It looks like the work-around may be good for awhile. I'd really prefer not to leave my home of over 20 years, not to mention setting up 2 new sites.
Google *has* already abandoned Blogger and Blogspot -- no help center, impossible to reach anyone, they make changes whenever for no reason, and if they break it, you have to find a work-around or it's over. Even if you find one, they have turned from apathetic to vindictive against their own users. That's why I couldn't even leave comments after awhile -- some seething spiteful flunkie actually coded the "browser not supported" screen into the comment box itself. But I'll get to the gory details about that in a little bit.
Suffice it to say, I sense them ultimately giving Blogspot the same treatment that Yahoo gave GeoCities -- total demolition. Slightly better-case scenario, they leave up the domain but stop the writers from putting up any new posts or comments. Either way, there's zero chance they will migrate the blogs at Blogspot to some future site, as they have nothing to move them to, unlike when they killed Google Play Music and forced users into YouTube Music. They didn't even keep their attempt at social media, Google+, so why would they keep a format that is even less utilized, like blogs?
Just cuz I have a work-around doesn't mean it'll work forever, especially given how vindictive the Google-hive has become. Even if it works, they could shut down the entire domain. So, I'm setting up 2 separate sites just in case.
The WordPress one -- The Library of Akinokure -- will be mainly for collecting entire series that I've done here, especially those that have mainly been in the comments section, so search engines can find them. That gives me several years' worth to re-publish in more coherent form. I may even go back through the archives here for series that were already in standalone post form, and back them up there as well.
Right now, I'm working on the work I've done about Japanese / Japonic belonging to the Dene-Yeniseian family of languages. Full posts will go up over there, and I'll just leave a brief remark about it in the comments section here -- in case people don't want to read an entire 500-word discovery every time, but just get the gist.
I've more or less set up the layout, though I'll be tweaking it and maybe making a new header image, etc., but you can start perusing the Japonic-Dene-Yeniseian linguistic series there right now and going forward.
The Substack one -- just "akinokure", like here -- will take longer for me to figure out what to do with, since that allows both long-form posting and a micro-blogging comment feed, like I have here. But I don't want to cannibalize this main site by putting too much on Substack. I'm thinking of using it for pictures in the micro-blog feed. Brutalist mall du jour, vintage book du jour, thrift store find du jour, that kind of thing. I don't have the layout set up yet, other than making the landing page look like this blog, so there's not much to do there yet.
The point is, I'll keep to posting here as much as I can, for as long as I can, and if anything should interfere with that, or end that, you'll be able to tell. But now, you'll have 2 alt sites to check on, to see if in fact I'm moving over there for good. For the moment, and unless I specifically say so at the alt sites, they'll remain alt and Blogspot will stay main.
I don't like posting these content-free programming notes, but I really did just receive an intense signal from Google that Blogspot will receive even less support than merely being abandoned by them. So I've had to waste a bunch of time scrambling to find a work-around, and set up alt sites just in case.
I know the American military is about to commit suicide-by-cop with another failed war in the Middle East, but I've already said pretty much everything there is to say about that, specifically about Iran, so my next post here will go into greater detail about the cyber-bureaucracy that controls so much of our online existence, how surreal it is, how to minimize our exposure to its risks, and so on. Might as well get something productive and insightful out of this whole ordeal...
February 19, 2026
UPDATE: Staying here until no longer able, WordPress and Substack will be back-up / alt sites
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To keep Nonstop Nihongo New Year going here, I'll summarize the findings that were posted in full at WordPress during my brief hiatus here.
ReplyDeleteJaponic "horn" has Dene-Yeniseian cognates meaning "bone".
Japonic "blood" has Na-Dene cognates meaning "heart". After "kokoro" shifted meaning from "mind" to "heart", this displaced the older Japonic word for "heart", which then came to refer to "blood" instead.
Japonic "juice, sap, soup" is cognate with Dene-Yeniseian words for "blood". This is yet a further stage in the semantic shift chain reaction: "mind" -> "heart" -> "blood" -> "juice, sap, fluid vital essence other than blood".
A doublet of Japonic "juice, sap, soup" was "milk", which then shifted to mean "white".
Japonic "liver" has cognates in Dene-Yeniseian, leading to a new-and-improved reconstruction of the shared ancestor of them all, with the crucial help of the Japonic form.
Japonic "to smell, scent" has Na-Dene cognates meaning "to feel, to sense", which probably referred specifically to the sense of smell.
No conspiracy from techtards will ever stop my exploration and discovery of the Paleosiberian roots of the Na-Dene, Yeniseian, and Japonic super-family of languages! ^_^
Man, setting up 2 sites showed me how bland and bleak online is compelled to look in 2026, really beginning during the puritanical anorexic Millennial woketard heritage-hating iconoclasm of the 2010s. They have literally banned all the layout formats from the good ol' days, and if you want something real, you'll have to host it yourself (not free hosting at the well-known domain), and pay through the nose for the ability to de-bland-ify your site.
ReplyDeleteThat's a topic for another post, with lots of pictures. But suffice it to say, it was a deliberate orchestrated crusade, part of the broader sensory-deprivation crusade of the "design" world during the 2010s, but lasting through today by inertia, and likely to never go away, since no new styles can ever be created -- let alone catch on as a broad phenomenon -- during the ungluing of cohesion, and the social auto-immune disease, that accompanies imperial collapse.
It's not just the lack of colors, or the "flat design" with no line art or shading, and nothing that looks like hand-drawn illustration. The main thing is the yawning expanse of dead-space, meant to deprive the senses of anything whatsoever.
So *that's* why you guys keep making the trek up here -- it must be such an exhilarating rush to load the page and immediately feast your eyes on the summary headline, and FIVE (count 'em, FIVE) full lines of text, without even having to scroll down one millimeter!
You're not immediately anesthetized by a yawning void with a few generic words and a meaningless photograph that never ever changes.
Trust me, I know from browsing Twitter -- that is the most soul-deadening experience in the cyberspace. And when you leave up a pinned post -- especially if it has the obligatory big-ass image -- that's even further I have to page-down just to see what the hell you have to say du jour. I don't need to be confined to a digital waiting room every single time I load your page -- I already know who you are, I want to see what's new.
It's not a "magazine layout" -- holy shit, the cope! No magazines ever looked like that in the glory days of print publishing. It looks exactly like what it is -- "puritanical anorexic Millennial 2010s website", not a magazine, LOL.
It took me forever to find a WordPress layout that was useful, and it's only barely content-oriented, still mostly just the header image -- but it at least shows the headline of a post, plus a row of honest-to-goodness icons. Nothing has icons anymore -- visual aids that tell you what the associated item does. Everything is just label label label, or cryptic visual, often hidden / condensed into menus within menus within menus.
I really had to do a double-take to make sure I wasn't hallucinating -- icons! Quite the blast from the past...
But I only found out about that layout from a very old forum post at WordPress -- there's no summary page for it at WordPress' collection of layouts. If you search for it in the dashboard, you'll find it, and you can still use it -- unlike most of the other good ones, which have been banned ("retired"). But they really want to keep this one hush-hush, lest any rogue writer attempt to thwart the puritanical anorexic Millennial perpetual-2010s yawning void sensory deprivation chamber look-and-feel of all of online.
Leave it to me to find it! ^_^
I really want to re-do the header image, and make it more reminiscient of Microsoft Encarta from Windows 95, or something with that overall feel. I like the one I have here, in this context -- it really screams CYBERSPACE. But for an online library, something still computer-age and space-age, but more learned somehow -- yet still whimsical and charming, like Encarta. They really had it all figured out back in the good ol' days... ^_^
Quick summary for the upcoming failed American war against Iran, based on what I've written many times for awhile now. It's timely, and you have not -- and will not -- hear any of these points made anywhere else. Only from the cliff-dwelling sage.
ReplyDeleteFirst, wars are won 100% by who has the most team spirit, literally nothing else matters, or is downstream from the team spirit factor. It is not an engineering problem, an arms race, or anything technical like that.
So don't get lost in stats and facts about how many of this type of vehicle, how many of this type of weapon, how many soldiers, how much money, what types of intel, etc., is going on the battlefield.
Most of the time this doesn't matter at all -- wars are won by outmanned and outgunned armies, if they are highly cohesive and the super-manned and super-gunned rival is not cohesive or downright fragmenting internally.
To the extent that it does matter, it reduces to the team spirit factor -- highly cohesive societies can manufacture, transport, service, and utilize the necessary material factors like manpower, vehicles, weaponry, etc. Fragmenting societies can't do any of that.
Expanding empires expand due to their high cohesion, and they contract when they lose that cohesion. Read Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War, if you haven't already.
The American Empire reached its max territorial extent by conquest with WWII -- 80 years ago. Every effort to expand by conquest since then has pathetically and catastrophically failed -- and there have been many, many experiments to "test the hypothesis" of whether or not the American Empire can hold together on the battlefield, even against dirt-poor rice farmers who are outgunned a million to one, and that was already back in the Korean and Vietnam War era, not to mention the continued failure to take back a poor sugar plantation that sits only a hop skip and a jump away from Florida -- Cuba.
We never did conquer any part of the Middle East, North Africa, or Central Asia -- so we will continue to lose there again in Iran, which is an even stronger society than Iraq or Afghanistan were.
Know-nothing take-meisters on both sides of the fake-and-gay debate must obfuscate basic facts like this, and basic reasoning like transitivity (if we fail against a weak enemy, we 100% will fail against a strong enemy). Their audience demands a world of wild-and-crazy, who-knows, it's-all-up-in-the-air, anything-could-happen maximum uncertainty. If the outcome is predictable and guaranteed, there's no dramatic tension, nothing to pull you in to invest emotionally over the course of the narrative.
So all take-meisters must adhere to this audience demand, or lose attention, which is their #1 motivation. They must provide a narrative or "analysis" that assumes anyone could win, and we'll just have to wait and see, so exciting! Or try to sell their "insight" as a wannabe consultant -- anyone could win, but give me money and status, and my analysis could tilt the odds of victory in your favor. They have no services to offer as wannabe consultants, if the outcome is completely predictable and guaranteed and unalterable, which it is with war during one stage or the other of the imperial lifespan -- guaranteed victory on the way up, guaranteed failure on the way down.
So I will not be offering any exciting, dramatic, edge-of-your-seat analysis or commentary -- the outcome is predictable and guaranteed right now, total American failure, and that will strike the emotion take-junkies as borrrinnnngggg, so they'll change the channel. Good! I don't want retards clinging to my words so they can fry the emotional lobe of their brain over parapolitical bullshit narratives. That's why I will never join Twitter, where this is the sole format of dIsCouRsE.
Great post.
DeleteE. Michael Jones has also been saying for a while that the Iran campaign is a desperate sign of imperial collapse. He posits that America is moving out of its third-republic phase, each phase of which has run about 80 years (First from 1781-1861, Second from 1865-1945 and Third from end of WWII until now).
One aspect I haven't dwelled on before is Iran's team spirit factor. They're not an expanding empire either, so they don't have as much asabiya as Southern Lebanon does (their solidarity was sparked by the Zionist meta-ethnic nemesis right on their border). Hezbollah has fought and won an integrative civil war ("the Lebanese Civil War"), which is a positive test of their cohesion. Likewise with the Houthis in Yemen.
ReplyDeleteIran's governing system has not changed since the late 1970s, and that was more of a realignment than an integrative civil war -- there were no 2+ geographical sides struggling against each other. It was just phasing out one national polity (led by the Shah) in favor of another one (led by the clerics).
But at least they're not suffering from disintegrative civil war -- not anymore, anyway. Their last empire was the Safavid Empire, of the Early Modern era, and it has been losing territory here and there ever since the 18th C. But the collapse of that empire has been in the rear-view mirror for over 200 years now. They've recovered their national stability.
But they haven't begun a new round of expansion and imperial cohesion. Iran has been the origin of empires going back thousands of years. But since they face no intense meta-ethnic nemesis on their frontiers, they are not compelled to cohere at a super-duper level. Israel is too far away from their borders, Afghanistan is too similar to Iran to serve as a meta-ethnic nemesis, and the Russian Empire has long given up on trying to jockey for status in Iran. The Saudi Empire was a regional rival, and they are fairly different from Iran, but they never massed forces along the Iranian border, let alone invade / raid / etc.
Only the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s came close to sparking Iranian asabiya -- but Iraq was weak, lost, and was then invaded by America. But since America never controlled Iraq, they couldn't use it as a base to launch an invasion against Iran, or force the occupied Iraqis to serve as a proxy force to invade Iran.
So, Iran is not capable of launching an expansion, e.g. against Israel -- but it is also not mired in the social hangover stage of the imperial lifespan, they are not fragmenting internally, and therefore they have a higher team spirit factor than the American side, which is still plunging into the abyss of anti-cohesion, actively trying to separate from their fellow countrymen.
Speaking of Israel, they have never had high asabiya -- their success is entirely due to the support of expanding, or plateau-ing empires, who took them on as allies. First the Ottomans, then the British, now the Americans. Without bona fide imperial overlords, they will crumble into nothing -- which they have already begun to do, as civil disintegration among Israelis keeps getting worse and worse every year.
As for Iranian internal realignment, that will be another national polity replacing the current one, not a disintegrative civil war. So any attempt to "regime change" will only hasten the process of this national realignment, with internal stability. It cannot fracture Iran into pieces.
ReplyDeleteWhat would be the nature of this realignment, out of the Islamic Revolution era? Well, just look at who the opposition is, and what they want, and how they act. They are more educated, urbanized, affluent, and culturally tolerant / liberal of their fellow citizens -- symbolized by their "who cares?" attitude about women covering their hair in public, wearing figure-obscuring clothes, etc.
Retards in the West think this means when the Islamic regime is finally over, this opposition who comes to power for the next several generations, will love America, want to sell off their country, ally with Israel, betray Hezbollah, and so on, since America is synonymous with cultural tolerance, education, etc. Westoids think Iranian regime change will bring Iran back into the American imperial orbit, as it was under the Shah.
In reality, these educated urban professionals despise Israel, are MORE emphatic about Iran having atomic weapons, and they see the sclerotic clerical elites as out-of-touch and as obstacles to the all-important goal of turning Iran into a nuclear military, so it can fuck up Israel once and for all, if that's what the Israelis insist on. The Ayatollahs have been the strongest force for nuclear NON-proliferation this whole time, having issued fatwas against nuclear weapons.
So, the next stage of the Iranian political system will be liberalizing the cultural conservatism of the Islamic era -- while also ditching the old regime's pacifism, in favor of amping up nuclear weapon development, and getting aggressive, especially against the regional nightmare, Israel. Not by funneling rockets to Southern Lebanon -- although that will continue -- but by unleashing hell on Israel from Iran itself.
So far, the Iranian regime has only given a sneak preview of that pummeling against Israel, during June of last year. This is typical of the disjunctive phase of the party realignment cycle -- the incumbent regime tries to evolve out of its out-of-touch ways that were only revolutionary many genrations ago, to meet the increasingly loud demands of today's citizenry. But because they are the party that instituted the current system, they cannot fundamentally alter it.
And so, the fatwa against nuclear weapons remains in effect, Iran continues to keep the kid gloves on against Israel, and will not seriously fuck up America, even as they win over the fragmenting empire. The Islamic regime's pacifism will only prolong the war.
This inability to adapt to current conditions is what will trigger the next round of realignment, bringing to power the educated urban professionals who will immediately get nuclear bombs, decimate Israel, and get aggressive against America's forces in the region. They're incapable of expanding, but they can take off their self-imposed shackles and start wiping out American bases and ships in and around the Persian Gulf, as well as amping up their material support for Hezbollah and the Houthis, farther away from Iran's backyard.
Therefore, a sane rational self-preserving America and Israel should want to AVOID regime change in Iran at all costs, since the next stage spells doom for America and Israel. But America has entered its downward spiral, and will be incapable of sane, rational, self-preserving actions -- it will only get crazier, stupider, and more suicidal, as it desperately circles the drain. So, count on America and Israel taking a suicidal stance vis-a-vis Iran, trying to ravage the nation, change the regime, which will only result in a fanatically anti-Israeli and anti-American successor regime -- with the new and added flavor of nuclear weapons and aggression rather than pacifism.
I gave the same brief summary when Russia began taking back Ukraine in 2022 -- it was guaranteed Russian victory, since they have higher team spirit than Ukraine, and were no longer stuck in the depths of imperial collapse like they were in the 1990s, or most of the 2000s for that matter.
ReplyDeleteThat's why I've never mentioned any of the particular details since then -- Russia conquers this village, or that city, Ukraine loses another 1 million on the battlefield, and so on and so forth. That's not "news", it's just the inevitable unfolding of what was entirely predictable at the start. Unless you're interested in Russia as a region, don't worry about it, it's just reclaiming some lost territory from its disintegrative civil war of the 1990s.
