in-law’s (husband’s brother) wife: ներ (ner).

In the other cases, when you refer to the husband of a sister-in-law, you can use kerayr, and if it is the wife of a brother-in-law, then hars.

Of course, it is not as easy as “brother-in-law” and “sister-in-law,” but at least, when you want to refer to one of your in-laws, if you use the proper term, nobody will get confused about who you are talking about…

Dealing with In-Laws (1)

The English language has a very easy way to deal with relatives: it uses “in-law.” You have father-in-law, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and brother-in-law. This shows, in fact, that the language actually lost, over time, the kinship terms that were common to Indo-European languages.

Some of those languages are more conservative than others. Armenian, for instance, mostly maintained all those terms, with the exception of “nephew” and “niece,” where we need to make recourse to artificial words (եղբօրորդի/yeghporortee “brother’s son” and եղբօր աղջիկ/yeghpor aghcheeg “brother’s daughter”) to denote them.

What does Armenian do with the in-laws? It has a collection of terms specifically for each of them, and on both sides!

This time we will only deal with father-in-law and mother-in-law. It turns out that, unlike English, if you are the groom, you call your wife’s parents in a certain way, and if you are the bride, you call your husband’s parents in a different way:

Groom
Father in law: աներ (aner)
Mother-in-law: զոքանչ (zokanch).

Bride
Father-in-law: կեսրայր (gesrayr) or սկեսրայր (usgesrayr)
Mother-in-law: կեսուր (gesoor) or սկեսուր (usgesoor)

Besides mixing one side and the other, there are also mistakes in the use of each term. The most common is the wrong use of aner. We may hear people calling their father-in-law աներ հայր (aner hayr). Since aner means “bride’s father,” then aner hayr would be… “father of the bride’s father”! Even worse, you can hear people using աներ մայր (aner mayr), which is an indescribable cocktail: “mother of the bride’s father”!

The same superfluous use of hayr (“father”) and mayr (“mother”) appears when we go to the bride’s side. We may come across կեսուր հայր (gesoor hayr), which is a corruption of gesrayr, and it would mean “father of the mother-in-law,” and կեսուր մայր (gesoor mayr), where people end saying “mother of the bride’s mother.”

Once you clean up the mess, you will see that is very easy: instead of having one word to designate a father-in-law and one a mother-in-law, you have two. We should assume that you can manage learning four words instead of two, right?

Salty and Sweet

A previous column (April 28, 2016) explained how Armenian աղ (agh) and English salt were related to each other. Now it seems fit to explore how salt, in the end, may become… sweet.

Salt gives flavor to all sorts of food, and, of course, it may be used in a metaphorical sense, as Jesus did in the Sermon of the Mount: “You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost its flavor, with what will it be salted? It is then good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under the feet of men” (Matthew 5:13). Without salt, let aside all other condiments, food loses an essential nutrient and much of its actual taste.

 The concept of flavor implies, by extension, that salt also provides taste, including “sweetness.” The Armenian language has reflected that in a few words. Classical Armenian had the word աղու (aghoo), which meant “tasty, sweet.” Villages and mountains in Eastern and Western Armenia were and are named Աղու (Aghoo). The name comes from the combination of the word agh and the suffix ու (oo), used in adjectives like հատու (hadoo, from had(el) “to cut” + oo, meaning “sharp”).

But we have more surprises: two common words that are only used in Western Armenian and also have agh as their source. One of them is the word աղուոր (aghoo + or = aghvor), with the meaning of “good, nice” (e.g. աղուոր աղջիկ / aghvor aghchig “nice girl”). The other is աղէկ (agheg), which means “good” (e.g. աղէկ պայմաններ / agheg baymanner “good conditions”).

Doesn’t it sound convincing? In such cases, comparative examples offer a solution. The Russian word for “salt,” from the same Proto-Indo-European source, is sol’ . Two surprising derivations of this word are “sweet” (sladkii) and “candy” (sladosti). Why? Such are the mysteries of language

Some Armenian Words That Sound (Almost) Like English... Or Not

As Indo-European languages, Armenian and English share vocabulary that comes from the depths of history, from the time when a common grandparent was supposed to have existed someplace in Eurasia around 3000 B.C. Proto-Indo-European (P.I.E.)—the reputed grandparent of all Indo-European languages, from Farsi to Spanish—has not been attested in any ancient document and has been reconstructed on the basis of language studies. For this reason, scholars use asterisks, as a convention, to represent any of its words. This is why we will actually find a cluster of stars below.

Armenian and English have in common, for example, the words “father” and “mother.” Although the latter look somehow different to their Armenian counterpart հայր (hayr) and մայր (mayr), there is no doubt that both share the same ancestors: P.I.E. *pǝter and *mater.

P.I.E.  * pǝter > Proto-Germanic *fader > English father P.I.E.  * pǝter> Proto-Armenian *hayer > Armenian hayr (հայր) P.I.E.  * mater > Proto-Germanic *moder > English mother P.I.E.  * mater> Proto-Armenian *mayer > Armenian mayr (մայր)

The replacement of *ter by yr (յր) in Armenian may look odd. Comparative linguistics has found out that most Indo-European languages have kept something closer to a *t, such as t, d, or th, to say “mother” or “father,” while it is only in Armenian where P.I.E. *t became y over a certain amount of time. Another example of this rule is seen in the word այրել (ayrel , “to burn”), whose root ayr comes from P.I.E. *ater.

