Evening Etc.

[nairi]

Here's what I got from a (Dutch) acquaintance (I translated it from Dutch):

 

I have already mentioned the lack of night/nuit and Indo-European "yesterday" in Armenian. It is striking that IE had no word for "tomorrow".

Specialisation of "vesper" to (Christian) communion chant made that Latin needed another word for evening (soir/sera from serus, late). (The use of the Armenian "vesper", gisher, came before "evening" was dropped. The meaning of evening for gisher was covered by yerek, now yereko). The Latin "mane", early, was kept in demain and manana. In late-Latin it was replaced by its predecessor of the French matin.

In German "vesper" also disappeared.

I think it's funny that "vaghuts", long ago, is a fossilized ablative, so literally "since early", almost like our own (Dutch) "vroeger".

Armenian "tiv", time/day, has been replaced by Farsi "zham" and (IE) "or".

[Arpa]

Did you have to darken our days? :)

 

Inchu mtagnetsir mer aravot@? :)

 

Yes, words do disappear, others appear and many evolve to an unrecognizbale form.

 

In Nairi's words; Language is living and dynamic. Meaning, constantly moving and improving.

 

Bari ereko, bari gisher, bari or yev bari luys.

 

It is assumed that "gisher", a native Armenian word is in kinship with "vesper" which in turn is from the Greek "esperos". We are familiar with the Greek expressions of "kali mera" and "kali spera", good day and good evening respectively. How espera/vesper ends up as gisher is beyond my amateur comprehension.

 

Erek, yesteday is from "ereko", evening, as in last night or yesterday. Ajarian does say that there are varied spellings of the word like "erik" and "erek" where the second E is the seventh letter Eh, however he may have had a memory lapse that in fact the first E should also be the seventh letter rather than the fifth "yech" based on his theory that words beginning with the seventh letter like esh and ejq were at one time pronounced not as the straight E sound but slightly tending towards the I sound, the reason why esh becomes ishou and ejq becomes ijnel (to descend). Based on that "erek/yerek/yereg", yesterday should be spelled as E-re-yech-ken. Just as above "erek/ereko" becomes "irikun" and "iriknamut" etc.

 

As to tomorrow, the most common and seemingly the only word is "vagh". The word in fact means early or ancient. Its use to mean tomorrow may have derived by the partial use of the phrase "vagh aravot". i.e. early morning. Why not!!

Edited February 8, 2004 by Arpa