Every time I see one of those tedious Ukrainian flags IRL or online, I just blithely dismiss it with a brief "Get annexed", and move on.
You should do the same for the upcoming slopaganda campaign during the failed American war in Iran -- "Write better fanfic," "Get sunk", or if you want a little more historical pizzazz, "Get Julian the Apostate'd".
And definitely do not feed into the "edge-of-your-seat dramatic tension" kind of "analysis" or "commentary". It's all just slopaganda. SPOILER ALERT: America gets wrecked, Iran prolongs it longer than it needs to be out of sclerotic pacifism, and sooner than later the Islamic regime gets replaced by a new coalition that burns their hijabs while developing atomic bombs to wipe out Israel.
And now back to your regularly scheduled programming... ^_^
Iran has not lost territory / fragmented since the early 1800s, when the Russian Empire conquered the Southern Caucasus as part of its broader eastward conquest of Northern and Central Eurasia. That was just after the peak of the Safavid Empire in the 18th C, during the declining Qajar dynasty. *That* was the time to try to destabilize or take land from Iran -- not now, when they have long since stabilized internally.
ReplyDeleteAnd at any rate, there are no more expanding empires like the Russians of the early 1800s, to do the stealing.
Also, this lost land was in the Southern Caucasus, not historically from the core of Iran.
Also, it didn't last long -- Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan were incorporated into the USSR, but they have been independent from Russia since the 1990s, and if anything are moving further away from Russia during the 21st century.
This also happened with the Central Asian countries that Russia conquered in the 19th C and later absorbed into the USSR, but have become independent since the 1990s -- Kazakhstan and the others.
The only foreign conquerors to hold onto Iranian territory long-term, and as an empire, were the various Turkic invaders from the Eastern Steppe, who took the southern route through historical Bactria / Khorasan / etc. Needless to say, America is not an Eastern Steppe nomadic confederation like the Seljuk Turks, so conquest of Iran is impossible.
If only the Japanese navy had sailed up the Persian Gulf during their early 20th-C heyday, they could've taken over key parts of Iran, during the collapse of the Qajar dynasty in the 1920s. That was what they did in China (collapse of Qing dynasty), Korea (collapse of Joseon dynasty), far-east Russia (pre-Revolutionary Russia), etc. The Wa people were from the Eastern Steppe, after all! But Japan was content to stay in East Asia, and not bother the noble Iranians. ^_^
Not even Russia, which sits far closer to Iran, could take much of Iran -- only the Southern Caucasus, and not for very long.
No polity has ever controlled the Northern and Southern Caucasus long-term, as that mountain chain is as big of an obstacle as the Himalayas. So Russia has held onto its Northern Caucasus conquests right through today, while largely washing its hands of the Southern Caucasus.
All of this is to say that America is going to attempt the impossible, while collapsing internally! When you take a stab at the impossible, you'd better be at the top of your game, not 80+ years into a never-ending streak of humiliating losses to technologically inferior societies.
GET SUNK!
Also, most of those Turkic conquerors of Iran were not a nomadic confederation sweeping through, at the time of their conquest. They may have begun that way, but they joined the Iranian military as mercenaries, rose through the ranks, and became a foreign-origin military elite. When the Iranians began fragmenting internally, this did not affect the foreign elite, who promptly took over Iran during the power vacuum of civil war.
ReplyDeleteSo even Glorious Nippon probably could not have conquered Iran -- they would have had to join the Iranian military as mercenaries, rise through the ranks, and wait for internal fracturing before they took over.
Ruling over Iran is tricky stuff!
Another massive load of BS you'll be subjecting yourself to if you follow "the news" (including Fox News for Millennials, formerly known as Twitter), is that the ethnic diversity of Iran is a weak point, and if America applies enough pressure, they can fracture Iran into half a dozen rump states, sowing chaos, and so on.
ReplyDeleteIf this were true, it would have happened sometime in the past several centuries, but it has not. The only ethnic minorities who broke away from Iran were in fact conquered by the expanding Russian Empire, way back in the early 1800s. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan.
Since America is contracting rather than expanding, even this is impossible. They can't conquer and admininster the breakaway regions as client states -- they would just leave them to fend for themselves and get wiped out by regional powers, as America has done to the Kurds for 40 years.
And the Kurds are in fact one of the supposed potential breakaway regions inside Iran -- but the Kurds in Iran have never been able to be bought off with failed promises from America, like their brethren in Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. If there were a pan-Kurdish willingness to ally with America and turn against Iran, the Iranian Kurds would have already done so -- and been left high-and-dry many times over, as their gullible brethren have been in Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. Iranian Kurds have it pretty good, as the Persians are their ethnic brothers or cousins, as opposed to their dissimilar status in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
In all of the various realignments since the fall of the Qajar dynasty in the early 1900s, there has never been a serious regional separatist movement in Iran. Not the Balochis, not the Kurds, not the Azeris (who were not already part of Russian-conquered Azerbaijan), not the Arabs, not anyone. Internal conflict, succession of regimes, and protest movements, have always been national in character, not regionally separatist. That remains true for the protests of the 21st C.
Really the only separatist ethnic minority inside Iran has been Persian Jews -- but most of them simply left the country for Israel, or L.A. They did not wage a separatist war inside Iran, to carve out their own little sphere of influence. They just left. That's demographic emigration, not political separatism. Likewise the boatloads of Irish who left Ireland for America -- as opposed to their brethren who did wage a politically separatist war in the early 1900s, and won. Emigration is not separatism.
The Ottoman Empire saw tons of regional separatist wars during its stagnation and collapse -- and long into its aftermath. Ottoman, not European, imperialism is the source of all the regional rivalries in the modern Middle East.
The various South Asian empires have seen regional separatist wars during their collapse -- like Pakistan breaking away from India, and then Bangladesh breaking away from Pakistan. Sri Lanka was an independent local monarchy before British conquest, but even if they had belonged to a South Asian polity, they surely would have broken away during the mid-20th C like the others.
But Iran has never been like that, in its thousands of years of history. It may gain and lose territory at its periphery, like the Southern Caucasus or Bactria. But its core turf, even with ethnic diversity, tends to remain politically whole.
Just remember the response anytime you see this slopaganda about fragmenting Iran along ethnic minority faultlines:
"Write better fanfic"
"Draw better fanart" (in response to maps)
And so on.
Dene-Yeniseian origin of Japonic word for "to drink". Keeping with the theme of body parts. There's another set of cognates relating to "eat, bite", but it's more complicated. I'll probably post these at WordPress as a single post on both related verbs. For now, this'll be a sneak preview on the one for "to drink".
ReplyDeleteIn P-J, "to drink" is "nəmu" (MJ "nomu"), with an ultra-rare nasal as the final consonant of the verb stem (see the post from December last year on the frequency of verb stem final consonants). That means the "m" is part of the root, not a default / dummy verb suffix "-mu". Only the "-u" is a default segment, the obligatory verb ending.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/n%C9%99m-
In P-Athabaskan, it's "naˑn", although also reconstructed as "naˑŋ" -- hinting that the coda used to be velar, way back when, but Athabaskan fronts its velars. The onset shows nothing strange, just "n", and the "a" vowel is long.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Athabaskan/na%CB%91n
In Tlingit, it's "naa", just like P-A but missing the coda.
In Eyak, it's "la", but Eyak "l" is often the correspondent of "n" in Tlingit and P-A, which it must be here.
Clearly this word goes back to P-ND, seemingly "naˑŋ". But we can do better by bringing Wa / Japonic into the picture.
Onset "n" is the same. The nuclear "a" could have been followed by a coda "w" in the ancestor of all forms, realized as "ə" in P-J (coda "w" -> "u", doesn't totally replace preceding "a", which drags it down to "ə"). In P-ND, "aw" becomes long "aˑ", with compensatory lengthening from the lost "w".
The coda in P-J is "m", but this may result from earlier "ŋʷ", where the nasal manner remains and the labial feature becomes primary place, i.e. "m". So either the P-ND form should have coda "ŋʷ", or it is this in the ancestor of all families and lost its labialization in P-ND.
So the common ancestor of "to drink" in Wa, Na-Dene, and (as we'll see) Yeniseian, was "nawŋʷ".
That takes care of the cognate status of P-J and P-ND. Now onto Yeniseian, which bans nasals in initial position, making the search a little more difficult.
ReplyDeleteThere are a pair of words from Ket that suggest "to drink" in P-Ketic was "dopʰ".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BF
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BE
Similarly, Pumpokol has a compound word "duždop", where "dop" is cognate with the P-Ketic root above.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/du%C5%BEdop
Supposedly this reflects P-Y "gʷap", but I doubt that. Rather, it looks like the Japonic and Na-Dene forms, which begin with "n", show Yeniseian cognates where that has hardened into "d" (still voiced, and in the same place), in order to get around the Yeniseian ban on initial nasals.
The "o" may come from earlier "aw", as in Japonic.
The coda "p" may be the hardening of earlier "m", since Yeniseian doesn't care much for "m" compared to the other nasals, even when it's allowed in coda position.
That earlier "m" may result from even earlier "ŋʷ", as "m" is the most common (though not only) reflex of P-Y word-final "ŋʷ" in Yeniseian descendants. E.g., P-Y "tuwVŋʷ" = "black" has descendants with "m" instead of "ŋʷ" in all 4 branches of the family.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/tuwV%C5%8B%CA%B7
So, although it's harder to see due to the uniquely Yeniseian dislike of nasals, the "dop" root in Ketic and Pumpokol may easily derive from a more ancestral "nawŋʷ":
"nawŋʷ" -> "nawm" -> "nom" -> "dom" -> "dop"
That clinches the cognate status for these words across all 3 families of Wa-Dene-Yeniseian!
Again, think of how fruitless my search was when I was only comparing Japonic and Yeniseian -- I saw the supposed root for "to drink" as "gʷap", and dismissed it as irrelevant to Japanese "nomu". But since Yeniseian bans nasals in onset, while Na-Dene does not, it was Na-Dene to the rescue yet again! I'm really growing fond of that family, it's a far more reliable place to start searching for connections to Japonic, and Yeniseian is more for secondary follow-up or triangulation.
Worth noting that Japonic and Yeniseian show the same treatment of ancestral "ŋʷ", making it "m", while Na-Dene simply removes the labialization and makes it "ŋ", and/or fronts it as in Athabaskan. But not altering it to "m", which Tlingit and Eyak both lack. Even in P-A, "m" is rare, and absent in onset.
ReplyDeleteYeniseian shows other cases of altering earlier 2nd-ary labialization into primary labial place, so this strategy for resolving labialized consonants seems to be a shared innovation of both Yeniseian and Japonic, meaning they share a common ancestor, and that Old World super-family was sister to the Na-Dene New World family. Not too surprising, based on the geography.
Also, Yeniseian came to be heavily agglutinative just like Japonic, whereas Na-Dene descendants are still toward the polysynthetic side of the spectrum. Probably due to a common influence, namely Uralic, the main expansionist family in Northern Eurasia. Not "contact" influence, but absorbing former Uralic speakers into Yeniseian or Wa communities.
The source of the split between Yeniseian and Japonic is when the Wa people began absorbing the Emishi / Ainu speakers in Korea and Japan. That's the source of total reduplication in Japonic, which is absent or rare in Yeniseian and Na-Dene, but present in Ainu.
By now, I don't think Wa / Japonic ever went through a proper Altaic stage. Altaic languages are also incorporating former Uralic speakers, and both Turkic and Mongolic have Yeniseian as another parent, although Tungusic seems to have Nivkh or something further east as its other parent.
And by now, I don't think of Japonic as a carry-over of Yeniseian, as put through an Emishi / Ainu filter. It descends from a sister to Yeniseian, called Wa. Their common ancestor is sister to Na-Dene. One great big happy Trans-Pacific Paleosiberian family. ^_^
The reason why the minorities in Iran aren't really ethnic minorities is that it's mostly just a language difference -- Iranians who stuck with Persian, Iranians who speak a sister to Persian (Kurds, Balochis), Iranians who switched to Turkic (Azeris, Qashqai), and even Iranians who switched to Semitic to some degree (Iranian Arabs of Khuzestan).
ReplyDeleteNone of their genetic and other cultural traits show a marked difference from regular ol' Persians. All evidence I could find says that Iranian "Arabs" of Khuzestan practice Nowruz, which any true Saharo-Arabian would look down their nose at, as "fire worship". That's a huge ethnic divide between Indo-Europeans and Saharo-Arabians, and both sides know it. So the fact that Iranian "Arabs" celebrate Nowruz in all its Indo-European glory, reveals that they're actually Iranians to the bone, aside from language.
Same thing with Azeris, whether in Iran or Azerbaijan. They celebrate Nowruz, they jump over fire, they do all that other Iranian stuff -- they just switched languages to Turkic.
That's why I have always downplayed the role of language in ethnicity -- it is too utilitarian, it's a tool for communication, and therefore there's a powerful material motive to switch it, if you need to communicate with powerful or influential foreigners who speak a different language than you.
And that's why I've always been more interested in dance styles, folk customs, and other things that are allowed to vary arbitrarily across cultures, with no motive to abandon your old forms and adopt new forms.
I only got into Japonic's relationship to Yeniseian and Na-Dene cuz I'd already laid the foundation for the Wa people being an Eastern Steppe culture, in other domains of culture -- like their creation of the landmasses myth, which is only shared with Northwest Mongolians (former Yeniseian speakers). And the practice of breaking mirrors as a funerary rite. And all that other stuff outside of language.
But since I was trained as a linguist in undergrad, I figured I might as well try that avenue as well -- and boy did I crack that sucker wide open!
Still, I find all the non-linguistic traits more persuasive about the Wa having been an Eastern Steppe culture, since there's no reason to change them, so their overlap with NW Mongolia means they're descended from a common ancestor, not that one side changed to the other for material motives like joining a multi-lingual empire.
So those maps of the different ethnic regions in Iran are BS -- they're linguistic maps only, not other deeper domains of culture. They should be labelled, "languages spoken by culturally Indo-European Iranians, in various parts of Iran".
ReplyDeleteAlthough every large society has regional differences, Iran's are not ethnic, but primarily linguistic. If half of America switched to a Turkic language, that would not require them to make other cultural changes, and they would remain identifiably American on a cultural shibboleth level -- they would just be speaking Turkic.
On the flipside, there could be gigantic ethnic differences among speakers of the same language -- especially if it has been spread by imperial expansion, and adopted by wholly different conquered groups. Like Spanish speakers in the New World -- they are visibly still very pre-Columbian, and that is confirmed in all the non-linguistic parts of their culture, where Spain has been one of many influences, not necessarily the strongest one either, depending on the region.
Ethnicity does not reduce to language, so talking about ethnic differences based only on language is pointless. Deeper cultural shibboleth roots would have to be shown -- but nobody even thinks about these things when they're trying to serve up slopaganda, so they fool themselves into thinking Iran has multiple deep faultlines that could be pressured into fracturing all the diverse ethnicities in it.
In reality, there's just 1 ethnicity -- Iranian -- some of whom speak other languages. I don't mean "political citizen of the nation known as Iran", I mean they're all ethnically and culturally Iranian, but differ on language. And that explains why, throughout all the rises and falls of empires in Iran, there tends not to be intense ethnic tensions internally, political separatism, and so on -- everyone's Iranian, and it's only a matter of who will rule over their unified central state.
The other 2 long-term locations of empires in the Middle East -- Egypt and Anatolia -- are like Iran in this respect.
ReplyDeleteEgypt is always a large unified central state, at least since Upper and Lower Egypt united way back around 3000 BC. It may go through cycles of dynasties internally, it may expand and contract as an empire, it may be invaded and ruled by imperial foreigners. But it's always big and unified and centralized.
Same with Anatolia, right up through the present -- despite all the massive ethnic fragmentation and continued hostilities that attended the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Anatolia has remained whole, without serious political separatism (the occasional Kurdish rebellion is always easily surpressed, and they're way on the margins of Anatolia anyway). Even when invaded and conquered by a foreign empire, like the Seljuk Turks who became the Ottoman Turks, Anatolia stayed whole and centralized -- just now under foreign elite rule.
You could say the Anatolians suppressed ethnicities with origins outside of Anatolia, like the Kurds, Armenians, and Greeks. But this conflict has rarely taken the form of political separatism, civil war, etc. -- it's the powerful central state suppressing ethnic minorities, or expelling / genociding them so they're no longer a problem internally.
The point being, there's no ethnic faultlines to put pressure on if some dum-dum wanted to collapse Turkish society.
