# Urartian sue (sowe), Armenian tsov and proto-Germanic *saiwaz "sea"



## CyrusSH

Are there relations between these words? 

The name of Sevan, the largest body of water in Armenia and the Caucasus region, is believed to be from this Urartian word.


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## ahvalj

How do you imagine the procedure of evaluation? Armenian arose on the Urartian substrate, so the borrowing is quite possible and is indeed often postulated in this case (or, alternatively, in the opposite direction, from Armenian to Urartian, as in _Martirosyan HK · 2010 · Etymological dictionary of the Armenian inherited lexicon:_ 141 along with _burgana_). But what to do with the Germanic word: how to decide whether it is related or not? Just the steps?


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## CyrusSH

According to etymonline the proto-Germanic word is of unknown origin: sea | Origin and meaning of sea by Online Etymology Dictionary

The Hurrian word for "water" is _šiye_ and it seems _šiwe_ means "river".


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## berndf

And? I don't see your point.



ahvalj said:


> How do you imagine the procedure of evaluation?


... says it all, as far as I can see.


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## Treaty

Considering the laxness regarding similarity of vowels and somehow consonants, the chance of a three-letter CvC word being similar between Germanic and Urartu is around 1% (10Cx1Vx10C). This means if each language had only 200 words, the chance of *not *having a match like above would have been 13%. With 87% probability of randomness, there is nothing significant about this similarity.


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## berndf

Well, multiplied with the chance of a semantic match, the probability of a coincidence would be much reduced, if both languages had indeed only 200 words. Urartian has indeed only about 200 attested words. But there are something like 10000 known Germanic words. That brings the propabilty of chance coincidence up again, certainly into the double digit percentage.

But even if the probability of chance coincidence were significantly lower, Urartian is an instinct language belonging to a group of just two languages with the other member of the group being extinct too and equally sparsely attested. What possibility would we have to decide about the relationship to a word in a totally different group and that has but limited traceability in within the group.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> And? I don't see your point.



I meant it has probably Hurro-Urartian origin, not Indo-European.


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## CyrusSH

Treaty said:


> Considering the laxness regarding similarity of vowels and somehow consonants, the chance of a three-letter CvC word being similar between Germanic and Urartu is around 1% (10Cx1Vx10C). This means if each language had only 200 words, the chance of *not *having a match like above would have been 13%. With 87% probability of randomness, there is nothing significant about this similarity.



First you should use your denial tactics then mathematics, the relation between Urartian and Armenian languages is an undeniable fact and linguists talk about huge similarities between Armanian and Germanic languages: The Indo-European Languages - Page 20: In Germanic and Armenian, all stops experience a very similar chain shift, in which all PIE stops weaken. Voiced aspirates lose aspiration, voiced stops lose voicedness, and voiceless stops change to fricatives (in Germanic) or to voiceless aspirates (in Armenian).


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> I meant it has probably Hurro-Urartian origin, not Indo-European.


I understand that. But there is nothing that makes it probable.


CyrusSH said:


> huge similarities between Armanian and Germanic languages


That is irrelevant for your question.
Your claim was that it is of Urartian and not of Armenian origin.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> That is irrelevant for your question.
> Your claim was that it is of Urartian and not of Armenian origin.



The similarity between Germanic and Armenian doesn't indicate that one of them is the subgroup of another one but they were probably developed in the same environment, about Armenians we know they lived in almost the region as an Akkadian colony from at least 2300 BC. For this reason loanwords from Armenian in Urartian seem to be usually more possible.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> The similarity between Germanic and Armenian doesn't indicate that one of them is the subgroup of another one but they were probably developed in the same environment, about Armenians we know they lived in almost the region as an Akkadian colony from at least 2300 BC.


Such vague feature similarities does not allow such far reaching conclusions. Karpović also assumes the developments to be independent and gives reasons for it if you read the page you quoted more carefully.

And even if they had developed in the same region, we wouldn't know where.



CyrusSH said:


> For this reason loanwords from Armenian in Urartian seem to be usually more possible.


