Dear David,
Thanks for your eagerness to help. Now it is my turn
to reveal what I really want
:)
I am interested in all those words that were needed to
refer relatively sophisticated institutions,
especially to institutions relevant for running an
elaborate state bureaucracy. Bureaucracies have a long
history in the history of the ancient Near East, but
Iranians and Persians in particular were surely
newcomers in this area. So, one should assume that the
newcomers would borrow many words related to these
relatively sophisticated institutions. And yet the
direction of the borrowing seems to have different: we
seem to have many loan words referring to bureaucracy
in Akkadian, Elamite and Aramaic from Iranian
languages. Of course, all this is due to the existence
of the Achaemenid empire and its scribal practices,
but where did the Persians get these words in the
first place?
That the words should look Iranian is not a surprise:
they are usually not actually attested in Old Persian,
but are reconstructed on the basis of words appearing
in Elamite, Akkadian or Aramaic. In view of this, one
should not high very expectations on tracing their
possibly non-Iranian origins
:) However, when I tried
to learn something about scholarly opinions on this
matter, I immediately stumbled on
ganzabara, i.e. treasurer. Here is what Matthew
Syolper says about ganzabara:
The cluster -nz- (rather than -nd- or the
unmetathesized -zn-) indicates that the common Old
Iranian form was originally non-Persian, so-called
Median.
http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/History/hakhamaneshian/ganzabara.htm
Alas, very little is known about Median language. And
even if knew more about it, we would not necessarily
be any wiser about the source of bureaucracy-related
words in Old Persian as the contemporary scholarship
tends to view the Median empire as a mirage, not as
a reality.
Any ideas?
All the best,
Juha
--- david_russell_watson <
liberty@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Juha Savolainen"
> <juhavs@...> wrote:
> >
> > Indeed, it is not surprising that words from Old
> Persian,
> > the language of the ruling ethnos, found their way
> in the
> > language of the Aramaic scribes (and the laguage
> of the
> > Aramaic-speaking population, in general). But
> where do
> > these words originally come from? What is their
> etymology
> > and what is their origin, Iranian or something
> else?
>
> I quickly skimmed pages 256 - 261, but none of the
> loanwords
> stood out as unusual. Which specifically did you
> have in mind?
>
> You might also want to post your question to the
> Indo-Iranian
> linguistics list at
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo_iranian .
>
> David
>
>
>
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