Neither are there such faultlines in Egypt.
The easiest place in the world to put pressure on intense ethnic faultlines to fracture the polity into smaller chunks, is South Asia, which has already done much of that work already. But even within Pakistan, there's the Iranian / Afghan / Pashtun side vs. the Indo-Aryan side. And within India, good night! There's more ethnicities than you can shake a stick at! Not just linguistic differences either -- religion, music, dance, food, folk customs, clothing, you name it.
And unlike Egypt, Anatolia, and Iran, South Asia has rarely or never been unified politically. India's present unification is ignoring the fact that on the time-scale of decades ago, Pakistan and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka separated from it. And it's masking the fact that throughout history, it doesn't stay this unified for long, and it's unstable, destined to fracture into smaller regional polities in the coming decades and centuries.
South Asia is like Southeast Asia in that respect, but SEA is already highly fragmented, so there's no need to put pressure on those ethnic faultlines to collapse a central state -- there is no centralized multi-ethnic state down there. They each have their own state. Sooner than later, India will re-join SEA in being decentralized along ethnic faultlines.
While we're talking about Indo-Euros who adopted a Semitic language, Assyrians are in that same category with Iranian "Arabs". Not that genetics matter for transmitting culture, but Assyrians are genetically closest to other Indo-Euro groups from Anatolia, the Southern Caucasus, and Iran.
ReplyDeleteAnd culturally, I looked into their shibboleth-type rituals in the past, and they were Indo-Euro, like their Iranian neighbors. But probably more like Armenians, a sister-culture of the Iranians.
For that matter, their language -- Suret -- shows signs of having previously spoken Armenian -- they have a 3-way series of stop / affricate contrasts, between voiceless, voiced, and voiceless aspirated. No Semitic has a 3-way consonant contrast, only Caucasian languages do in that region (whether Indo-Euro or otherwise).
And they don't pronounce the Semitic pharyngeals as pharyngeals, but as "x" and glottal stop -- just like Israelis, who also never spoke a Semitic language in their history until the 20th C.
And they only have 2 emphatic consonants, not the typical 4. I wonder if they're really emphatic, given how non-Semitic their other supposedly Semitic consonants turn out to be.
And they have "v", which is just about confined to Indo-European and Caucasian languages, and absent in Saharo-Arabian (along with almost every other family). This also makes them resemble Maltese and Israeli Hebrew -- Indo-Euros who switched to Semitic, to some degree.
If you image search them, they are visibly Armenian (exotic hotties), and could pass for Iranian or Turkish. They don't look Iraqi.
But Chaldeans, the other Christian minority from northern Mesopotamia, do look more Semitic. And their language, supposedly just another dialect of Suret, looks way more Semitic -- no 3-way contrast among stops / affricates, just voiced vs. voiceless as in Semitic. They have 5 emphatic consonants, "q", and both pharyngeals. Supposedly they have "v", but I doubt that -- probably an approximant rather than fricative. Or it's a hybrid language, where some of the speakers come from a Semitic lineage and others from an Indo-Euro lineage.
At any rate, Chaldeans are more Semitic than the Assyrians.
Just cuz they call themselves "Assyrian" doesn't mean their ancestors spoke Akkadian, or Semitic at all. Ancient Assyrians were an expanding empire, and they might have converted some Armenians to speaking a Semitic-ish language, while leaving the rest of their culture as it always was.
The Byzantines called themselves "Romans" despite not being Roman or even Italian -- or even European! They were Anatolian mostly, some were Balkan, but none were Roman. However, the Roman Empire expanded into the Balkans and Anatolia, and some of the locals took up the Roman ethnonym, although they didn't necessarily switch from Greek to Latin, let alone take up other Italic or Latin shibboleths.
Always remember to get curious and scratch beneath the surface...
I never did write that up, about Assyrians being Indo-Euro based on rituals. Well, it was about trick-or-treating and related rituals, which are central to Indo-Euro culture -- including the noble Iranians. It may not be called "trick-or-treat" and "Halloween" as in the Celtic / Germanic lands, but it's the same practice, and it happens near the end of the year (Nowruz for Iranians).
ReplyDeleteIn Serbia, there's the tradition of Koleda:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_Christmas_traditions#Koleda
In Scandinavia (admittedly not the most Indo-Euro region, with Uralic foundations), there's the cognate ritual of Julebukking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julebukking
Also in Germanic lands, Mummers' plays and Wassailing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummers_Play
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassailing
Now feast your mind upon the cognate rituals of the Assyrians during Lent, the same time in the year as Nowruz:
http://www.zindamagazine.com/html/archives/2006/03.08.06/index_wed.php
*The evening before the fast began, or on Somikka night, small groups of young men, dressed in strange clothes and wearing weird masks, would go around from house to house to scare the children into fasting. The parents would give each group a small donation (food items in the olden times and money in later generations) and tell their children that this was to ward or bribe Somikka off them. They would also warn them that if they broke their fast during Lent, Somikka would come and punish them.*
*The Somikka observance in our Middle Eastern communities earlier in 20th Century had a somewhat spookily entertaining aspect to it. As a little boy in the 1930s, I remember when some Somikka groups, in strange clothes and masks, would make the round of the neighborhood homes. They would carry wooden swords and shields and put on a brief one-act action play, with a fasting theme. Other groups would have a troupe of a masked and “dressed up” person carrying a hand drum and two other persons bending down one behind the other under a covering and masquerading as a mare, complete with a horse’s “head” and ”tail” and four legs. The drummer would pound his drum and sing a funny song. The “mare” would trot and prance around for a couple of minutes and then collapse on the floor. The drummer would then ask the family for money “to buy my mare some hay because she is weakened by the fast.”*
This is not due to a shared Christian heritage, since the time-depth goes back before Jesus was born, and Saharo-Arabian Christians like the Levantines and Copts do not practice these rituals. It's an Indo-Euro thing, regardless of their religion du jour.
More uniquely Indo-Euro cultural traits of Assyrians, which I've already richly uncovered and pieced together since the early 2010s, off and on.
ReplyDeleteMost tellingly, they have a tradition during the holiday of Rozune, where they hide a lucky charm in a meal meant for a large group, and whoever finds it in their portion, will have good luck for the rest of the year. This shows that it originally came from the New Year's holiday rituals. It is still celebrated during the springtime New Year season (March 9). I've written extensively on this most distinctive of Indo-Euro rituals -- king cake in Latin Europe, Greek vasilopita, Armenian gata bread, Iranian samanu / samanak, British Christmas pudding, Irish barmbrack, and so on and so forth.
They dye eggs for their springtime New Year holiday, just like Iranians for Nowruz, Armenians, Greeks, Ukrainians, and other Europeans (Easter eggs).
Also for the New Year, they set out agricultural products in groups of 7, just like the Haft Seen ("Seven S's") display for Nowruz, and the Ashkenazi Jewish 7 ingredients for their Seder plate. See my posts and comments from around August 2024 for the discovery that Ashkenazi Jews were originally Indo-European -- a fusion of a Slavic side, and an Anatolian / Armenian / Iranian side -- who converted to Judaism during the Dark Ages, based on all these cultural shibboleths.
They put on red-and-white armbands during the wedding ceremony, and their fingers are tied together with a ribbon -- "tying the knot" is an Indo-Euro wedding ritual. Indians do it, both using a red bracelet around the wrist, but also tying bride and groom together with a sash. Greeks have a ribbon that connects the crowns worn by bride and groom. Assyrians also do a crowning ceremony for the wedding. Ashkenazi Jews tie the bride and groom's hands together. Parsis do something similar.
Assyrian weddings feature the groom's side stealing a valuable item from the bride's side, and smashing it publicly. This is part of the Indo-Euro tradition of mock ransoming -- always by the groom's side, against the bride's side. E.g., ransoming a shoe in Indian weddings, or the knife dance in Persian weddings. Usually the two sides negotiate its safe return, but Assyrians don't do this -- they mix it into the tradition of breaking a glass, like Ashkenazi Jews and Greeks and Armenians. It's a mock raid, from nomadic pastoralist roots, and shows that the two families can reconcile their differences, even if it initial offense goes as far as raiding the other side's livestock -- they're together through thick and thin, not burning bridges or getting locked in vendettas, once they become in-laws.
Assyrian dances are grouped together with Greek, Balkan, and Armenian styles, not Saharo-Arabian styles.
I wish there was an Assyrian babe who I knew IRL or online, who I could dedicate this scholarhip to, but sadly I don't know any. Plus the only one I've even seen online, is heavily invested in styling herself as Semitic, not Indo-Euro, even though she looks as Armenian as they come (hot). Ah well...
Back to Iran's minorities, we can tell there's no ethnic faultlines regionally, or else certain regions would be given quotas in the national parliament, to placate them and keep them from separating.
ReplyDeleteRather, the special quotas in the parliament are along religious lines -- Armenians get 2 seats, and 1 seat apiece for Assyrians, Jews, and Zoroastrians.
I've already shown that Assyrians are a flavor of Armenian. It makes me wonder if Persian Jews were also more likely to come from an Armenian background before converting during the Dark Ages. Or if the surviving Zoroastrians were also originally Armenian.
Persians, Kurds, Balochis, Azeris, etc., are just about 100% Muslim, and have been for centuries. Anyone who is still something other than Muslim, might not have begun as Persian or Iranian, and were using their religion to identify themselves as ethnically different, and wanting to remain outside the Iranian mainstream, while still being tolerated or protected -- like Armenian.
Armenians are very crafty people, I wouldn't be surprised if they are quadruple-dipping in the Iranian parliament by wearing 4 different non-Muslim costumes. For sure the Armenians proper, but also the Assyrians once you scratch beneath the surface.
Obviously no Jews in Iran are indigenous, they're local converts from something else.
And of course Zoroastrianism was the most Iranian of religions -- several millennia ago.
Who in Iran is still holding out against Islam, for over a thousand years? It just might be an ethnic minority like (former) Armenians.
Armenians aren't just crafty in general, they figure out all the angles to play when adapting themselves into a host society outside of Armenia. It wouldn't surprise me.
While we are on the subject of culture and language groups, I thought you may be interested to know that many concepts that are supposedly from the (Hebrew) Biblical tradition, including immortality of the soul, dualism, angels and demons, etc actually appear to have their roots in Indo-European (especially Persian) sensibilities. Here is one example:
ReplyDelete"During the period of the Second Temple (c. 515 BC – 70 AD), the Hebrew people lived under the rule of first the Persian Achaemenid Empire, then the Greek kingdoms of the Diadochi, and finally the Roman Empire.[50] Their culture was profoundly influenced by those of the peoples who ruled them.[50] Consequently, their views on existence after death were profoundly shaped by the ideas of the Persians, Greeks, and Romans.[51][52] The idea of the immortality of the soul is derived from Greek philosophy[52] and the idea of the resurrection of the dead is thought to be derived from Persian cosmology,[52] although the later claim has been recently questioned.[53] By the early first century AD, these two seemingly incompatible ideas were often conflated by Hebrew thinkers.[52] The Hebrews also inherited from the Persians, Greeks, and Romans the idea that the human soul originates in the divine realm and seeks to return there.[50] The idea that a human soul belongs in Heaven and that Earth is merely a temporary abode in which the soul is tested to prove its worthiness became increasingly popular during the Hellenistic period (323–31 BC).[43] Gradually, some Hebrews began to adopt the idea of Heaven as the eternal home of the righteous dead"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven
More Indo-Euro groups who claim to be Semitic (but aren't) in the Northern Middle East. The most egregious case of this phenomenon is Jews, none of whom are descended from the ancient Israelites, but are local converts from the Dark Ages -- most of whom are not even Semitic, aside from Yemeni Jews, whose Semitic roots are South Arabian, not Levantine.
ReplyDeleteI'm revealing these truths just in case any of them get funny ideas about launching their own version of Zionism and imperial-overlord-supported conquest of the actual people from the lands and culture that they claim descent from, but to which they truly have no connection.
Assyrians are not the descendants of Akkadians, Babylonians, Sumerians, or anything like that -- they're a Southern Caucasus culture.
There's a similar group called Syriac-Arameans, a Christian group who claim to be from the Semitic Aramean tribes of the Bronze Age who roamed around to the east of Israel and Damascus. I took one scratch beneath the surface, and discovered that they, too, hide a lucky charm in a communal meal for the New Year -- same as the Assyrians, right down to the holiday, Rozune. The meal is also bread, the lucky charm is also a coin, just like the Armenians with their lucky coin in the gata bread for Christmas or Candlemas. They're 100% Indo-Euro, not Semitic.
Then there's the Mandeans, who nobody heard of until the 20th C, who practice an Abrahamic-inspired religion centered on John the Baptist. Their legend claims they left Jerusalem for Media (Iranian), but they're not Semitic.
They have a community in Khuzestan province in Southern Iran, alongside the "Iranian Arabs", who are not Arabs but Iranians. I can't find out too much about their culture, but they don't look Semitic, their DNA puts them with the Caucasus, Iran, and Southern Europe. They're fanatic about marrying within their group, puritanical religion, impose stringent virginity checks upon brides-to-be, and are famous for being metalsmiths -- that reminds me of Gypsies, another Indo-Euro group with obscure religious affiliation.
Like the Assyrians' language, the Neo-Mandaic language is classified as Neo-Aramaic (Semitic), but they only have 2 emphatic consonants, and they lack the pharyngeals. And they have "v", not to mention uvular fricatives. That doesn't stand out as obviously from a certain background, the way that Assyrians are clearly from the Southern Caucasus / Greater Armenia, but it's also definitely not Semitic. Probably Iranian by background.
All of these groups, and perhaps more that I haven't found out about yet, are Indo-Europeans who claim to be Semitic in origin, but are not Semitic at all. They lack the telltale shibboleths of speaking Semitic languages (4 emphatic consonants, 2 pharyngeal consonants, absence of "v"). And judging from their wedding rituals, New Year rituals, dance styles, and so on -- they cannot even be considered "Arabized" or "Semiticized" people of earlier Indo-Euro background. They are still just as Indo-Euro as they ever were.
ReplyDeleteTellingly, they stand apart from any truly Semitic host societies they find themselves in, like Syria and Iraq. If they had been Arabized, Semiticized, Iraqi-ized, or Syrian-ized, they would not stand out at all. They'd be just another random group of Iraqis or Syrians, speaking with emphatic consonants and pharyngeal consonants like they're going out of style. They would have switched their wedding, New Year, dance, and clothing shibboleths in favor of their adoptive Semitic cultures.
So they've adopted religions that are partly or fully inspired by Semitic people -- yeah, so has most of the world. It doesn't make Christians in Europe a lost tribe of Israel. Nor Jews in Europe a lost tribe of Israel, more to the point.
I don't care if cultures tell fanciful narratives about their origins, but to make them historically and geographically specific is not just saying "Our people were born from a she-wolf / bear / dragon". They're making a specific claim to a specific piece of land, which is currently occupied by someone other than them. And that sets up the ideology of "we must return to our ancestral land" and by implication kick out the people who've actually been living there for the past 2000+ years, even though the invaders have zero roots there whatsoever.
Sure, so far it's only Jews who have taken the next leap forward in their historically & geographically specific ethnic LARP / cosplay. Probably due to their proximity to Romantic Nationalism in Europe during the 19th C.
But who knows? The Assyrians, Arameans, and Mandeans could get stricken by Romantic Nationalist fever as well, if their host societies catch it first. Then all of a sudden, there will be a "Back to Nineveh" movement to hijack modern Mosul by a small minority of Assyrians, away from the Semitic Iraqis who have been living there forever. Granted, the Assyrians don't live so distant from the place they'd be trying to reconquer, unlike Polish Jews traveling all the way down to Palestine -- but still, they'd be launching a fake and retarded crusade against the rightful occupants and stewards of an ancient / medieval city, just cuz they think they're really from there when they're actually from Greater Armenia, much further north.
And would they stop at Mosul? Maybe they'd take a page out of the Zionist playbook about "Greater Israel", and extend "Assyrian" identity and territorial claims all the way down into former Babylonia, as part of "Greater Akkadia". Syriac-Arameans might think they have a claim to Syria, which in ancient times included modern Lebanon. When people get infected by fake and retarded and crazy ideologies, there's no telling where they will take them...
So I'm just laying it out here in advance, just in case. All these cultures come from Anatolia, Southern Caucasus, and Iran, and they have no legitimate claim to anything from the Semitic or broader Saharo-Arabian sphere. And when you hear their tales about where they come from, just know it's fake -- not fantastical, like being descended from twins who were nursed by a she-wolf, but a specific geographical-historical claim that is not true.
