79 replies to this topic

[aurguplu]

tigrannesiii,

yes, this is very possible. the silk road was in place by roman times and in all probability before that, and the flow of goods and ideas was not always one-way: the greek meander motif made its way into china in the centuries b.c., and the romans are known to have had factories and other installations as far east as malaysia.

let me tell you of a rather curious discovery that was made in aegean turkey about one or two decades ago:

the ancient greek ruins that dot the place are full of various ornaments in the forms of swirls, meanders etc. the dresses of the turkmen nomads that abound there are also full of different but visibly similar ornaments. of course, when the similarity was discovered, it was naturally supposed that the turks who had come later, had borrowed the ornaments to be seen on the greek monuments that were exposed above the ground here and there. then it was discovered that the same motifs were found further east in anatolia, and even further east in azerbaijan and as far as turkmenistan. no large scale eastward movement of turks after their arrival into anatolia is known, and people were puzzled quite a bit.

then of course, the mystery was solved: the bactrian greeks! they had penetrated as far east as afghanistan, and established cities there (there is a place in afghanistan, ay khanoum (a turkish name as you can see) which has been dug out, and is a greek site). they of course took the motifs they found there and left quite a bit of theirs there as well. when the turks came in a few hundred years later (we hadn't yet permanently settled there until a bit later), they took some of those motifs, and of course some of those turks made for anatolia a few centuries later, and today you have two very different interpretations of the same set of motifs side by side!

history is fascinating.

[aurguplu]

1. i know the above explanation re the origin of "hay", also, another explanation that finds favour with the archaeologists/specialists of ancient languages is that it derives from something like "hayk'" (can't get the exact transliteration on this keyboard) meaning "hittite". this is quite possible, as the greeks in byzantine times were calling themselves "romaika" after the roman empire, and anatolian turks were calling themselves "rum" after the same empire. if the armenians ever were in a confederation where the hittites were the bosses, then they could have been called by the same name as well. i understand "hayasa-", "hayk" and a few other versions are pretty old.

2. what factors led me to accept the genocide:

a) my family has played a role in turkish affairs for quite a while now, including before, during and after 1915, and i was exposed to "alternative" versions of history very early on.

b) the wet nurse of a member of our family had lost two sons in the "kıyım", as a senior member of my family had told me.

c) a member of my family, when he was a teenager, had had to travel from some place in anatolia to istanbul (or was it vice versa?) in 1915-1916. their cart was stopped by the chetes en route and all males ordered to get out. they were then told that no turkish adult male shall pass that gorge without first killing an armenian. that member of my family was about 12 at the time, so he was saved. several others were not that lucky: they were taken behind the hill and some time later two shots were heard. then they were sent back to the cart and the cart was allowed to continue.

one of these unlucky ones was a senior member of the CUP and a party ideologue. he did not open his mouth all the way to their destination.

d) my (english) arabic tutor at oxford, whom i have always been very fond of, used to make jokes about the armenian genocide with other tutors in front of me saying things like "when the germans organised it for them".

a, b, and c are confirmations of killings rather than the genocide. many turkish families have similar stories to tell, and the killings themselves have never really been denied. what was denied was that the whole thing was a state-engineered attempt to specifically eliminate, or drastically reduce the armenian nation in turkey. d was an eye opener, and it led me to read a bit more on it while abroad (those days it wasn't advisable to nose about asking for things armenian in turkey), and of course, several salient facts emerged:

i) there were some 18 million people in anatolia in 1914, some 1.3 million of which (by our own account) were armenian. after the war, there were 12 million people in anatolia, some 70,000 of which were armenian. looks like something pretty bad has happened to the armenians, doesn't it?

ii) the turkish parliamentary archives were then closed from 1915 onwards. if you had something to hide about the foundation of the republic, 1919 at the earliest would be a more likely date. why 1915?

iii) armenians in turkish history books make a brief appearance in WWI, when they betray us in favour of the russians, kill us, and then disappear. no word before, no word after. a bit enigmatic. makes you ask for more info.

iv) i don't know how early i acquired it, but like most turks, i knew from very early on that "something very bad" had gone on between the turks and the armenians, and therefore the two peoples had an invisible wall between them. even turkish children as young as six are to some degree aware of this "something very bad".

