From: Juha Savolainen
Message: 39636
Date: 2005-08-17
>http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/History/hakhamaneshian/ganzabara.htm
>
> 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.
>
>
>____________________________________________________
>
> 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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