Genetic reductionists think you have to collect and analyze a DNA sample in order to tell someone's true origins -- aside from being wrong, since genes don't propagate culture, it's also impossible to administer under hostile / adversarial conditions, and they would never volunteer it and give themselves away accidentally.
ReplyDeleteBut cultural shibboleths are the opposite -- they're true rather than fake indicators of what their deep ancestral roots are, and they can be either voluntarily displayed by the otehr side, or at least passively observed under adversarial conditions. Just wait until they open their mouth to listen for linguistic shibboleths, or wait until they celebrate the New Year or a wedding, for ritual shibboleths to reveal themselves.
By focusing on culture, the truth will come out, whether they intend it or not.
In fact, most actual Semitic people near Israel don't complain about how poorly the Israeli Jews perform on a DNA test of Semiticity or whatever. They don't compare principal component scores like it's the SAT or the MMPI.
Instead, they laugh at how pathetically Israelis "speak" Semitic, like being unable to pronounce pharyngeal consonants, probably the most distinctive sounds in Semitic. "You guys can't even say your own holiday's name properly -- 'KKKKKHHHHHHanukkah', 'KKKKKHHHHHanukkah' -- ya 7abibi, it should be '7anukkah', you should have practiced your pronunciation better back in Poland before coming here! Now everyone here instantly knows that you're just filthy foreigners cosplaying as Semitic people! Go back to Poland with that accent..."
Kurds are also former Armenians! But who somewhat Iranicized their culture during the past 1000 years. I'm totally putting these findings together in a new standalone post, once I'm satisfied that there's no more findings on this topic.
ReplyDeleteUnlike the Assyrians and Syriac-Arameans and Jews, though, Kurds do not claim to be Semitic now, or to descend from an ancient Semitic group. Their geopolitical ambitions focus on where they live now, and have lived for 1000 years -- Kurdistan, not in the Saharo-Arabian sphere to the south. So good for them for their honesty about who they are, where they're from, and what they want / deserve in the future.
They'll never get it, cuz they are too anarchic and anti-cohesive to sustain their own nation, but at least they aren't anarchic low-trust LARP-ers who steal others' land and fuck up the whole world, like Jews moving to Palestine.
First, Kurds still live in the Southern Caucasus to this day, not just in Armenia with fellow Indo-Euro speakers, but in Georgia as well. And Kurdistan occupies the land formerly known as Greater Armenia, in between the major power centers of Anatolia and Iran, to the north of Mesopotamia, just south outside the Caucasus Mountains.
There was a locally ruled kingdom there from the late 9th to mid-11th centuries -- Bagratid Armenia -- which was still Armenian in character, with Armenian as the language and Armenian Apostolic Christianity as the religion. This was a brief reconquest on behalf of Christian Armenia and Georgia, after the Emirate of Armenia had ruled the region during the 8th and 9th centuries, as part of the Arabian conquest of MENA.
However, although the Bagratids expelled the Arabians, it wasn't long until the Seljuk Turks took over Iran, swept westward to conquer Greater Armenia, and from there into Anatolia, where they developed into the Ottoman Empire. So much for Armenian and Christian rule, from then onward.
This accounts for the only striking NON-Armenian trait of the Kurds -- adopting Islam. But they're in the same boat as their fellow Indo-Euro neighbors the Anatolians and Iranians. More like their Anatolian neighbors, in having formerly been Christian like the Byzantine Greeks. They belong to an unusual school of Islam for their region -- Shafi'i Sunni -- as opposed to the Hanafi Sunni school that the Ottomans spread, or the Shia branch that the Safavids adopted, and which predominates in nearby Mesopotamia. Perhaps the Kurds were still trying to carve out their own distinctive ethno-cultural Third Way niche -- neither Anatolian, nor Iranian, and not beholden to the clerical elites of Constantinople or Tehran for religious authority.
This overall conclusion is not counter-intuitive, controversial, etc. -- Kurds now and as far back into the past as they have been documented, have lived in Greater Armenia, not primarily in Iran and then moving westward, and not primarily in Anatolia and moving eastward, let alone being Semitic migrants from the south.
Since there is no widespread documentation of them representing a mass migration from somewhere else, we have to assume at first that they are native to Greater Armenia, and are an ethnogenetic evolution of the High and Late Middle Ages, when they are first documented by all their neighbors.
Let's look at all the evidence...
First, I'll step in a great big stinking pile of DNA, before purifying this blog with the all-important cultural evidence, linguistic and otherwise.
ReplyDeleteGenetic comparisons to their neighbors place them within the same Mediterranean / Anatolian / Caucasian / Iranian swath as their fellow Indo-Euro speakers of the Middle East. But they are similar to Caucasians, not distinct from Caucasians. And like Armenians, they probably descend genetically from the Urartians, who spoke a non-Indo-Euro language in the land that later became Greater Armenia.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5256937
But genetic data is fairly coarse-grained. It says they could be Anatolian Greek, Caucasian, or Iranian, even if they're a bit more Caucasian-like. Let's get super-specific -- and only cultural shibboleths can magnify things with that degree of resolution.
Starting with the Kurdish language, or languages, the majority of ethnic Kurds speak Kurmanji, which is the furthest north of the 3 main languages, and spoken in Greater Armenia.
ReplyDeleteUnlike all other surviving Indo-Euro languages aside from Armenian, it still has a 3-way contrast among the stop consonants -- voiced, voiceless, and voiceless aspirated. This is the same 3-way contrast that Armenian has today, and back to Old Armenian. Ancient Greek had this same contrast, but it vanished during the Roman period.
A similar contrast existed in Urartian, with one difference -- voiceless aspirated, voiced, and voiceless ejective. And in any case, Urartian was dead by the mid-1st millennium BC, a millennium before Kurdish could have been born.
The Urartian contrast also existed, and still exists, in Kartvelian -- the SW Caucasian family that Georgian belongs to. Better time-frame, but still the difference of there being a voiceless ejective rather than plain voiceless.
In Proto-Indo-European, there was a similar 3-way stop, but the aspirated one was voiced (not voiceless), plus the plain voiced and voiceless ones. Again, way too far into the past to feed directly into Kurdish, and on the other side of the impenetrable Caucasus Mountains.
The 3-way contrast was lost by Proto-Iranian (although earlier present in Proto-Indo-Iranian), so Kurdish could not have inherited it directly from P-I. In the other Iranian languages, the 2-way voiced vs. voiceless contrast from P-I developed a 3rd voiceless fricative (e.g., "f" in the labial place, instead of only "p" and "b"). From there, the voiced counterpart was filled in as well, giving "v". But within stops, there were still only 2 flavors -- voiced and voiceless.
Theories that derive Kurdish aspirated stops from Iranian fricatives should be assumed wrong, since they are doubling back on the history of Iranian evolution, which got rid of aspiration altogether, and created fricatives in order to fill out more of the phoneme inventory from the lost aspirated stops. It is simpler to assume that Kurdish inherited this contrast from the long-historical language of its region -- Armenian.
A 3-way contrast among stops is common to all families in and adjacent to the Caucasus, including the 3 Caucasian families, as well as Proto-Indo-European and Hurro-Urartian. So Kurdish having such a contrast places it within the Caucasian regional sphere, and since Armenian is the only other Indo-Euro language with such a contrast, and that it is the exact same contrast as in Kurdish, the reasonable conclusion is that Kurdish inherited it from Armenian.
That leaves two possibilities:
ReplyDelete1. Kurdish is an Iranian language spoken by former recent Armenian speakers, i.e. it's Iranian with an Armenian accent / phoneme inventory / phonotactics.
2. Kurdish is an Armenian language, with various Iranian linguistic features or loanwords that have been borrowed or spread by contact from their Iranian neighbors.
I haven't made a deep dive into this topic, so I don't know which is more likely right now.
I didn't know before a cursory exploration of these topics, but apparently the Iranian branch is the most poorly understood within Indo-European. I know that from having proven that Scythian was Uralic rather than Iranian (or any Indo-Euro branch), last year. It was the laziest, craziest theory I ever saw, once I looked at the supposed evidence and the sources like Herodotus. It's 100% Uralic, from the Mordvinic branch, most similar to modern Erzya, the most southwestern Uralic language to this day. From the phoneme inventory, to phonotactics, to the etymologies -- the only answer is Uralic, and Iranian is decisively ruled out (along with Turkic, BTW).
For example, there is no reconstruction of Proto-Kurdish -- the shared ancestor of all languages / dialects called Kurdish or Kurdish-adjacent today.
https://protouralic.wordpress.com/2022/02/09/will-someone-please-reconstruct-proto-kurdish-already/
There's something very lazy, mystical, and fantastical about Iranian specialists outside of Iran, which is where a lot of this retarded BS comes from, like the notion that Scythians were Iranian, something nobody ever claimed before fin-de-siecle Austria-Hungary and the Soviet era. Or the Romantic nationalist nonsense among Baltoids that their ancestors were neighbors with Iranians -- "Sarmatians", who also did not speak Indo-Euro (either part of the Uralic belt, or Northern Caucasian).
And Iranian is heavily politically charged these days, since the collapsing American Empire loves to bet all its money on Iranian-adjacent ethnic groups who are not Persian, to overthrow the Islamic regime in Iran once and for all. Or to take over Iraq from the Baathist regime. Or to rule over Syria. Sorry, Kurds can never do that, always lose, and get hung out to dry by Uncle Sam for all their troubles.
So if it turns out that Kurds are mostly Armenian, ethnically and/or linguistically, that could wreck the comforting delusions of lots of wannabe power-trippers throughout the American Empire.
And the Armenian / non-Iranian shibboleths of Kurdish don't end there. Kurdish also has 2 "l" phonemes, a light / clear alveolar one like most Indo-Euro languages, but also a dark velarized one. This pair of "l"s was also present in Old Armenian, although it was gradually lost after about 1000 AD, as the dark one became a voiced velar fricative.
ReplyDeleteThis allows us to date what stage of Armenian the speakers of Kurdish used to speak -- Kurdish evolved from a community of Old Armenian speakers, not Middle or Modern Armenian speakers. And that time-frame matches their ethnogenesis during the High / Late Middle Ages.
Tellingly, Iranian does not have the 2-"l" contrast. In fact, it has hardly ever had a single "l" -- one of the most damning facts about Scythian, as I detailed last year, which has "l"s all over the place, including initially (e.g., "Lipoxais", the deity from the Scythian founding myth). All the way back to P-Indo-Iranian, "l" was lost from P-IE, merged into "r". Iranian didn't recover "l" until the Middle Ages, and only in limited contexts, like an "rC" cluster, and not in initial position.
Since "l" is a very non-Iranian sound, let alone there being 2 "l"s, we should be suspicious of Kurdish being Iranian -- or an internally developed form of Iranian. It's either Armenian, which has both "l"s, or it's "Iranian with an Armenian accent".
Check out all the Kurdish given names beginning with "l", vs. 0 male and only a handful of female names beginning with "l" in Persian (some of which are Arabic borrowings, like "Layla").
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Kurdish_given_names#L
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Persian_given_names
Neither Georgian nor its proto ancestor (P-Kartvelian) has the pair of alveolar and velarized "l"s. Urartian had the pair in allophony, not as distinct phonemes. Nor do the NW or NE Caucasian languages, although they have a wealth of other laterals. The closest match is Old Armenian, which is precisely what was spoken in the very land where the Kurds would emerge, right as Old Armenian was giving way to Middle Armenian.
The Kurds were simply a breakaway ethnicity from Dark Age Armenians, in the southern plains where they were exposed to the Islamic conquests of the Arabians and the Seljuks, who couldn't keep all of the old ways intact like their northern cousins who could safely hole up in the fortress of the Caucasus Mountains.
Last linguistic trait, before moving onto the important cultural shibboleths. Kurdish has a surprising number of labialized consonants as phonemes: kʷ, gʷ, xʷ, ɣʷ, qʷ all contrast with plain counterparts.
ReplyDeleteThis is not even Armenian, which at no stage had them. P-IE had some of them, but not all (again, too far back, wrong side of the Caucasus).
Needless to say, neither does Iranian, so this only weak link in the Kurdish-Armenian theory does not favor the Kurdish-Iranian theory either.
Nor did Urartian.
Nor does Georgian / P-Kartvelian.
Nor does Semitic, in case anyone was thinking of that.
The only nearby family with extensive plain vs. labialized pairs, including these exact ones, is Northwest Caucasian. Because individually, and especially as an entire class, these sounds are rare, they should not be assumed to have developed organically or "by chance" from Iranian -- or from Armenian alone, for that matter. They had to have been inherited from NW Caucasian.
Greater Armenia was, like most sprawling polities during the millennium of weak central states (300 AD to 1300 AD), a multi-ethnic confederation or coalition of neighboring groups from the region. So perhaps one of them was a stray wandering group who spoke a NW Caucasian language, and they were important enough in the coalition that this highly distinctive shibboleth of theirs was approved for inclusion in the new Kurdish language that was to become their lingua franca.
Regardless of precisely how they came to be in Kurdish, they are clearly a Caucasian trait, not an Iranian trait.
Brief aside: recall the earlier series of comments on the heavily Caucasian nature of the Gypsies, who were popularly thought to be a migration from India into the Balkans. But both the genetic, linguistic, and other cultural evidence points to them being part local Balkan, and crucially Caucasian (like Armenian), with only some Indian origins.
ReplyDeletehttps://akinokure.blogspot.com/2025/08/japanese-steppe-origins-breaking.html?showComment=1759809387888#c7164002542475373174
The role of the Caucasus cultures in the ethnogenesis of all sorts of Medieval groups is VERY underrated. Jews, Gypsies, Kurds, Assyrians -- you name it. I'm sure there are more, I just haven't looked into it yet...
Well, the non-linguistic cultural evidence will be brief but conclusive. There's no need to demonstrate their Indo-European status -- everyone knows that. And they do celebrate Nowruz (Newroz in Kurdish), and jump over fire for good luck during the New Year holiday. But every bona fide Indo-Euro group does that, including Armenians, Greeks, Spaniards, and every branch of Caucasian.
ReplyDeleteIts only the name of the holiday, "Newroz", that is clearly Iranian. But that could just be a loanword.
There is one ritual for the New Year that clearly divides the Iranians from their neighbors to the west -- what specifically they do for the ritual of "hiding a lucky charm in a communal meal".
In Iran and further east, they make a wheat porridge / pudding (samanu / samanak), and throw an entire unshelled walnut into it.
Among Armenians, Assyrians, Syriac-Arameans, Greeks, Ashkenazi Jews, and Latin Europeans, it's a metallic object (a coin in all except for Jews, who use a metal key), and it's inside a baked item like a cake or bread. Same ultimate origin ritual as the Iranian one -- but a different descendant than the "lucky food ingredient within a liquid meal" descendant.
It's no surprise to learn that the Kurds paint eggs and hide a lucky charm in a communal meal for the New Year holiday. But which side do they fall on?
Behold:
"The Kurds paint eggs in different colors and arrange them in rows of sprouted wheat. They also bake cookies in which they hide a coin. Whoever gets the piece with the coin will have good luck in the New Year."
https://hetq.am/en/article/6371
Although that report is about Kurds in Armenia, this cannot be mere assimilation to Armenian norms -- Armenians don't call the holiday any variant of Nowruz, but Trndez, and Armenians celebrate it in February instead of the spring. Also, Kurds in Armenia have not adopted Christianity or any Christian-related framing of the ancient Nowruz-type rituals, as Armenians have. They still speak Kurdish, call themselves Kurds, eat Kurdish food, and so on. They are an ethnic enclave within Armenia.
So, the fact that Kurds resemble Armenians rather than Iranians in their form of the "hiding a lucky charm in the communal meal" New Year ritual, means they are descended from a common ancestor, not borrowing or assimilation within Armenia.
And the baked good is slightly different between them, showing it's not a carbon-copy or loan, but subtle variations on a shared ancestral theme -- Armenians use gata bread, which is a big ol' loaf or cake, which is sliced into sections. Kurds bake cookies, which may come from a single large mass of raw dough, but are separated before baking, into individual cookies.
Neither of them use a liquid medium like porridge or pudding, and do not use a food item as the lucky charm, so neither is culturally Iranian, even if all 3 of them are culturally Indo-European.
I'm not sure of other ritual shibboleths that have this fine-grained resolution to distinguish Iranians from Armenians, within Indo-Euro traditions. But this is a key test, and the Kurds are revealed to have Greater Armenian roots, not Iranian roots. Again, not a surprise based on everything that is known about their territory back to the birth of their ethnicity.
Aside from Paleosiberia, the Caucasus is the most fascinating place on the planet. How can you not be spellbound by all this stuff? How can no one other than a cliff-dwelling sage be curious enough to explore all these secret passageways to discover unseen treasure, to then share it with the whole world?