well, how i came to accept the genocide. i had had to accept a number of ugly facts in life, some about people i knew, others about my nation, others about other things. i have a tendency to stop as soon as i realise that whatever intellectual exercise that i am doing is self-deception/wishful thinking etc. you had 18 m people, 1.3 m of whom were armenian. today you have 70 m people, 70,000 of whom are armenian. if you put it this blunt, i.e. call a spade a spade, you can't ecsape the conclusion that it was a genocide.

of course you cannot "prove" or "disprove" that it was a genocide, as authenticated first hand documents are not there (the archives of the CUP are lost and orders at any rate were very probably oral). but there comes a point when you realise that the genocide explanation is far more plausible and simpler than anything that the establishment makes up.

i can tell from my own experience that the best way to make a turk accept the fact is to make expose him to three versions of the story (armenian, turkish, third party: german is best). the more you try to force it upon them, the more they will feel compelled to deny because he will feel that he personally is being charged.

another factor is the land claims business. the main reason why turkey keeps denying the whole thing is the land claims, and as long as the persist (or are tied to the genocide claims) the future of the issue is bleak. the overwhelming majority of turks have no doubt whatsoever that the genocide claims are just a scam to take half of turkey away, and then the kurds will come along, then the greeks, and it will be sevres. it is extremely important to understand this, as many turks don't just make this up as a way to evade the genocide issue, but genuinely believe it, and let's face it, the armenian side habitually ties one issue to the other.

if you got some educating to do, perhaps the best advice i can give you is always to keep in mind that the other side really believes what he says. don't say something like he is lying, but rather that he has got his facts wrong. put the facts before him and then ask him what he thinks happened. i had put my facts before him and arrived at the genocide conclusion on my own.

[aurguplu]

arpa,

during the linguistic purges of atatürk it was the arabic and persian vocabulary that was the main target. the "primitive sound" kh does not occur in istanbul turkish, the basis of our official idiom. it is there in inner and eastern anatolian dialects, which always had had a low status anyway. there was a letter denoting "kh" in the ottoman script, which was used to render the arabic "kh" and the persian and turkish "kh" IN WRITING. these were pronounced as "h" as istanbul turks deem the "kh" sound as gross. "kh" probably fell from istanbul pronunciation by the 18th century (as contemporary european renderings of urkish pronunciation of the time, and evidence from poetry, indicate).

we lost two sounds thanks to the language reform, the closed "e" (the "e" between dark "e" and "i", and the barred "i" (the "i" between "i" and "ı"), but that is more because of these anatolians having little notion of linguistic niceties rather than any concerted action on the part of the government.

and i think the "mountain of pain" was a joke and not a theory ever held seriously by anyone.

cheers,

[aurguplu]

As to the Turkish "yagh"; "The (Arm.)colloquial "yegh" has found its way into many other languages, most particularly into the Tatar dialects. There is a rule in the Tatar languages that the "e" sound must not precede a consonant, so the "e" was modified into an "a", hence the Turkish "yagh" from the original Armenain "yegh".

arpa,

i happen to know some tatar (both crimean and kazan) and there is no such rule there. "e" sometimes changes to "i" but 1) this is recent, and 2) it has not got something to do with consonants in general.

what do you mean by "tatar languages" by the way? there are only two extant ( crimean and kazan) and one extinct (kuman), and they are part of the kipchak group of turkic languages, together with bashkir, kazakh, karaim, karachay-malkar and nogai. ours (turkish) is oghuz, together with azeri, kashgai, khorasan turkish, and turkmen. the two groups separated about 1,000-1,500 years ago.

cheers,

[aurguplu]

tigrannesiii,

i forgot to add:

there are references to the killings being part o a genocidal plan in the turkish literature of, or concerning, the period, written as memoirs (one example i can come up with is the "zeytindağı" (mount of olives) of falih rıfkı atay). as far as i know there is quite some evidence in such works written by turks that the state was behind the killings one way or the other.

take care,

[aurguplu]

PS. I also have access to many Turkic Altaic words that have derived from the Arm. "yegh". Some of them may not be readily recognizable such as the Altai "yu'", Kirghiz "jau", Yakut "aga" etc.