So your point is that because we know so little about Urartian and we know so little about the origin of _sea_ beyond PGm this is a match? Because we don't know where two words come from they must be from the same source?

Really???


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## Treaty

CyrusSH said:


> about huge similarities between Armanian and Germanic languages: The Indo-European Languages - Page 20: In Germanic and Armenian, all stops experience a very similar chain shift, in which all PIE stops weaken. Voiced aspirates lose aspiration, voiced stops lose voicedness, and voiceless stops change to fricatives (in Germanic) or to voiceless aspirates (in Armenian).


The word "huge" is suitable for American politics not this forum . The similarity is not huge anyway. Basically, there are two groups of consonants: 1) the aspirated _bh, dh, gh_ whose loss of aspiration is common between seven IE branches, not just Armenian and Germanic. 2) un-aspirated _b, d, g_ whose loss of voice is common between 5 IE branches not just Germanic and Armenian. In other term, apart form isolated changes (e.g., Toch. *_d>ts_), there were only 4 options (1&2, 1&!2, !1&2, !1&!2). The probability of any two language - out of context - matching one option is the statistically insignificant 25%. However, if you put in the context of 5 languages (i.e., the languages which share one of the options), then the probability of randomness would be above 40%. This probability is in reality much higher considering my raw calculation overlooks details which further shows dissimilarity between Armenian and PG.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> Such vague feature similarities does not allow such far reaching conclusions. Karpović also assumes the developments to be independent and gives reasons for it if you read the page you quoted more carefully.
> 
> And even if they had developed in the same region, we wouldn't know where.



We actually don't know many things, we are talking about proto-Indo-European everywhere in this forum and we still don't know where this language was spoken originally but it can't be a reason that linguists don't talk about for example loanwords from Semitic in PIE or vice versa.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> We actually don't know many things, we are talking about proto-Indo-European everywhere in this forum and we still don't know where this language was spoken originally but it can't a reason that linguists don't talk about for example loanwords from Semitic in PIE or vice versa.


We wouldn't based on pure similarity. To suggest a loan from a long extinct language family with only few members we would need more concrete evidence. For assuming, e.g., a Sumerian loan into European languages we would require traces through a well understood path like via Akkadian, Aramaic and Greek.


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## ahvalj

This is how science works. We don't know for sure, for example, whether stars exist in reality or are just an illusion, yet the combined independent evidence from different sources makes us regard the astronomical scenario as the most consistent and fruitful. Likewise the Indo-European reconstructions explain many facts and yet seem to face no crucial counter-evidence or alternative explanations.

Science relies on repeatable procedures. To make an assumption acceptable as a working hypothesis, one has to show that it is based on procedures that proved themselves reliable in previous cases, like e. g. the reconstructed sound laws that can be traced in thousands of words, including those not applied for formulation of these laws. The idea of a loan is involved when a word can't be explained from the sound system and word-formation patters of a certain language and at the same time has a tempting cognate in some other idiom, which is located in space, time and cultural universe in such a way that makes the borrowing possible.

If Urartian were spoken in a contiguous area with Common Germanic, or if there were words in intermediate languages derivable from the same source, or if there were several words in Germanic traceable to Urartian, the idea of a loan would have been acceptable. Meanwhile we have two words with not a single identical sound, coming from two languages with no demonstrable contact, so what to do with this? Miracles do happen and it may eventually turn out that this word comes from Urartian, yet the available evidence is simply not enough to tell anything.