ReplyDeleteWhy is everyone in academia so damn boring, and/or retarded?
I dunno, but I'm happy to heed my vocation as a discoverer and sharer of timeless mysteries, if they're just going to get bogged down in pointless minutiae, when they're not literally fabricating total bullshit in order to circle-jerk themselves.
The unexplored reality is far more fascinating than the ridiculously laughable crap that academics cook up when torturing the data until it confesses.
And that is why I will never abandon my post atop the Cliffs of Wisdom, laboring on behalf of an eternal and pan-spatial audience... ^_^
I just hope these ritual shibboleths don't become too widely understood over there, lest it set off a regional ethnic war.
ReplyDelete"Will you look at that? I just KNEW it -- they're walnut-in-the-pudding hiders!"
"Oh yeah, and what makes you coin-in-the-bread hiders so damn great, anyway?"
These things could turn into heated slurs! Hopefully they just sling them in playful teasing fun, like Polak jokes in America...
This also means Ashkenazi Jews were specifically Greater Armenian, on the side that was Anatolian / Caucasian / Iranian (the other side being Slavic). Ashkenazis used to bake a key inside a loaf of challah, with good luck going to the finder. Now some of them have modified it to just baking the loaf in the shape of a key, but that destroys the part about one person getting the lucky charm.
ReplyDeleteLoaf of bread, lucky metalic small object -- Armenian type, not Iranian type. Probably used to be a coin, but then altered to being a key -- since Ashkenazis were so close to money, maybe a coin didn't feel special or magical or talismanic enough. A key unlocks something valuable, like a mystery -- bingo, we'll bake a key into the bread instead.
See the posts from August 2024 for extensive exploration of this topic, about Ashkenazis and Jews as a whole.
Elhaik pointed out that all the place-name variants that resemble Ashkenaz (Iskenaz, Eskenaz, Ashanaz), lie in NE Turkey. That was part of Greater Armenia, and was never the secure core of the Balkan or Anatolian civilizations. Only the local Hittites had a lock on Eastern Anatolia. It was a troublesome no-man's-land for the Romans, Byzantines, and the Persian empires for that matter. So I doubt the cultures who left the "Ashkenaz" place-names there were Greek or Iranian -- more likely, local Armenians.
No idea what the place-name means, but Armenian etymologies are worth exploring.
Yiddish speakers used to speak Armenian! This will reinforce what I've already shown extensively using non-linguistic cultural shibboleths, where there's no reason to drop your traditions and pick up new foreign ones. Language is different, with powerful material motives to drop your original and adopt a new foreign one. But I couldn't stay away from the linguistic angle, now that I've rekindled my interest in my undergrad focus. ^_^
ReplyDeleteTo start with, it's clear Yiddish speakers did not come from any form of Germanic-speaking background, cuz Yiddish lacks front-round vowels -- probably the most shibboleth-y part of the Germanic phoneme inventory. Imagine trying to pass yourself off as a German speaker, without ever using front-round vowels! "Well, I kinda understand what you mean, but... you must be a foreigner speaking with a heavy foreign accent, since our most distinctive sounds are impossible for you."
Even centuries later, after prolonged contact with front-round-vowel-speakers in both Germanic and French-speaking countries, Yiddish never acquired front-round vowels. They didn't just "adopt" a dialect of German -- all dialects of German have front-round vowels. They were basing their new language on German, but they always spoke it with a detectable foreign, non-Germanic accent, since they were culturally apart from their host societies.
They weren't immigrants who eventually acquired the native tongue of their hosts, they were an ethnic enclave who preserved many features of their previous foreign language, while trying to fashion a creole of that older foreign language plus the native language of their hosts, in order to communicate with them.
That doesn't tell us *which* foreign language they spoke, though -- just that it wasn't Germanic. How can we narrow down the list of suspects?
I've already shown that they used to speak Slavic -- Yiddish does multiple WH-fronting, i.e. multiple relative pronouns can stack up at the front of questions. Only Slavic does so in that region. For example, "who hit whom?" (only 1 WH word at the front) can be "who whom hit?" in Slavic languages -- and Yiddish. And Romanian, but that just says that Romanian speakers used to be Slavic speakers -- shocker. It's also no shocker that Yiddish speakers used to be Slavic speakers. This is one of the few cases where syntax rather than phonology serves as a shibboleth -- neat!
A phonological pattern that hints at the Slavic background of Yiddish speakers is final obstruent de-voicing, which was common in Germanic of that time, but also in Slavic. Yiddish began with this pattern, although over time it lost it and kept final obstruents voiced if that's how they originally were. Notably, Armenian does *not* do this, so perhaps the initially polyglot Ashkenazi population, consisting of an Armenian side and a Slavic side, tried doing the Slavic thing at first, but eventually the Armenian side won out, so that Yiddish quickly stopped resembling Germanic and Slavic regarding this pattern.
And it turns out the Slavic background only gets you so far in accounting for Yiddish as distinct from Middle High German, the language it was based on.
OK, now onto accounting for the Yiddish phoneme inventory, compared to Middle High German that it was based on. The two are distinct, which is why Yiddish has a foreign accent compared to any other kind of German. And yet, Slavic cannot provide the Yiddish inventory, while Armenian can, down to very shibboleth-y quirks.
ReplyDeleteFirst, the inventories to consult. We have to use languages from around 1000 AD, when Yiddish came into being, not Proto-Germanic, Modern Russian, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_High_German#Phonology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish_phonology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_East_Slavic#Phonology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Armenian#Phonology
Starting with vowels, the most damning thing against an entirely or primarily Slavic background for Yiddish, is the presence of several diphthongs. Yiddish has "ei", "ai", and "oi". Slavic has NONE. This is due to the Proto-Slavic monophthongization of dipthongs from Proto-Indo-European. Some Slavic languages re-gained some diphthongs in some contexts, but it was not pan-Slavic, and this re-gain did not get completed until around 1300 -- way too late to serve as the background of Yiddish. To this day, Russian lacks diphthongs.
Slavic cannot put the "oi" in "oy gevalt", so we must look elsewhere...
And it's Armenian to the rescue! Old Armenian has 6 diphthongs, including "ai" and "oi" like Yiddish, although not "ei". However, it does have 2 whose first element is "e" ("ea" and "ew"), as well as the 2 just mentioned whose second element is "i". So it would not have been difficult for Old Armenian speakers to come up with "ei".
The target language, Middle High German, had 6 diphthongs: "ei", "øy" (both front-round), "ou", "ie", "yə" (first front-round), and "uo". Old Armenian could not match these, having "ay", "aw", "ea", "ew", "iw", "oy". But, at least they had diphthongs to adapt to the MHG target, unlike Slavic.
Regardless of how well Yiddish diphthongs hit the MHG diphthong target, it's clear that Armenian diphthongs are a much closer match to Yiddish ones. So, rather than Yiddish dipthongs being an assimilation of MHG ones, they were mostly the persistence of those from their previous language, Old Armenian, which is another source of the heavy foreign accent that Yiddish has compared to any other Germanic language of its time.
Why did half of the OA ones get lost? I speculate that, since Slavic speakers were the other half of the Ashkenazi coalition, their phonotactic needs were also crucial. Notice that Yiddish diphthongs all have "i" as the second element, unlike the OA or MHG ones. This would have made it easier to acquire for speakers from a monophthong-only language, like Slavic -- one element was constant, and only 3 variations on the other element, as opposed to multiple choices for either element (in OA, 4 first elements, 3 second elements, not all combos realized). And the 1st elements were widely spaced apart in the vowel space -- "e", "a", and "o" -- to make it easy for monophthong speakers to distinguish these strange new sounds.
Armenian, like just about every other language, lacks front-round vowels. So that's not definitive like the diphthong pattern, but it's another point in favor of Armenian as a pre-Yiddish language of the Ashkenazis.
Now onto the consonants. Yiddish, MHG, Old East Slavic, and Old Armenian are all somewhat similar, as Indo-European languages of the same era. But Yiddish has way more phonemes than MHG, which means it cannot just be adopting the language of its host society, but preserving the features of the language the Ashkenazis used to speak before fashioning their Germanic creole.
ReplyDeleteBoth Slavic and Armenian have more jam-packed consonant inventories than MHG, but OA provides a far closer match than does OES. And there is nothing that OES can do, that OA cannot. So the simplest assumption is that only OA was the precursor to Yiddish. Of course, the Slavic members of the Ashkenazi spoke a Slavic language before Yiddish, but it was not their consonant inventory that was carried over into Yiddish, the language of the new uni-glot Ashkenazi community.
Yiddish does not have a labial approximant like "w" or labio-dental "w" (transcribed as "ʋ"). Armenian also lacks such an approximant, whereas Slavic has "ʋ". MHG *does* have "w", so there was a critical need for it in a creole based on it -- but although Slavic could have provided it, it didn't wind up in Yiddish. The fact that MHG has "w", but neither Yiddish nor OA had it, while Slavic did, shows how Yiddish was content to be a foreign-accented creole rather than maximally faithful assimilation, and that Armenian generally over-rode Slavic when it came to fashioning Yiddish.
Yiddish has "v", which OA does as well, but OES does not. Eventually, "v" will become the definitive Indo-Euro / Caucasian sound, but it didn't happen everywhere at the same time. Armenian was a pioneer in "v" technology, while Slavic lagged behind.
Yiddish has a back voiceless fricative, however it's not velar "x" but uvular "X". And this is the only uvular consonant, whereas the stops "k" and "g" are both velar. OA has the exact same unusual pattern -- velar stops, but a uvular fricative "X". Slavic has velars for all 3, as is typical for Indo-Euro and probably cross-linguistically. The Yiddish and OA series of velar stops + uvular fricative is highly unusual and distinctive. MHG has the velar "x", like Slavic, so this is like the case of "w", where there was a critical need for velar "x" in the creole based on it being in MHG, and Slavic could have supplied this -- but it was over-ridden by OA, which supplied a uvular "X" into Yiddish, which was content to be a foreign-accented creole rather than strict assimilation.
The only weak point of the Armenian hypothesis is that it had 2 "l"s, one alveolar and one velarized. But Yiddish originally had 2, alveolar and palatalized. Slavic also has 2, alveolar and palatalized. This is one aspect of Yiddish that is more Slavic than Armenian.
Yiddish has a wimpy palatal series, with only the approximant "j" and formerly the palatalized "l". OES and all Slavic languages have an extensive palatal series of nasals, stops / affricates, fricatives, laterals, and approximants. OA also lacked a palatal series -- those listed in the "palatal" column at Wikipedia are identical with those listed in the "post-alveolar" column under Yiddish ("tʃ", "dʒ", "ʃ", "ʒ"), which OES did not have. The rich aveolar series of Yiddish is easily supplied by OA, but not entirely by OES (which lacked "dz").
Finally, Yiddish has "f", which neither OA nor OES have, but OA is in a better position to supply, since it had a 3-way contrast of stops, and the voiceless aspirated member can become a voiceless fricative, which was incredibly common in the history of Indo-European, including Armenian's spiritual twin, Greek.
Yiddish will lose the aspirated consonants from its OA precursor, while keeping the plain voiced and voiceless members of the series. There was no need for aspirated consonants in the MHG target, and Slavic speakers couldn't pronounce them, so they went out the window -- or in the case of "pʰ", adapted to supply "f" as was needed for MHG.
Two final notes on the Yiddish alphabet and orthography, as a clue to which languages were previously spoken by the Ashkenazis.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish_orthography
It is based on the Hebrew alphabet, which has way more consonants than are needed for Yiddish. But rather than keeping the letters that were needed, and junking the letters that added nothing, there are multiple letters for various sounds.
Keeping with the theme of Armenian and its 3-way series of stops / affricates, I wonder if this was the reason why the adopters of the Yiddish alphabet kept so many variant letters for the supposedly "same" sound. Maybe it wasn't the same -- maybe there were originally 3 velar obstruents, "k" and "g" and "kʰ". Likewise in the labial and dental / alveolar places.
Supposedly, the alphabet was over-specified in order to distinguish words of Semitic borrowing vs. Germanic or Slavic origin. They could use the more exotic non-standard letters for Semitic words, and the plain standard letters for Germanic and Slavic words.
But in the very earliest example of written Yiddish, from the late 13th C, the German word "tag" (= "day") shows final de-voicing into "tak". However, the final consonant is written with Hebrew "qoph", akin to Arabic "qaaf", both originally referring to the uvular consonant, not the velar one. This is an insanely exotic spelling for such a basic native word -- it's like spelling "thank you" as "thanq you"! Something else must be going on... maybe "q" was specially used to indicate "k as a result of final de-voicing" as opposed to "phonemic k", IDK, but it's not just a matter of Semitic loans vs. Germanic / Slavic native words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish_language#Written_evidence
Even more curiouser, there are 4 letters that come in a stop vs. fricative pair, for 8 total. 3 of the pairs are straightforward stop vs. fricative pairs -- "b" is tweaked for "v" (labial voiced), "p" is tweaked for "f" (labial voiceless), and "k" is tweaked for "x" (velar voiceless).
ReplyDeleteBut there's a "t" that's tweaked for "s". And AFAICT, this is only in final position for Semitic words, where it used to vary between stop "t" and inter-dentral fricative "th" way back when the literal "shibboleth" detection method was used in the ancient Levant. This is also where Arabic uses "taa marbuuta", which varies between "a" and "t".
That means that the intended fricative version was "th", based on stop "t". But this phoneme was not in the inventory of the speakers -- Yiddish, Armenian, Slavic, and MHG all lack "th". So they would have tried to pronounce it as closely as possible, as "s" -- like many foreigners do when trying to pronounce English words like "thank" (Japanese speakers use this solution, for example -- "sank").
But I don't like that picture -- it assumes a stage where there's a phoneme absent from everyone's inventory, "th", before altering to "s" which everyone can pronounce. And remember, no Jews after the Second Temple period were native Levantine Semitic speakers -- all local converts. So there's no way they would have tried to preserve the "th" sound that was only a phoneme in one local dialect in the Levant over 1000 years earlier. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong ethnic group.
Rather, I think these tweaked letter pairs were originally unaspirated vs. aspirated. Then as aspiration was lost in favor of frication, the current stop vs. fricative pairs emerged.
That explains the "p" / "f" pair, the "k" / "x" pair, and the otherwise unusual "t" / "s" pair -- it was originally "t" vs. "tʰ", and since that could not become fricative "th" (absent from everyone's inventory), it was mapped to the closest voiceless dental / alveolar fricative, namely "s". But it was never realized as "th".
This does raise another problem, namely the "b" / "v" pair -- Armenian had aspiration only on voiceless consonants, which is fine for the above 3, but not this one, since they're voiced. Nevertheless, the tweaked "b" = "v" is apparently a very rare form of "v" in Yiddish, which almost always uses a variant on Hebrew "waw", not the tweaked "beit". So perhaps this "b" / "v" pair only arose after the other 3 pairs, when aspiration was gone from the Armenian precursor, replaced by frication. Then this would be understood as a fricative variant, not an aspirated variant.
I can't find an easy source for when the "b" / "v" pair arose in the history of Yiddish, but it does seem like a later and rarer pair, compared to the other 3 voiceless ones.
To spell it out in a diagram, here are the 2 stages of the sounds that the tweaked letter referred to. The untweaked letter was a voiceless stop, "p", "t", "k". The tweaked letters referred to aspirated voiceless stops, then voiceless fricatives, as Armenian aspiration was replaced by frication.
ReplyDeletepʰ -> f
tʰ -> s
kʰ -> X
Why not assume the left-hand sounds were fricatives to begin with, and eliminate this sound change? Cuz that would require the alveolar consonant to be inter-dental "th" (as in English "thank"), which never existed in the inventories of any of the relevant speech communities.
Only by assuming the left-hand side were aspirated stops, can they all be supplied by the inventory of at least one of the relevant groups -- namely, Armenian.
Of course, the right-hand sounds can also be supplied by Armenian (including uvular "X" rather than velar "x").
And the logic of the changes are all the same: using the same Old Armenian phoneme inventory, instead of picking the aspirated voiceless consonant, pick the fricative one that has the same place and voicing. The only possible choice for "pʰ" is "f", the only possible choice for "kʰ" is "X", and the only possible choice for "tʰ" is "s". Inter-dental "th" never enters to complicate the picture.
So the tweaked letters were not originally about frication, but aspiration.
