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

[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.