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## Borin3

Amazing


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## CyrusSH

ahvalj said:


> This is how science works. We don't know for sure, for example, whether stars exist in reality or are just an illusion, yet the combined independent evidence from different sources makes us regard the astronomical scenario as the most consistent and fruitful. Likewise the Indo-European reconstructions explain many facts and yet seem to face no crucial counter-evidence or alternative explanations.
> 
> Science relies on repeatable procedures. To make an assumption acceptable as a working hypothesis, one has to show that it is based on procedures that proved themselves reliable in previous cases, like e. g. the reconstructed sound laws that can be traced in thousands of words, including those not applied for formulation of these laws. The idea of a loan is involved when a word can't be explained from the sound system and word-formation patters of a certain language and at the same time has a tempting cognate in some other idiom, which is located in space, time and cultural universe in such a way that makes the borrowing possible.
> 
> If Urartian were spoken in a contiguous area with Common Germanic, or if there were words in intermediate languages derivable from the same source, or if there were several words in Germanic traceable to Urartian, the idea of a loan would have been acceptable. Meanwhile we have two words with not a single identical sound, coming from two languages with no demonstrable contact, so what to do with this? Miracles do happen and it may eventually turn out that this word comes from Urartian, yet the available evidence is simply not enough to tell anything.



When we want to discuss about something, first we should define our view about it, the oldest known Germanic language is Gothic which was spoken in the north of Black sea about the second century AD (Armenian and Urartians lived in the east of Black sea).

I believe the Germanic (or pre-Germanic) people migrated from the south to the north, if you believe the migration was from the north to the south, then as you mentioned about Urartian, there should be several words in Germanic traceable to Finno-Ugric, Baltic and other languages which were spoken in the north, but we see most of loanwords in Germanic are from Latin, Iranian, and other languages which were spoken in the south.


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## ahvalj

Languages borrow words from sources their speakers consider prestigious. In the last 1500 years German was spoken in areas contiguous to Slavic lands yet the amount of Slavic loans in the non-dialectal German speech is minimal: ten to twenty if I am not mistaken. Likewise, Russian, that is widespread in the former Baltic- and Finnic-speaking areas, has more or less the same amount of loans from these languages. English, spoken by descendants of the pre-Germanic population of Britain, has a negligible number of Celtic loans. Modern standard Swedish has virtually no Finnish loans.

P. S. Concerning Swedish, _pojke_ "boy" from Finnish _poika_ comes to mind.


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## CyrusSH

ahvalj said:


> Languages borrow words from sources their speakers consider prestigious. In the last 1500 years German was spoken in areas contiguous to Slavic lands yet the amount of Slavic loans in the non-dialectal German speech is minimal: ten to twenty if I am not mistaken. Likewise, Russian, that is widespread in the former Baltic- and Finnic-speaking areas, has more or less the same amount of loans from these languages. English, spoken by descendants of the pre-Germanic population of Britain, has a negligible number of Celtic loans. Modern standard Swedish has virtually no Finnish loans.



I don't think that it relates to prestigious, if German language was spread from the east (where Slavic people lived) to the west then there could be many Slavic words in German, the same thing can be said about Russian and other ones that you mentioned.

It is really meaningless to say proto-Germanic language originated in the north Europe but there is absolutely no word from this land in proto-Germanic. I can also claim that proto-Iranian originated in Iran but there isn't any word from this land in proto-Iranian.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> I don't think that it relates to prestigious,


I am afraid it us not a matter of belief or thinking but there is enough evidence for this phenomenon. If we take a closer look we will surely find more loans and calques from Slavic. Another important source for loans is the import of goods that don't have a native equivalent, like _Piroggen_.


CyrusSH said:


> if German language was spread from the east where Slavic people lived to the west then there could be many Slavic words in German, the same thing can be said about Russian and other ones that you mentioned.


I don't understand what this has to do do with anything. The point is that Slavic and German speaking people inhabited large areas simultaneously over more than a millennium and yet the amount of loans is minimal.


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## ahvalj

Yet, what does the original poster suggest to do to find the answer to the topic question?


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## CyrusSH

I suggest to research more about Hurro-Urartian language and its relation to different Indo-European languages, in the 2nd millennium BC it was one of the main languages which was spoken in a vast region from the Caspian sea to the Mediterranean and Black sea.


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## ahvalj

Do you have additional Hurrian and Urartian texts with translations to Akkadian to research? The languages are extinct and the text body is very limited. Alternatively, a time machine could help.


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