And that only implicates Armenian as a precursor to Yiddish -- by 1000 AD, even Greek had lost its aspiration! Armenian was the only hold-out for aspiration, and it remains so to this day, being reinforced by Caucasian peer pressure. ^_^
Well, Indo-Aryan kept aspiration too, still to this day, but I mean the 3-way not the 4-way version, and in the European-ish region, not way over in South Asia. ^_^
ReplyDeleteI should add that the "t" / "s" tweaked pair of letters, is totally unnecessary to create an alternate letter for "s". There's only 1 "s" sound in Yiddish, and it already has 2 distinct Hebrew letters -- "sin / shin" and "samekh". That is plenty to cover Semitic vs. native words, or whatever. Just like the 2 distinct Hebrew letters for the single Yiddish "k" sound -- "koph" and "qoph". And the 2 distinct Hebrew letters for the single Yiddish "t" sound -- "taw" and "tet".
ReplyDeleteBy tweaking "tet" to yield another "s" letter, that's now 3 letters for "s"! 2 is plenty! No other consonant has 3 distinct letters, they were clearly content for just 1 or maybe 2.
The 3rd "s" letter is clearly an unintended consequence, not necessary -- if the goal was another "s"...
Therefore, the original goal was NOT to come up with yet another "s" letter. Nor was the original goal to come up with fricative letters whatsoever -- if that were true, then tweaked "t" would have had to refer to inter-dental "th", which Yiddish and all relevant background languages lacked.
And not all letters got tweaked into an alternate pair -- only the stops "p", "t", and "k" (and later, rarely, "b"). There was some reason to only tweak these letters, and not the letters for nasals, liquids, approximants, etc., to yield pairs of letters.
We've ruled out that reason being stop vs. fricative manner, since there's no fricative counterpart to "t" ("th") in the inventory. Why go through the hassle of tweaking "t" when "th" doesn't exist? Certainly it can't be to provide an unprecedented THIRD letter for a single sound, "s".
The only thing that the stops had in common, and not the other consonants, and which came in a minimal pair relationship, and where both were voiceless -- was aspirated vs. unaspirated.
Then when aspiration gives way to frication, aspirated "t" turns into "s" cuz that's the only possible choice from the existing, familiar OA inventory.
So what seems like a totally insane choice of orthography -- from the most high verbal-IQ wordcel autistic linguistically inclined ethnic group in world history -- must have had a rational explanation, when it was first invented. And the sole conclusion is that these pairs represented aspiration, not frication.
And, although they didn't know it at the time -- this would eventually reveal to a cliff-dwelling sage of the distant future on another continent, that the Ashkenazi Jews were originally Armenian speakers, or at least a big chunk of them were, and their phonology dominated the phonology of their coalition members when it came time to fashioning their new uni-glot creole of Yiddish.
I don't think Ashkenazi Jews mind thinking of themselves as descendants of Armenians -- another wily, brainy, middleman minority type. But it does hammer another nail in the coffin of their collective hallucination about descending from Levantine Jews of the Second Temple period, genetically, linguistically, and culturally.
Nope -- Armenian and Slavic converts from the Dark Ages, originally coalescing around the Khazar Empire, to administer its trade, mercantile, and economic networks. They adopted Judaism since that was the new converted religion of their Turkic imperial overlords / patrons / sponsors. But they're not Turkic themselves, not even a drop. They were a middleman minority, just as they are now.
Reminder of the Khazar Empire's territory, which included not only the Northern Caucasus, but all of present-day Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, though not further south into the plains of Greater Armenia, which was taken over by Byzantines, Arabians, Abbasids, or Seljuks, during the same time:
ReplyDeletehttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Chasaren.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Caucasus_topographic_map-en.svg
Of course, they controlled much of the East Slavic realm of the same time.
So it's totally straightforward, not counter-intuitive, to conclude that Ashkenazi Jews -- who emerged from this empire after it collapsed, and moved on to greener pastures north of the Caucasus -- were a mix of Armenian and Slavic. Possibly there were other Caucasian groups involved, but evidently the Armenians held the dominant role in their coalition.
Try figuring any of THAT out from genetics! Cultural anthropology for the win, yet again! ^_^
ReplyDeleteAshkenaz is the legendary founder of Armenia, according to Armenian legends! Bingo! Well, we can end the search for the origins of the place-names resembling Ashkenaz in Eastern Anatolia -- they are one and the same as the Old Testament figure, descendant of Noah.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenaz
This is a very obscure figure, who left place-names nowhere else outside of Eastern Anatolia. And only one ethnicity considers him their legendary founder, way back to their nation's first historian, who lived in the 5th C AD -- Armenians. And only one ethnicity continues to use his name as a given name in their language, to this very day, and it's a quite common name at that -- Armenians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenaz#Armenian_tradition
Before the Ashkenazi Jews used his name for their new home in Germany / France, and then to name themselves, nobody had ever heard of this figure, other than Armenians. The earliest mention of Ashkenaz as the local Jewish name for France / Germany is from Rashi, who lived in the 11th C. Presumably the local Jews had come up with this name sometime before then -- but not back to the 5th C, when they were nowhere to be found in that region.
Only the Armenians knew who he was, used his name in place-names, and took him up as their legendary ancient founder, at the very outset of their national historical tradition, in the 5th C AD, which continued through the Middle Ages and into the present day.
Conclusion: only the Armenians could have seeded the High Middle Ages culture of Jewish converts who named their new home and themselves after Ashkenaz. It was not only the name itself, but the tradition of using his name as their legendary founder, and using his name in their local place-names.
Just about all of the Armenian lexicon was lost when they converted to Judaism and became half of the new Ashkenazi Jews. But the name of their legendary founder, and the place-name named after him, was too SACRED to just toss in the garbage bin like yesterday's identity. It wasn't a fast-fashion accessory, it was a core part of their ethnic identity, and integrity and continuity of their culture demanded that they at least keep that part of it intact.
And that is why the only cultures who have ever known about this figure, let alone elevated his name so high, were the Armenians first -- and then their off-shoot who became half of the Ashkenazi Jews.
WOW! How is this stuff not broadly known and taken seriously??? I didn't even intend to discover this -- I was looking up names of Jews buried in Medieval German cemeteries, to see if any of them looked Armenian. It was too difficult to find a wealth of data online.
So then I tunneled from the other direction -- Wiktionary's list of Armenian names. And BOOM -- immediately in the first letter A, there's Askanaz!!! You can't make this up!
This is not the entire puzzle, just one more piece locking into place. But still, this piece was sitting in plain sight the whole time, and nobody noticed it!
Everyone else is too blinkered, boring, or bought-off to wander down the secret passageways of the universe, except for me... ^_^
Need to end the Zionist ideology among the Ashkenazim and their fellow travelers in America's elites and academia before they can start uncovering the true history of the Ashkenazim.
DeleteTo emphasize, "Ashkenazi" was an early Armenian endonym -- the name of an ethnic group, used by the in-group themselves. It wasn't just a given name, or used in place-names, or held up as their legendary founder. It was also used as an adjective, to name themselves as an ethnic group.
ReplyDeleteThe first Armenian historian, Koriun, writing in the 5th C., writes:
"I had been thinking of the God-given alphabet of the Azkanazian nation and of the land of Armenia—when, in what time, and through what kind of man that new divine gift had been bestowed"
He uses "Azkanazian" to describe a "nation", which is located in "the land of Armenia". An endonym.
Likewise in the 10th C, the very head of the Armenian Church, Hovhannes Draskhanakerttsi, uses "Ashkenazian" to describe a legendary army of antiquity, and armies belong to a political unit like a nation.
He says, "for at first Ashkenaz had named our people after himself in accord with the law of seniority..." This clearly means that "Ashkenazian" was an early ethnonym for the Armenians, according to their own legends.
Only two ethnicities in world history have ever called themselves "Ashkenazi" as an endonym -- first the Armenians, and then their later breakaway group, the Ashkenazi Jews.
When those converts to Judaism chose the name "Ashkenazi" to refer to themselves, they must have unambiguously understood it to be synonymous with "Armenian". It's a more poetic, mythological register, like the French calling themselves Gaulish, or Romans calling themselves Aenean, but "Ashkenazi" literally meant "Armenian" when the name was carried over into the Jewish convert off-shoot of the Christian Armenian culture.
Boring: the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel.
ReplyDeleteScoring: the 10 Lost Tribes of Armenia.
There's Ashkenazi Jews, Gypsies, Kurds, Assyrians, Syriac-Arameans, and that's only the half of them that I've uncovered so far! I wonder who else will wind up being secret former Armenians... ^_^
Dating Ashkenazi conversion to Judaism from the surname Kasdan / Cashdan / etc. I was trying to look for Armenian surnames in Ashkenazi Jewish surnames, but they are not there -- like Yiddish as a whole, they adopted Germanic or Slavic surnames, and left their old ones behind.
ReplyDeleteBut there's a class of Ashkenazi surnames that are not Germanic or Slavic -- those that refer to the hereditary priesthood. As it happens, Armenian Christians had a hereditary priesthood as well (now it's mixed), so it was seamless for them to transition to a Jewish religion with one as well. To the extent that there is an Ashkenazi Jewish bloodline for the priestly caste, it goes back through the Armenian Christian priestly caste, who were their predecessors -- and possibly back to Armenian paganism, if they had a hereditary priestly caste as well, IDK.
The main surname here is "Kohen" or its variants, which is the standard Hebrew word for "priest". Crucially, it is not in the plural, "Kohanim", as a surname, but the singular.
Then there's "Levi" and its variants, referring to the tribe that the priests belonged to.
Then there's "Rab" and its variants (like "Rabin"), referring to the title of the rabbi, who wasn't the same as a priest, but still a religious official.
Here's where it gets interesting: another common priestly surname is "Kasdan" and its variants. Except nobody has an easy explanation for where this name comes from. It has been given a comically ridiculous folk etymology about it being an acronym consisting of 4 separate elements -- sorry, nobody's name, given or family, is an acronym. Like, nowhere, never. Let alone a super-nerdy acronym that has 4 elements to remember!
The same acronym approach is given for "Segal" and "Katz", so those are bogus as well, but I don't know what they mean right now. We're just talking about Kasdan, but those need true explanations as well.
Well, it turns out that "Kasdan" has an almost perfectly Hebrew etymology as well -- it's almost like the Hebrew and Aramaic words for "Chaldean", the culture of Southern Mesopotamia during the 1st millennium BC, who were originally nomadic invaders from the West Semitic Levant, encroaching on the East Semitic Babylonian culture.
This culture was long dead by the time the name "Kasdan" emerges, and nobody was honestly calling themselves Chaldeans anymore. They bit the dust in the mid-1st millennium BC. But it was still hanging around as a poetic, semi-legendary term for the people of Southern Mesopotamia, especially for the literati, astronomers, astrologers, sorcerers, and magicians of the 1st millennium BC. The learned priestly caste of their time and place.
Why would any Jewish person call themselves Chaldean? In this poetic sense, it meant the center of learning near historical Babylon, then medieval Baghdad, which hosted the House of Wisdom during the Abbasid Caliphate. Just before this period, the compilation of the Babylonian Talmud was completed in -- that's right -- Babylon, in this same area. If you were a convert to the up-and-coming Rabbinic Judaism, and wanted to play a learned priestly role in your new institutional religion, you had to head on down to Southern Mesopotamia, where all the action was.
Once you had spent enough time there, absorbing all this new-fangled Talmudic stuff, you were given an exotic poetic epithet for having "gone native" there for so long -- Chaldean, or rather, Kasdan. It was a tribute and honor to be known as someone who'd made a second home in the epicenter of Rabbinic Judaism.
Except, there's one crucial difference. In Hebrew, the singular form of Chaldean is "Kasdi" and the plural, not that it matters, is "Kasdim". In Aramaic (the language that the Chaldeans originally spoke), it's "Kasda" in the singular, "Kasda'in" in the plural.
ReplyDeleteThe root is "kasd", but the endings don't match the "-an" of "Kasdan". Again, only Hebrew "Kasdi" and Aramaic "Kasda" are relevant, since they're in the singular. Both lack the "n", and the Hebrew one has the wrong vowel too -- "i" instead of "a".
The language that uses "-an" in a singular adjectival sense, is Arabic. It's "Kasdani" -- with a final "i" that will eventually get deleted in "Kasdan", probably to remove its overly exotic end vowel to Germanic, Slavic, and for that matter Armenian ears.
There's only one other person in world history who used "Kasdani" as an epithet -- Ibn Wahshiyya, an agriculturalist and alchemist of Southern Mesopotamia, who wrote during the early 10th centuries. He knew it meant Chaldean, and used this form instead of the standard Arabic "Kaldani", since the form with "s" was more faithful to the original, as reflected in Hebrew and Aramaic. It sounded more exotic and antiquated to Arabic ears. He claimed he descended from these exotic Aramaic-speaking nomads of 1500 years earlier -- so an exotic, authentic name was required.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Wahshiyya
Later in the 10th C, the Arabic-writing bibliographer and biographer Ibn al-Nadim (who may have been Arab or Persian), compiled the first encyclopedia in Arabic, Kitab al-Fihrist. In it, he discusses the Mishnah of Rabbinic Judaism -- and says that it's written in "Kasdani", by which he means Aramaic, once again using Chaldean in a poetic semi-legendary way. He could have picked any Aramaic-speaking group as the exemplar of their language, but he picked the Chaldeans, and used the "s" form rather than the boring ordinary "l" form of their name.
This is the only form of the word for Chaldean that could have seeded the future Ashkenazi priestly surname Kasdan. It has the right root, "kasd", it has the right first vowel of the suffix (unlike Hebrew), and it has the right consonant after that, "n", unlike either Hebrew or Aramaic. It's only the final "i" from Arabic that will get deleted eventually, due to it sounding wrong as a final sound of a surname to Germanic, Slavic, or Armenian ears.
Possibly it was deleted right away by the Armenians who travelled to Southern Mesopotamia to cram their brains full of the Babylonian Talmud, in order to become priests of their new religion. Armenian surnames tend to end in "-ian" ("son of"). Well, "-ani" isn't too different, if you delete the final "i", so there you go.
It's also possible they tried to adapt it to Armenian naming conventions, and came up with "Kasdian", and then since the "d" is alveolar, the "i" becomes more of a palatal "j", which becomes a 2nd-ary palatalization feature on the "d", yielding "Kasdʲan", and since there's no palatalized "d" in Armenian, that stabilized into just "Kasdan".
Hard to know which of the two paths it took, but it's clear that it began with Arabic "Kasdani" -- again, not necessarily coming from an Arabian source, but perhaps a Persian source who were using Arabic as the lingua franca of the Abbasid Caliphate. Iranians still use "Kasdani" as an adjective to describe one of two methods for making the setar instrument. They're evidently very fond of that poetic term for Chaldean -- so perhaps it was literate Persians the learning center of Baghdad, who encouraged the Armenian converts to Judaism to take up the name "Kasdan(i)".
Now for the timing of this name adoption. As already mentioned, the only prominent uses in Arabic of "Kasdani" were the 10th C, and that's also around the time the setar instrument was invented, one of whose construction methods is the "Kasdani" way.
ReplyDeleteThere was no vogue for Chaldeans, especially as spelled with an "s" rather than "l", since they disappeared as a distinct ethnicity in the mid-1st millennium BC... except for the 10th C, in Southern Mesopotamia or perhaps the Abbasid Caliphate as a whole. And after this brief vogue for all things Chaldean, it went away just as soon as it came, never to return.
That places "Kasdani" within a very narrow of popularity, basically just the 10th C.
Imagine there was a common surname, "Beatnikton" or "Hippiewitz" -- you'd know very precisely when these surnames were first adopted, and where. Sometime in America during the 1950s, '60s, or early '70s.
Likewise, the surname "Kasdani", or "Kasdan", must have been first adopted circa the 10th C, and in Southern Mesopotamia, where the priests were training their brains out to absorb the Babylonian Talmud straight from the source of the culture that produced it.
But these Armenian converts did not arrive right after it was compiled in the 6th C -- Arabic was not in use in Mesopotamia or the Sasanian Empire at that time. The Arabian conquest of the Sasanians was only in the 630s, and Arabic would not become the lingua franca for some time after that. And the vogue for the term "Kasdani" would have to wait until centuries later.
Nor did they do the full LARP and use the original Hebrew or Aramaic term for Chaldean -- "Kasdi" or "Kasda". Their form has an "n" after the first vowel of the suffix. So they didn't pick up this term from the Levant. And needless to say, they do not descend from anyone in the Levant, whether the Chaldeans or anyone else. That's why they aren't preserving the Hebrew or Aramaic words -- they have no linguistic roots with them.
Well, that fits perfectly with what we know about the conversion to Judaism of the Khazar Empire, in which the Armenian future Ashkenazi Jews were a middleman minority administering trade routes and other managerial affairs. The Turkic ruling elite converted to Judaism fully during the 1st half of the 9th C, and it would take a few generations for that to spread down the societal pyramid.
