On Mon, 21 Jan 2002, tgpedersen wrote:
> In one website, I saw the name of the Armenian god of war, Vahagn,
> explained as coming from *vah- "carry", *agn- "fire", thus a fire-
> bringing, Prometheus-like god. If so, judging from *vah-, it must be
> Indic, not Iranian (the god himself is a "translation" of the Iranian
> god <V&r&Tragna->, but the compound type (verb+object cf. French
> <porte-parole> etc) doesn't look right. On the other hand, getting
> from V&r&Tragna- to Vahagn, how would you get rid of all those r's?
> That does't look right either. Anyone have a solution (an Indian one
> would of course be the most interesting)?
Dear Torsten,
it is definitely Iranian *vr{th}ra-gna- with syllabic /r/ trated as /ar/
and {th}r > Middle Persian hr (> rh) reduced to /h/ as in a few other
examples representing an old layer of Iranian loans in Armenian:
1. the fem. suffix -uhi, old in but a single example, viz. taguhi 'queen',
fem. of tagawor 'king', literally 'crown-bearer', explained by Benveniste
from *ta:ga-br{th}ri: (better *-bar{th}ri:, B.A.Olsen, The Noun in
Biblical Armenian 592).
2. mah 'death' (u-stem), alternative spelling marh (Bolognesi Imprestiti),
identical with Av. m@...@{th}iiu-.
3. pah 'guard' (u-stem), variant spelling parh in NT mss., is Iran.
*pa:{th}ra- 'protection', Mod.Pers. pa:s 'guard'.
4. vahan 'shield' (i/a-stem), derivative from *vr{th}ra- 'protection'.
Younger Iranian loans retain rh, as as^xarh 'country' : Avest. xs^a{th}ra-
'power'.
It seems that Middle Iranian /hr/ was metathesized to /rh/ and then, in an
early treatment, lost the /r/ in Armenian, while later loans retain /rh/.
The words with variants date from the period of change or have been
borrowed twice. There are no examples of -(r)h- in the indigeneous parts
of the vocabulary.
The connection of Vahagn and V@...@{th}ra{gh}na- is treated at some length
by Hübschmann, Armenische Grammatik 75-77 (1897).
Jens