This is a follow-up on
my thoughts on PIE *bhag. I’ve come
across an article by Hrach Martirosyan (“The place of Armenian in the Indo-European
Language family: the relationship with Greek and Indo-Iranian”, Journal of
Language Relationship, No. 10 / August 2013, p. 85 - 138), PDF here, where he adduces Armenian bak “courtyard;
sheep pen, sun or moon halo” (missing in NIL) as a cognate of Indo-Iranian *bha:gá-: Sanskrit bha:gá- m.
“prosperity, good fortune, property, personified distribution”, Old Avestan ba:ga- “part”, the descendants of which
took on the meaning “landed property, fief, garden” (p.99, §5.1.3). Martirosyan
admits the possibility that this is not a cognate, but an old loan from
Iranian; he names one argument for it being a loan, namely the fact that the Armenian
word is an a-stem, while the Indo-Iranian correspondences are o-stems;
incorporation as an a-stem seems to be the expected outcome for an Iranian *ba:ga-; as another argument for a loan I
would also see the fact that there seem to be no other formations from a root *bhag- in Armenian. On the
other hand, it would have to be an old loan from before the Armenian consonant
shift, but Martirosyan admits that there are other such loans.
If this is not a loan, but a cognate, it
would require a proto-form *ba:g-a:-,
which could be explained as a Vrddhi-formation from *bhag- or point to a PIE *bheH2g-eH2- (Martirosyan’s reconstruction).
Therefore, accepting bak as a cognate
would in any case require us to posit a root PIE *bhag- or bheH2g-
separate from *bheg- “break”
(continuants of the latter root are well-attested in Armenian).
1 Kommentar:
Not that I have any particular expertise in this area, but I would bet on its being a loan. Intriguing, though.
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