It is not strange, then that Proto-Indo-European *p, after its division, yielded different sounds, such as a*f in Proto-Germanic and a*h in Proto-Armenian. This accounts for the relation between father and hayr (the first parts of mother and mayr are easy to relate). The same as its relatives, Dutch vader (it may well have inspired the name of the “dark father” of Star Wars, Darth Vader) and German vater, English father comes from their common parent, Proto-Germanic *fader.

This is not an isolated example. The oldest poem of Armenian literature, namely, the birth of Vahagn, god of storm, fire, and war, includes the following line in his physical description:

Նա հուր հեր ունէր (Na hoor her ooner, “Fiery hair had he”).

Today commonly used in poetic language, hoor (“fire,” hence “fiery”)—synonym to կրակ (grag)--has been or may have been the source for many proper and common nouns, such as the male names Հրաչեայ (Hrachya) and Հրայր (Hrayr), for instance, and standard words like հրշէջ (hrshech, “fireman”), հրաբուխ (hrapookh, “volcano”), and others. Both hoor and fire (< Proto-Germanic fōr) constitute another related pair, whose ultimate common source is P.I.E *puro.

Incidentally, someone might relate Armenian her and English hair; the latter is derived from Proto-Germanic *hera, which at its turn came from P.I.E. *k’er(s) (“stiff hair, bristle”):

1. Both her and hair look alike and have the same meaning.
2. Even though the standard Armenian word for “hair” is մազ (maz), we use her in compounds like շիկահեր (shigaher, “red-haired”) or հերակալ (heragal, “headband”).

However, this is an optical illusion. In the 1920s, Hrachia Adjarian had already stated in his etymological dictionary that the similitude between her—whose actual origin is unknown— and hair was just casual. Since then, it has been shown that the poem about Vahagn, where the word her is already present, reflected words and images belonging to the common Indo-European time (third millennium B.C.), probably long before the ancestors of the English language washed their . . . *hera.

The mysteries of language are still infinite.

The Armenian Carpet

British polymath Sir William Jones (1746-1794) enunciated for the first time the existence of the Indo-European family of languages in 1786. It already comprised languages from England to India. In the early nineteenth century, the Armenian language was also incorporated into the family, and in 1875 German linguist Heinrich Hübschmann (1848-1908) demonstrated, contrary to generally held belief, that Armenian was not part of the Iranian branch, but was an independent branch.

For the past hundred and thirty years, extensive research has been carried to study the Armenian language and its relations with its relatives within the family. It has been shown that Armenian has the closest relation with Iranian and Greek, to the point that we may consider them first cousins.

Similar to other Indo-European languages, English is a distant cousin to Armenian. This would not be surprising, if we consider the geographic distance between the lands where Armenian and English were and are spoken. But it is surprising to find out that both languages, despite that distance, share a few words with practically the same phonetics and meaning.

One of them is our familiar term carpet. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it comes from Middle English carpet “coarse cloth” (late 13th century) and was derived from Middle French carpite “heavy decorated cloth”(< Old Italian carpita “thick woolen cloth” < Italian carpire, Latin carpere “to pluck”).

Let’s go to Armenian. Classical Armenian (krapar) had a word, capert (կապերտ; the Western Armenian pronunciation is gaberd), which already appears in the Bible and means“piece of cloth.” It may or may not be related to the word cap “knot” (կապ, Western Armenian gab); the etymological dictionary of famed linguist Hrachia Adjarian (1876-1953) says nothing about that, which means that he did not consider it possible.

The colloquial form of capert was carpet, said Adjarian, and brought forward a collection of words in Armenian dialects very close to the English one: carpet (կարպետ) in Salmast, Van, Yerevan, and Tiflis, the same as in Kharpert and Sepastia (accented on the last syllable). They call it carpret (կարպրէտ)(accented on the first syllable) in Gharabagh, and called it garpet (կարբեդ) in Alashkert and Moush. The Armenians from Tigranakert (Diarbekir) used the word cârpit (գարբիդ), and the Armenians in Hamshen say carpit (գարբիդ). Interestingly, all of these words mean “rug without hair.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, the German linguist Erich Berneker published an etymological dictionary of the Slavic languages in two volumes (Heidelberg, 1908-1914). He noticed that the Armenian dialectal words were the same as the abovementioned European words, and also German karpet, Hungarian and Serbian karpit (“curtain”), and Serbian krpita (“rug to cover the table”). Adjarian took note of this and asked himself whether the source of these words was not, instead of Latin carpo “to knit wool or thread,” the late Armenian form carpet. In the end, the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia had been one of the main commercial venues for European traders in the Middle Ages, including carpets. Florentine merchant Francesco Balducci Pegolotti reported that carpets were imported from Sis, the capital of Cilicia, and Ayas, its main port, to Florence in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. What could have been a “thick woolen cloth” in Italian, if not a rug?

Thus, the ubiquitous carpet may have flown from Armenian, through Italian and French, into the English language, and centuries later, when Persian carpets were introduced in Europe, the word carpet went down to the floor.