ReplyDeletePerhaps at first the Armenian middleman minority didn't know if they'd have to convert from their Christian religion of many centuries, just cuz their imperial overlords had adopted Judaism. But the rulers were evidently serious about it, and like middleman minorities, the Armenians didn't want to get on their rulers' bad side, so converted as well. Possibly for other reasons, as I mentioned before, about wanting Judaism to be a nonaligned / third way stance between Muslim and Christian empires. That's likely why the Khazars converted -- and the Armenians in their empire might have agreed with the logic, and joined them.
But you can't have a literate institutionalized religion that already has volumes and volumes of sacred texts, without studying them, memorizing them, copying them perhaps, and internalizing them. So, it was off to the very origin of the Babylonian Talmud, in Southern Mesopotamia, to absorb the written knowledge you were expected to have under your belt as a priestly official in this new-fangled Rabbinic Jewish religion.
This would have been all the more urgent once the Khazar Empire collapsed in the mid-10th C, and the Armenians no longer had imperial overlords to sponsor them. Suddenly, they had to fend for themselves, or serve as new leaders for the former subjects of the empire.
And what kind of religious leaders would they be if they didn't know anything about its sacred texts? To prove their worthiness as leaders, they had to really digest the Talmud, and that meant a sabbatical in Baghdad... where they would spend so much time acculturating themselves, that they would pick up the epithet Chaldean -- or more poetically and antiquatedly, Kasdani, shortened to Kasdan for Armenian (and later, Slavic and Germanic) ears.
And of course that fits into the timing of Ashkenazi Jewish ethnogenesis -- they are totally unrecorded by others, and never recorded themselves, during the 1st millennium AD. It's only in the early 2nd millennium AD that they cohere as a culture. That required an incubation period where they were new converts, and their Jewish identity was still inchoate.
ReplyDeleteSo the incubation beginning circa the 10th C is totally believable. By the 11th C, Rashi begins using "Ashkenazi" to describe Jews in Germany, replacing the earlier term "Loter".
I wonder if there's a note he left in the margins somewhere, saying he heard some of them even carry the surname "Kasdan" as though they were still clinging to that whole Chaldean mania from the previous century, and need to get with the times already. Hehe.
I dedicate this little piece of scholarship to a helpful person in my life who bears the poetic antiquated form of "Chaldean" as a surname. ^_^
ReplyDeletePS, why couldn't the Kasdans be Persian? After all, Persians seem to have loved that term for Chaldean, at the same time and place where the vogue was sweeping over.
ReplyDeleteExcept Persian Jews don't have any variant of this surname, even though it's still used to refer to the construction method of their setar instrument. And maybe they felt too proud of their native Iranian culture, not wanting to adopt a Semitic name unless required for their conversion to Judaism. But Chaldean had nothing to do with Judaism, indeed it was very PRE Second Temple and PRE Rabbinic, so why bother adopting that term as a surname?
Whatever their reasoning and motives were, they clearly did not adopt the surname. So whoever did adopt it, was not Persian. They weren't literal Chaldeans, a long-vanished culture. They were new converts who would go on to be priests in the Ashkenazi group in Europe -- the Armenians.
Another Armenian influence on Yiddish phonology, and ruling out Slavic influence. When the Ashkenazi Jews were fashioning their new creole, Yiddish, they were patterning it on Middle High German. By this stage, there was allophonic variation of "ch", depending on whether it followed a low/back vowel like "a" vs. a high/front vowel like "i". After "a", it was velar "x". After "i", it was palatal "ç". This remains a characteristic of German in the present.
ReplyDeleteIn Yiddish, the sound after "a" is uvular "X", while after "i" it is "ʃ" -- postalveolar sibilant (like "sh" in English). E.g., "naXt" (= "night") vs. "niʃt" (= "not"). The German cognates are "naxt" vs. "niçt".
The Yiddish allophonic pair of "X" and "ʃ" can only come from Armenian, not Slavic. In Old Armenian, these are the only two sounds close to the MHG targets of "x" and "ç" -- there is nothing else in between them in Armenian. So, although Yiddish "ʃ" is much further forward in the mouth than MHG "ç", it's the only possibility from the Armenian phoneme inventory.
Old East Slavic, on the contrary, has both velar "x" and two palatal fricatives -- palatalized "s", that is "sʲ", and the alveolo-palatal sibilant fricative "ɕ", which is the sibilant counterpart of "ç".
Certainly the velar "x" would provide a perfect match to the MHG target, unlike Armenian.
And either of the OES palatal-ish sibilants would have done as good a job or better at approximating "ç" than Armenian "ʃ".
So if the point were maximally matching the target sounds of MHG, Slavic phonology would have won in shaping Yiddish phonology.
But instead, it was Armenian phonology that won, even though that meant a less faithful rendering of the target language for their creole.
And so we see yet again how the Armenian faction of the up-and-coming Ashkenazi Jewish coalition was far more influential in shaping their inchoate culture, while the Slavic faction had to just go along with them as junior members.
Armenian does multiple WH-fronting! So does Yiddish, but so does Slavic. I never said Armenian did not do it, I just overlooked investigating it -- cuz I was focused on Slavic, a family I already knew did it, and who were members of the early Ashkenazi Jewish coalition. So I just figured it came from them.
ReplyDeleteHowever, now after seeing how many aspects of Yiddish reflect Armenian, not Slavic, I looked it up -- and indeed, Armenian allows multiple WH words to move to the front of a question.
E.g., Armenian "koj kavko pravi" -- literally, "who what does?" In English, "who is doing what?" More than 1 WH word moving to the front.
Therefore, we don't need to attribute this aspect of Yiddish to Slavic -- Armenian can supply it perfectly well. Don't posit any more than is necessary.
Sorry, that example was from Bulgarian, to establish that part. Some Armenian examples, from "The syntax of Armenian: chains and the auxilliary" by Tamrazian (1994):
ReplyDelete"Ov umen e sirum"
Literally, "Who whom is liking"
In English, "who likes whom?"
Armenian even allows a third WH word to front:
"Ov ume inchkan e sirum"
Literally, "Who whom how-much is liking"
In English, "How much does who like whom?"
Katz and Sagal are Armenian surnames! Well well well, I shouldn't have given up after looking at Wiktionary's list of Armenian surnames. There are other more extensive lists, and some names that aren't on the lists, but do come up in searches.
ReplyDeleteAs mentioned, both Katz and Sagal (variant: Segal) are priestly surnames, both have utterly bogus folk etymologies about being acronyms for full sentences in a language they never spoke, and therefore, both must have real etymologies elsewhere. Given the central role of Armenians in shaping Ashkenazi Jewish identity, we take a look to the "-ian"s of the world, and whaddaya know...
Artiom Katsian, a pioneer and record-holder in manned flight from the early 20th C. Pronounced the same way as "Katz" in Yiddish.
Sagal turns up lots of results for both Sagalian, as well as the variant Shagalian -- which is also mirrored on the Yiddish side, without the "-ian" of course, i.e. Shagal or in the case of the early 20th-C Russian Jewish painter, Chagall. There's also a variant Shaghalian, probably from a dialect where the aspirated consonant is the voiced rather than voiceless one.
There's a key link in the name of Israeli politician Joseph Shagal. He's not Ashkenazi, but a Mountain Jew (i.e. from the Caucasus), from Azerbaijan. And yet he has the name Shagal! Just like the Ashkenazi name, but he couldn't have borrowed it from them -- it's native to the Caucasus, as also attested in the Armenian variants with "-ian" at the end.
Likewise the pilot Katsian didn't borrow it from Ashkenazi Jews on the other side of the Caucasus -- it's a native Caucasian name.
In both their cases, it spread from the Caucasus to the Ashkenazi, via the Armenian faction of their early coalition. They didn't want their surnames to sound too weird in their new-found German host society, and they realized that all their last names ending with "-ian" would make them stand out. So they junked this suffix, while keeping the root of the name intact -- Kats (spelled "Katz" in German) and Sagal / Shagal.
I consider these mysteries only half-solved, since I still don't know what Kats and Sagal / Shagal mean in Armenian or Georgian or whatever. Nevertheless, they are the only other place nearby with these roots in their surnames, and so they are the only plausible seeds for the identical surnames among Ashkenazi Jews.
Kaplan fits Armenian, too! I was going to leave a joking remark about, "What am I going to find next -- Kaplanian?" But yes, yes I am! There are plenty of results for that surname.
ReplyDeleteSo when they crossed north into Europe, they simply dropped "-ian" and it became Kaplan.
Supposedly the Ashkenazi surname came from MHG "kaplan" = "chaplain", but these are Jews, not Christians, so I reject that.
Rather, it turns out "kaplan" is the Proto-Turkic word for "leopard, tiger", suitable to any religion. Which Turkic language donated it into the Caucasus for the inchoate Ashkenazi Jews to pick it up and run with it?
IDK, possibly it came from the Khazars -- they were Turkic, and were steppe nomads, who would've loved a surname like "leopard" or "tiger". And they were the overlords of the future Ashkenazi Jews, both the Armenian faction and the East Slavic faction.
Maybe the Seljuks, who left their Turkic language in Azerbaijan? That's a little too late, but maybe.
It doesn't matter which Turkic group left it, the point is that it is Turkic, does not refer to a Christian religious official, and is already in use as a surname in Armenian (with the "-ian" suffix of course). So it made a natural jump the Ashkenazi Jews when they broke off from Armenians.
The fact that it coincided with the German word for "chaplain" was a stroke of good luck, nothing more. Perhaps that's what allowed it to carry over (minus the "-ian") -- it was a false cognate with a pleasant word in their host society's language.
Kaplan is a priestly name, BTW, for Ashkenazi Jews.
ReplyDeleteCantor is Armenian too! Supposedly this is from a learned German borrowing ("kantor") of Latin "cantor" = singer, i.e. leader of the choir or chants in religious services. But German only borrowed this word in the 15th C, and the first variants of this surname for Ashkenazi Jews show up then or earlier -- there's a Kanther in 1498, but we'll get back to that variant in a second.
ReplyDeleteAgain, the priestly caste names, or upper-tier status names, were not mere Germanic or Slavic borrowings / assimilations -- they wanted to indicate prestige of where they came from, whether imaginary or real. Like the Hebrew names such as Kohen, Levi(n), Rab(in), and so on. So we go looking for other etymologies.
First, we have to note the wide scope of names that are variants on Cantor / Kantor among Ashkenazi Jews. Just as there is Kantorovich, there's also Kantarovich -- with "a" between "t" and "r". Hmmm. There's also Kanther, with "e" between those 2 consonants, and with an unusual "t" that's really "th". Sometimes Kanter, with "e" but plain "t".
So the "o" may not be original, and may be a later adaptation of the original to German "Kantor" = "choir leader".
Behold: the Armenian surname Kantarian (variant: Kanterian), with root "kantar". Kantarian is cognate with the Slavic surname Kantarovich.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%B2%D5%A1%D5%B6%D5%A9%D5%A1%D6%80
The Armenian root "kantar" was borrowed from Turkic, where it means a kind of large weighing scale in the marketplace, and by extension, the marketplace itself. Finally, a winner for an Ashkenazi Jewish surname -- markets, trade, buying & selling!
As it turns out, that Turkic word was borrowed from Arabic "qinṭār", but we know that can't be the source of the Jewish surname since it has the wrong 1st vowel. Arabic in turn borrowed it from Byzantine Greek "kentenarion", who borrowed it from Latin "centenarium", and those too have the wrong 1st vowel for the Jewish surname. So the Jewish surname definitely goes back only to Turkic, likely via a nearby language that borrowed from Turkic -- namely, Armenian, where it is attested in the surname Kantarian.
The Armenian origin is also bolstered by its "t" being aspirated, not plain. That's why there's sometimes a "th" in the Yiddish surname, like Kanther. There's nothing exotic about the "t" from Turkic, so it could not motivate the "th" in Kanther.
Which Turkic group donated it to Armenian? IDK, either the Khazars or the Seljuks, it's not important for the purposes of establishing what it means and who it came from. It directly came from Armenian, who in turn borrowed it from Turkic, when Turkic elites were the imperial overlords of commerce, trade routes, and marketplaces. Sometime after the heyday of Arabic as the lingua franca of trade, and the rise of Turkic empires -- late 1st / early 2nd millennium AD, right when Ashkenazi ethnogenesis is incubating.
So, yes, there are crucial Armenian surnames among Ashkenazi Jewish surnames -- without the "-ian" of course, since that was just a generic suffix, and didn't sound very Yiddish. Don't want to arouse too much suspicion with last names all ending in "-ian"...
ReplyDeleteBut they didn't just carry over any ol' Armenian surname -- it was only for a small number of priestly or high-status families, while everyone else had to go hunting for a random combination of Germanic and Slavic words to form their new family name, like Mandelbrot ("almond bread").
Priestly families might also have the privilege of LARP-ing as ancient Hebrews with names like Kohen, Rabin, Levin, and so on. They were probably the hereditary priests of the Christian stage of Armenian history. And Armenian priests did indeed put the term in their surname -- the prefix "Ter-" means "lord, master, father (when addressing a priest)", and goes before their ordinary family name.
So when they converted to Judaism, they figured why not keep that tradition alive, just with Hebrew words for "priest" instead of Armenian ones.
I'm glad I didn't give up after not seeing tons of Armo names among Ashkenazi Jews -- it may have only been a few, but they're the high-status priestly ones. Again showing how influential the Armenian faction was in shaping Ashkenazi identity -- it wasn't Slavic surnames that became Cantor, Katz, Sagal, or Kaplan. Or Kohen.
...You hear all those initial "k" surnames? VERY Armenian. ^_^
PS, there's also an Armenian variant Kanterian, with "e" instead of "a", just like there's Ashkenazi Kanter in addition to Kantar(ovich).
ReplyDeleteCute alt girl around 20 years old stopped me in the middle of the supermarket to tell me, "I love EVERYTHING you're wearing...!!! :))))"
ReplyDeleteI turned back around toward her as she and her friend passed by, and added that I got all of it at thrift stores, smiling.
"*dramatic pause* Now THAT'S how to do it! :))))"
How can girls be so cute? They do it without even trying...
Just remember: do the opposite of what the girl-hating literal fags online tell you to do if you want female attention.
Don't neg a girl if she's already friendly toward you, most obviously when she's the one who approaches you. Negging was only a tactic to get someone's defenses down if she was initially hostile or suspicious -- not when she's already warm, friendly, smiley, and social. But seething girl-haters turned it into the goal in itself -- "to put those foids in their place, cut them down to size" bla bla bla bla bla. YOU'RE GAY.
And don't just stroll by them, if they're already friendly and interactive -- spin around to face them as they pass, and you'll discover that they've also spun around to face you after passing! Imagine the risk you're taking by doing that -- if the other side hasn't also spun around, you look desperate and left high-and-dry by someone who barely knows you exist.
But if she's already shown you a warm positive vibe, obviously she isn't just making a brief clinical assessment of your sartorial skills, like she's grading you in class or something. She's into you enough to just blurt it out and make the first move -- OF COURSE she's gonna turn her head or spin around as she passes, to see if you are too!
Nothing hits as hard as that kind of social trust game, and both of you catching each other instead of trying to power-trip and see how much you can get the other side to give attention to you while giving the minimum back. It's such a relief to take a risk and have it rewarded, and to share it since it's reciprocal -- *she* also feels relieved that you didn't just blow by her and make her feel like chopped liver, despite giving you a positive first move.
It's not like she wants to have a hour-long chat session, but yes, she does want some further interaction if she's already made a smiley friendly first move. Don't deny her that follow-up feeling -- and don't deny yourself either.
Too much game-playing these days. It's really refreshing when they just take a leap of faith -- and from their POV, really refreshing when you catch and squeeze them like you're supposed to after they've taken a leap of faith. ^_^
Steal his look (all vintage): navy blue wool beret, large-rim glasses with brown frames and slight rose tint to the lenses, brown ankle boots, dark blue slim-fit jeans, oxblood leather jacket, '90s color block polo shirt (large horizontal blocks stacked in a column, in navy blue, cherry red, turquoise / teal, and white).
ReplyDeleteThe supermarket is the only place left with that classic mall social atmosphere. You're denying yourself and shirking your social duties if you order food to be delivered rather than go out to mill around the supermarket for a little while...
ReplyDeleteRealignment just happened in Iran. Ali Khamenei is dead now, the Iranian hardliners are going to take over and go to war in the Middle East against Israel and America.