arpa,

how on earth do you derive kirghiz altai and yakut (for god's sake, yakut!) word (and one a basic part of the vocabulary) from an armenian word? have the armenians ever been east of the caspian in any numbers, and why would these guys use an armenian word for "fat" (that's what it originally meant: anything lipid) when they had plenty of fat around them in the form of sheep?

besides, i expect your comments on the eurasiatic/nostratic stuff i had posted earlier on.

cheers,

[aurguplu]

re orenag/örnek:

i think the following is plausible to some degree:

since orenag can be derived from an armenian root, and örnek from a turkish one, it might be that there were originally two independent words, the armenian orenag and the turkish örnek. the meanings appear to have been slightly different, if "orenag" originally meant something like "rule" and "örnek" originally mean something like "textile pattern" the meanings were vaguely alike, and people bilingual in turkish/armenian started to use them interchangeably. örnek is found as far east as kazakh and uighur, and means textile pattern there (something woven), and it has a perfectly fitting turkish etymology (ör-enek). i find it a bit hard to conceive that the kazakhs would import an armenian word for an activity that they had pursued for millennia (weaving) which looked just like the word they would have coined from a turkic root if they had cared to!

i think the two different origins and then parallel existence theory is the least implausible: there are a few such instances between unrelated languages that had lived side by side.

[bellthecat]

The slashed "l" is simply a phonetic representation/translitteration for a sound that is similar to the "ch" in the German "Bach" or Scottish "loch" but with a little bit of an "r" sound added. It is absolutely nothing like the "L" in "fall". It is also not a sound found in modern Turkish, hence the "Turkified" spelling "Akdamar" (although the Kurds around Lake van still seem to pronounce it correctly, regardless of how they spell it).

Although it is spelt Aght'amar in many books, I prefer Acht'amar since that more closely resembles the correct pronounciation.

The "gh" spelling probably came about because the first writer to describe it in detail (Lynch - 1895) was English educated, and the first writer to write about it academically (Nicole Thierry - 1960s) was French - both races (like Turks ) are notoriously uwilling to pronounce foreign words correctly. Bachman (1913) who was German, spells it more accurately as "Achthamar".

[bellthecat]

The correct name in Turkish is Agri Dagi. During the 19th century (and, presumably, earlier) this was the name of the entire mountain range stretching as far west as Kagizman.

Is it likely that this entire range is named after an insignificant little village on the southern slopes of Ararat? I do not think it is.

In addition, "painful" is a correct description for the tortuous tracks that once crossed over these mountains when compared to the more gentle passes over other ranges in the region. During the 19th century, European travellers mention even more ridiculous names for mountain passes in Turkey, like "camel tiring pass" or "trouser ripping pass"!

So, probably the current name for Ararat was derived from the old name of the entire mountain range, and the name of the mountain range is perhaps derived fom the characteristics of the routes over it.

Steve

[Twilight Bark]

Much has been said in the forum since I started my latest "silent period", and I have resisted the temptation to comment. But silly etymology for place names has a special place in my heart for some reason.

While we don't really know the origin of Agri (pronounced approximately Agh-ruh), we can be pretty sure it has nothing to do with pain. The mountain does not need to be named after the village. The village could have been named after the mountain. Or both could be named after a diety or some such. Also, just because the namesake village was small in historical times does not mean that it was insignificant in prehistoric periods. If you can prove that Armenians had a good reason to name their village in ancient times after a Turkish word for pain, then you might have a case. But you don't.

And lastly, the mountain name "Agri" and the word "agri" meaning pain are pronounced with the stress put on different syllables. In the mountain name the stress is on the first syllable, whereas in the word meaning "pain" it is in the second syllable. If the mountain were named after "pain", the stress would be at the end of the word.

TB

[nairi]

It's always hard to tell how people used to pronounce words 800 years ago, especially if there are no recordings. Guesses are that many Armenian words that now have a clear /l/, uvular /r/ or /x/, used to have a voiceless /l/, as in the Welsh "ll". Whether this is true or not, no one should be surprised that transcriptions of words such as Akhtamar are very varied today (especially if we take idiolects and allophones into account).

[bellthecat]

Who here is saying that Ahkori village was named after the Turkish word for pain? No-one, as far as I can read. Arpa is saying that Agri is probably a corruption of the name Akhori, and I'm saying that there is probably no connection between the name Agri and Ahkori, so I don't quite get your point that I should prove there is!

