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]

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.