Jack O'George

[pne]

I was just reading the Wikipedia entry on Mind Your Language and saw that one character was played by Kevork Malikyan.

So I thought, hey, his first name reminds me of Jack Kevorkian's last name.

And that made me think, hey, -ian is an Armenian patronymic, isn't it. So it would make sense that there's a given name "Kevork" that "Kevorkian" is derived from.

And I wondered what names that might be cognate with, and thought it might be "George"... I seemed to recall "o" turning into "vo" in some places in Armenian, so "Kevork" matches fairly well with "Georg".

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

And I take it you know all about the West Armenian consonant shift that flips voiced and voiceless unaspirated consonants, right? So Classical Armenian Gevorg remains so in Eastern Armenian while becoming Western Kevork. (Incidentally, this underlines the recent vintage of Malik [< Ar. ملك], since if it were borrowed pre-shift, you'd expect *Maligian.)

With that in mind, see if you can decipher the cognates of these other comon Western Armenian surnames:

Andonian
Bedrosian
Kasparian
Krikorian
Margosian
Matevosian

These have one or more other changes as well:

Boghosian
Hagopian
Hovesepian
Sahagian
Yeghiazarian

[pne.livejournal.com]

And I take it you know all about the West Armenian consonant shift that flips voiced and voiceless unaspirated consonants, right?

Well, "know all about" is an overstatement, but I knew there was something up with consonant voicing in Armenian - I didn't remember the details, though.

Is it a straight flip -- all voiced consonants become voiceless unaspirated and vice versa? I wonder how that came about, without some kind of middle ground they could chain-shift around.

With that in mind, see if you can decipher the cognates of these other comon Western Armenian surnames:

Andonian
Bedrosian
Kasparian
Krikorian
Margosian
Matevosian

Αντώνιος, Πέτρος, Caspar/Gaspar[*], Γρηγόριος, Μάρκος, Ματθαίος, I suppose.

[*] I've seen both versions, but I don't know where they come from. I also don't know this as a Greek name like the others.

These have one or more other changes as well:

Boghosian
Hagopian
Hovesepian
Sahagian
Yeghiazarian

Hm, 2 and 3 are Jacob and Joseph (though isn't it "Hovsepian" without the -e- in -ves-?), I suppose.

I also know about "Hovhannes" (or something like that), so I presume /j/ -> /h/ word-initially was a fairly systematic change at some point.

I can't think of any cognates for the other three names, though.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Both variants "Hovesepian" and "Hovsepian" exist. And, yes, there was a historic shift of /j/ to /h/, but only in initial position.

Here's a clue: Classical Armenian /ɫ/ > Modern Armenian /ɣ/.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I suppose Yeghiazarian comes from Eliezer, perhaps?

I'm less sure about Boghosian, though - I suppose the proto-form is something like *Polos, but that doesn't ring a bell. Unless it's from Paulus (possibly via Greek Παύλος)?

What about Sahagian - Isaac, perhaps?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

All correct! /aw/ monophthongised to /o/ in Classical Armenian, so Παύλος > Պօղոս Pōɫos. In Modern Armenian, there is no longer any distinction between the vowel sounds of օ and ո.

In "Yeghiazar", we see diphthongisation of initial /e/ to /je/ (paralleled by dipthongisation of initial /o/ to /vo/).

[pne.livejournal.com]

Whee!

And thanks for this little activity!

[anicca-anicca.livejournal.com]

So langsam machst Du mir Angst.

[pne.livejournal.com]

the West Armenian consonant shift that flips voiced and voiceless unaspirated consonants

Speaking of which - I've had "learning the Armenian alphabet" on my to-do list for ages, and one of the things that keeps putting me off when I occasionally attempt it is not knowing which pronunciation to learn (Western or Eastern).

Do you have any recommendations? Is either more "useful" (for some subjective value thereof)?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

FWIW, most Armenians living in Western Europe speak Western Armenian.

The pronunciation differences are really very minor; it's not hard to learn both pronunciations. One advantage to the Western version of the alphabet is that it hasn't undergone the same spelling reform as Eastern Armenian, a process which eliminated some letters (such as օ) and changed rules on the usage of others (for instance, Յ can no longer represent /h/ in initial position). It did improve the sound-symbol correspondences, but the price was the loss of a lot of etymological information.

Since I imagine you're more interested in how Armenian relates to other languages (such as Greek), you'd be better served learning a more etymological spelling. Of course, if that's your focus, probably the best approach would be to learn the Classical Armenian values, then the few correspondences necessary to read them with modern Eastern or Western pronunciations as need be.

Oh, and about the sound shift. I think the current favoured theory is that the Classical Armenian distinction was: unaspirated, ejective, and aspirated. In Eastern dialects, the unaspirated series was non-contrastively voiced as well, and this persists even in varieties which have lost distinctive glottalisation. In Western varieties, the ejective series simply became the voiced series.