The key point is that Agri was a name used for the entire mountain range, not just Ararat. Akhori probably always was the largest settlement on the Northern slopes (I said Southern earlier, my mistake) of Ararat - but there always were far bigger and more important places that were also near to that range, so if the Agri range is named after a place, why pick a remote and unimportant place like Akhori?

But, isn't stress is the least standard and the easiest thing to vary in the pronounciation of a word? And is something very liable to change over time or distance? Who knows how the locals pronounced the word Agri several hundred years ago.

[aurguplu]

tb,

re the accent: in turkish, accent is one of stress, and it usually falls on the last syllable, especially of nouns. but place-names never have accent on the last syllable, there the syllable typically moves to the penultimate position (if it is on the antepenultimate, then you have reason to doubt the word's turkish origin).

for instance, kurtuluş means "salvation" in turkish, and the accent is on the last syllable, but kurtuluş with the accent on the first syllable is the name of the quarter where a number of armenian families still live.

taksim with stress on last syllable means "division, allotment", taksim with stress on the first is the name of the taksim square in istanbul.

steve,

slashed l represents a "w"-like sound in polish which originally developed from the slavic dark "l". it is also used to transliterate the russian and turkish dark l (like in russian ja padal (i fell) or turkish aldım (i took)). to the best of my knowledge it is also used in IPA and the north american transliteration systems. if it is used to transcribe some other sound in armenian, which may of course be, then this is completely independent from its normally accepted international usage to transliterate dark l.

(mind you, "gh", kh" etc, might also have evolved from dark l, which is entirely possible and documented in a number of cases).

[aurguplu]

steve, tb,

the overwhelming majority of mountain names in turkey (as well as other place names) are non-turkic in origin, but have acquired a turkic-looking garb in pronunciation and spelling terms over the centuries. it would be abit fuile to look for a turkish origin of an armenian name for a mountain that has been their symbol for three thousand years. the name of the mountain is either armenian or kurdish (or urartian or georgian), but i would be very surprised to learn it to be turkish.

or, maybe "agri" is a recent name, and until comparatively recently, it was called by another name. i don't know.

cheers,

[Twilight Bark]

I understand the point about shifting the stress (as a practical means to distinguish between the ordinary usage of the word and as a proper noun). That would be necessitated by daily life in a city. However, can you provide similar examples where mountain names are involved? I am not asking rhetorically.

[Twilight Bark]

Indeed. Perhaps you will if you read more carefully.

Bye for now.

TB

[ October 22, 2002, 10:19 AM: Message edited by: Twilight Bark ]

[Twilight Bark]

[ October 22, 2002, 10:19 AM: Message edited by: Twilight Bark ]

[aurguplu]

tb,

the only mountain name that comes to my mind that has the stress on the second syllable is süphan dağı (your sipan), and i think that is either because it has only two syllables (but then again, both agri and toros, both stressed on the first syllable, have two syllables), or because süphan is a koranic word (subhan with long a). of course, the transition from sipan to süphan probably took place during the republican period, and i would very much like to know how the locals (who are probably kurdish) call the mountain.

as a rule (of which i do not really know any exceptions other than süphan dağı) place names are never stressed on the last syllable. in fact, this rule is in turkish grammar books (but then again, i take certain "rules" in these books with a huge grain of salt). i have no evidence in favour or to the contrary whether that would be necessitated by life in the city. one should really consult a work turkish dialectology, and these are improving in time (meaning that many works composed earlier, which recorded dialects that are on the verge of dying out thanks to television and radio, are not that properly recorded: they were usually decent at recording phonemes (sounds), but info re the accents leave much to be desired).

so i am afraid i have no very clear answer to your question. but i can say that as a native speaker of turkish, a place-name stressed on the last syllable sounds very un-turkish to me. we even shift the stress to the penultimate in foreign place names where it would be on the ultimate, like paris.

[aurguplu]

that's true, and is always a hotbed of debate among historical linguists of any language. some evidence can be derived from poetry (where things that don't rhyme today rhymed a thousand years ago, in fact, the chinese were among the first to note this, and realised that language was subject to change).

frankly, we probably need a grabar/krapart specialist to sort us out in this matter.

[nairi]

Very true.