ReplyDeleteThat's what I just came here to say: this is the end of pacifism and isolationism in Iran, which Khamenei was almost single-handedly upholding for many decades, and which all of his lieutenants were upholding as well -- like those earnestly and gullibly working on "the nuclear deal" with the Great Satan, those who called of the Iranian army from getting revenge against the Taliban when they murdered Iranian diplomats and journalists in the '90s, and so on and so forth.
ReplyDeleteNot to speak ill of the dead, just re-iterating one of the central points I made a few days ago -- when the Islamic Revolution era of their society is over, it's getting replaced by a turbo-charged militarism, foreign interventionism, and cultural tolerance domestically. Hot urban educated babes tearing off their headscarves -- so they can get a nuclear bomb that they'll drop on Israel, and on American bases in the region.
That must have been why Iran just immediately fucked up all their American-supporting neighbors, after getting attacked by Israel-America. Khamenei must have been incapacitated early on, or dead, or on his deathbed realized how unending the American bullshit will be, so he finally gave the military his blessing to take the gloves off. Probably not the latter. Probably he was out early on, and that removed the internal restraints on showing balls and spine against all the various thorns in Iran's side.
With no more pacifist leader in control, the military said enough of pacifism, and rocked the Arab clients of Israel-America without hesitating. That was something that was totally off the table just last year, when it was strictly Israel vs. Iran.
The Iranian military knows damn well it isn't just Israel in the region who is a thorn in Iran's side -- finally, Iran struck the traitor government of Jordan! That was out-of-bounds last year. They fucked up multiple Gulf Arab states, targeting airports, hotels housing American invaders, they closed the Strait of Hormuz -- just BAM BAM BAM, everything they must have been itching to do last year, but could not due to Khamenei, his cadre, and the deep-rooted ethos of the Islamic Revolution era, which was about isolationism, avoiding nuclear weapons, and appeasing their tormenters.
Again, I hate to speak ill of the dead so soon -- just sayin', it's insane how much the Iranian clerical elites let their enemies get away with over the decades, other than finishing the war against Iraq when they got ground-invaded in the '80s.
But the clerical sector of society will no longer be the dominant power-broker in the government, and very clearly the military has skyrocketed to the most powerful sector in government. De facto for now, soon to be de jure with elections or appointments or whatever formal steps are taken, to realign out of the Islamic Rev era and into the "Bare-haired baddies dropping nukes on Tel Aviv" era.
I said the American Empire, as a circling-the-drain zombie polity, would do the stupid, insane, suicidal thing -- and assassinte the one force on the other side that was restraining it from going ballistic against Israel and America in the region.
When bare-haired Persian baddies are dropping nukes on the gay pride parade in Tel Aviv, Westoids will be BEGGING to bring back "The Mullahs!!!" to power in Iran. But it will be too late by that point.
And yes, since Israel targeted Iran during the anti-Persian Jewish holiday of Purim, the most devastating retaliation from Iran should land on Israel and America's holiest holiday -- the gay pride parade during gay month, June.
OK, I'm just writing fanfic now. I'll post more later if it's relevant...
Last thought: this may be why Khamenei had been planning for multiple tiers of replacements, in the event he was assassinated. Not just to maintain the coherence of the Iranian state -- regime change through assassination is fake, we already know that. But to try to prolong the Islamic Rev era, with the pacifist isolationist clerics still in charge, and the secular aggressive military on the sidelines.
ReplyDeleteWell, his appointed successors are going to have a hell of a time containing the military at this point. The military finally got its chance to take the gloves off, and once that starts, it's a positive feedback loop, and cannot be easily shut down. So they'll get the experience, fame, and de facto control over at least foreign policy.
I don't care that Shia Islam venerates martyrs -- so does Christianity, but most Christian leaders don't seek martyrdom, or if they get assassinated, it doesn't necessarily magnify their side's power. Ideology is mostly cheap talk.
I'm sure Iranians will mourn his loss -- but I'm also sure that rather than causing them to double-down on clerical leadership of their society, this experience will force them to say, "Y'know, it would have been better if he hadn't been assassinated, and whatever policies *of our own* that led to this result, should be inverted."
That is, no more appeasement, no more trying to appear more restrained as a goal in itself. Take the gloves off, fuck up the enemy, finish them off ASAP, and get on with life.
I think they'll use this as an occasion to learn from his mistakes, so that future leaders don't get martyred one after the other. Israel-America already assassinated Iran's top secular military leader back during Trump: Season One, Soleimani. Now the leading cleric and national figurehead.
Again, not to speak ill of the dead so soon, but these multiple assassinations will ultimately serve to discredit the foreign policy of the clerical-led era, within Iranian society. They'll begin to favor the military over the clerics, and the military is already using this opportunity to flex its muscle and prove its leadership abilities to their society in a time of existential crisis.
But I think the discrediting effect will extend outward in a negative halo effect. The whole raison d'etre of the clerics is moral guidance, social and cultural regulation, and so on. Soon that too will fall under suspicion as one of the myriad societal forces of the Islamic Rev era that led to multiple Israeli-American assassinations of top Iranian leaders that went largely unanswered.
Iranians will start to question the value of sobriety and stoicism and restraint uber alles. Look where those moral values got our parents and grandparents -- picked off by the Great Satan. Maybe we should indulge the fiery passionate side of our Persian heritage, and start fucking these scum up without pondering and debating and reasoning so much beforehand. Just do what needs to be done.
Not getting emo or angst-ridden or anything like that... but retiring the moral virtue of sobriety uber alles, since it seems to them to have led to an international weakness, where their moral virtues are like fighting with one hand tied behind their back, against a sadistically depraved opponent.
Once the next generation takes power, it's over for the Islamic Rev era's pacifism and isolationism, much as it was when Kim Jong-un took over from his father, which saw North Korea rapidly get nuclear weapons, build ICBMs capable of hitting America, and then demonstrating that through public displays.
Some Gen X or maybe Millennial Iranian is going to be their Kim Jong-un, and when that happens, it's over for Israel, once and for all. Not to mention America in the region, if we haven't already tucked tail like we did in Afghanistan earlier this decade.
Also over for the Gulf Arabs on the Persian Gulf. A lot of them are ruling over Shia Muslims who prefer Iranian rule vs Arab rule (see Bahrain for example) and have in the past tried to overthrow their Arab rulers (e.g. during the Arab Spring). Arab nationalism, Wahhabism / Islamism, etc is a dead force now.
ReplyDeleteWow, I struck the motherlode on Armenian surnames carried over into Ashkenazi Jews. Like, the most uber-Jewish surnames in existence -- they're all Armenian... most are phonetic carry-overs, minus the Armenian suffix, with new semantics based on false cognates in their host society's language, usually German. Sometimes there's a semantic carry-over with totally new phonetic form, but is distinctly Jewish rather than German as a surname.
ReplyDeleteI'll try to find time for these today, there's just so many of them!
Kushner, Warten, Rosen, Ruben, Cukor, Marantz, and the list will surely go on and on and on... I need to figure out where the ubiquitous "wein" / "wine" comes from.
Quickly, the list of surnames I'm consulting for German-Jewish and Armenian. If the Armenian one is not listed there, it's from a Google search that turns up a clearly Armenian-surnamed person (like a birth record saying they were born in Armenia, or they're a professor of Armenology at Harvard).
ReplyDeletehttps://www.avotaynu.com/books/MenkNames.htm
https://www.armeniapedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_Armenian_Surnames_A
Next, the asymmetry of placement for Germanic or Slavic elements in Ashkenazi surnames, as a clue to which elements are local (Germanic or Slavic) vs. original (Armenian). This only applies to names with compound form, since a one-element name could be interpreted as either the initial or final position.
ReplyDeleteOne of the Jewiest surnames ever is "Rose" and its variants, like "Rosen". There's roughly 100 German-Jewish surnames that begin with this element -- and yet 0 (zero) that end in this element, or have it as a medial element.
Same with "Ruben" / "Rubin" -- about 10 names in initial position, nothing in final position. And although there's "only" 10, they are highly common in the population, VERY Jewish name.
This class of names contrasts with the class made up of a random hodgepodge of Germanic (or Slavic) elements, like "Steinberg", consisting of German "stein" and "berg", in that order. These same elements also appear with their arrangement reversed, "Bergstein". Likewise, "Bergfeld" and "Feldberg", with German "feld" in either position.
These were apparently meaningless surnames that were cobbled together purely to "sound native". They probably weren't common in the German host population, cuz their order can be scrambled around any which way -- whereas in German, their arrangement could only be in a certain order.
For example, "feld" means "field", and is apt to be the final element of a place-name, given the head-final nature of Germanic compounds. This can combine with Germanic "blum" = "flower", in either order for Jewish surnames -- Blumfeld and Feldblum.
Given the head-final nature of Germanic compounds, only Blumfeld sounds like a plausible place-name, and therefore surname -- it's a field, that is associated with flowers. A field with lots of flowers in it. The opposite order, Feldblum, must be a kind of flower, that is associated with fields -- "field flower" in English. But that's the name of a plant, not the name of a place, and not a surname.
Sometimes place-names don't need over place-name elements, so Feldblum could be a place-name, with no overt place-name suffix -- it's the place where a certain type of flower, "field flowers", are common. But these compounds strain credulity and sound weird, compared to the ones with overt place-name suffixes, like Blumfeld, which sound more natural.
The point is, the hodgepodge names clearly sound foreign to local ears, like how Feldblum sounds to German ears. The Jews were not borrowing local surnames or other words, for this class of names -- they were just cobbled together to sound German-ish.
Whereas the class of names with strong asymmetry in the order of their elements, are the super-Jewish-sounding names, which were not cobbled together in a hodgepodge. Their first element is the root or core, and represents some kind of carry-over from their earlier ethnicity (Armenian), while the second element or suffix is the attempt to assimilate it somewhat to the local language -- removing the Armenian suffix, and substituting a Germanic or Slavic suffix instead. That way, they preserve the root of their ancestral surname, while only altering the generic suffix -- not too bad, as far as preserving tradition goes.
This asymmetry will help us (me) identify which elements to look for in Armenian, vs. ignore as local elements thrown together in a hodgepodge.
Starting with Ruben / Rubin, we can rule out a direct Hebrew borrowing of Reuben, a Biblical name, since that name has 2 vowels between "r" and "b", each vowel separated by a glottal stop. And in Hebrew, that name tended to show its "b" fricativize into "v" -- a phoneme that Yiddish has, but did not use for Ruben / Rubin. The direct borrowing into Yiddish is Reuvein.
ReplyDeleteThe local false cognate is German "rubin" = "ruby", which does not serve as a given or family name in Germany. This is crucial, since it makes it less likely that incoming Jews would choose it for a surname either, based on the local meaning of "ruby". A superior match is from a culture where it is used as a given or family name.
And whaddaya know -- Armenian uses it for both! And in both variants, with "e" and "i". In fact, there's someone with both the given and family forms of this name, with both "e" and "i" variants -- Ruben Rubinyan, the current Vice President of the National Assembly in Armenia. That's like Ivan Ivanovich for a Russian, or Arthur Arthurson for an Englishman. You can't get any more Armenian than that. It also comes in a variant Rubinyants.
The further origin of this name is not Armenian, however, since Armenian does not like "r" at the beginning of words. There are few Armenians surnames beginning with "r", and most are foreign borrowings, from Arabic or Persian or somewhere else.
In the early 2nd millennium AD in Southern Anatolia, there was the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, who were supposedly Armenian refugees who fled Armenia after the fall of the Bagratid dynasty in the last independent kingdom of Greater Armenia, caused by the invasion of the Seljuk Turks.
One of their dynasties was the Rubenids, founded by Ruben I in the 11th C, with Ruben II and III both leading the kingdom later as well.
It's possible that this Armenian Ruben was a borrowing of the Biblical name, either directly or via a Romance language in the Mediterranean.
Regardless of where it came from, though, it's the only version that has a variant with "i" that's also used in personal and family names, whereas Romance and other languages only use the "e" version, adhering strictly to the Biblical inspiration.
And it is a very popular given and family name in Armenian.
So the only language where all the patterns of Yiddish Ruben / Rubin match up, and at a very early date, is Armenian.
It only appears in initial position, not final, for Ashkenazi Jewish names, so it is definitely of ancestral ethnic origin, not German. The name does not begin in Armenian, due to the ban on initial "r", but it entered Jewish names *via* Armenian, where it may have been a borrowing of a Hebrew Biblical name.
Marants is used as a place-name in the Kharpert region of historical Armenia, now Eastern Turkey. It derives from Armenian "maran" = "wine press / cellar", likely referring to the place being used for vineyards. With suffix "i", it is also used as an Armenian surname Marantsi, usually transliterated in Roman letters as Maranci, meaning "from / associated with Marants".
ReplyDeleteRemoving the typically Armenian generic suffix "i" (as they did with "ian"), this reverts to Marants -- or in German spelling, Marantz. E.g., Saul Marantz, founder of the high-end audio equipment company of the same name.
The local false cognate is "pomeranč", meaning "orange" in Czech. This requires a further clipping of the initial "po", which is a huge no-no for clipping -- a stressed, early syllable. Also the vowel after "m" is wrong -- "e" instead of the required "a", which requires further unmotivated raising.
But it's Armenian, cognate with Maranci, which is more faithfully transliterated as Marantsi -- just minus the generic Armenian final "i", to make it sound more German / Slavic.
Golden Age of Hollywood director George Cukor pronounced his name as "kukor", although it's supposed to be of Hungarian origin, where that spelling would be "tsukor".
ReplyDeleteThere does happen to be an Armenian surname Kukorian, just in case "kukor" is the original form of the Jewish surname.
But if it's from Hungarian and pronounced "tsukor", there's a very close match there as well. American records list a Dick Chukorian who was born in Armenia in the 1920s. He clearly adapted his given name to American norms, and probably his last name was somewhat as well, either by his family or the Ellis Island clerks.
Removing the "ian" suffix, the written form "Chukor" is equal to "tsukor", with the initial affricate shifted ever so slightly back. This written form was likely chosen in order to make it appear more English-friendly, where we have initial "ch" but not initial "ts", despite them being very close to each other in the mouth.
The local false cognate is Hungarian "cukor" = "sugar".
Also, the German word for "sugar" is "zucker", which is the local false cognate for Jewish surnames Zucker and its compound variants like Zuckerberg. It does not appear in final position, though, so it's likely of ancestral origin -- as always, Armenian.
ReplyDeleteIDK what the "tsukor" or "chukor" from Chukorian means in Armenian or where it came from. But it could have been the origin of surname Zucker as well. In German spelling, "z" is the same as Hungarian "c" -- the affricate "ts".
The following "u" vowel is the same, as is the following "k", and final "r".
But the 2nd vowel of Zucker is "e" instead of "o". Possibly the original "tsukor" altered its final vowel in German to make it sound like the local false cognate and not arouse suspicion, whereas that vowel change was not necessary in Hungarian, since the vowels matched perfectly.
There does happen to be a non-Jewish surname supposedly based on the word for "sugar" -- Sakharov in Russian, from "sakhar", but also bearing the possessive adjective suffix "ov".
The German and Hungarian surnames have just plain ol "sugar", without a typical surname suffix.
So it makes me think this Russian surname also has nothing to do with sugar -- why "son of sugar" or "belonging to sugar"? The usual word that goes before "ov(a" is a given name, like "Ivanov(a)".
There is a perfectly Russian given name like Sakhar -- Zakhar, their borrowed form of Biblical Zachary. Only a difference in voicing of the initial consonant, but it makes a million times more sense than "son of sugar".
I doubt all of these surnames that supposedly refer to sugar, whether Jewish or Gentile.
Kushner / Kushnir is supposedly derived from German "Kürschner" = "furrier, peltmonger". Set aside the minor problem that Yiddish lacks front-round vowels, and typically turns them into their unrounded counterpart, but that's not what happened in Kushner, which has "u" instead of "i".
ReplyDeleteThe major problem is what happened to the "r" in the first syllable? That is required for the meaning of "fur", and it's out the window. It's not due to Yiddish phonotactics -- they have zillions of surnames with coda "r", including ones that more or less rhyme with Kirsch -- like Hirsch.
So although this was the local false cognate, it is not the origin of the Jewish surname, which lacks "r" in the 1st syllable.
Whaddaya know, tons of Armenian surnames that match Kushner, just by removing "ian".
There's Kushnarian and Kusnerian, and there's even an Armenian-Jewish (not Ashkenazi) guy from the Soviet era named Vardan Vardanovich Kushnir. This is like the Mountain Jewish politician in Israel, Joseph Shagal, who shows that these surnames are not from German or Slavic speaking lands, but local to the Caucasus, whether they're Jewish or Christian.
Tellingly, the Caucasian Jews have also removed the "ian" from their surnames, while the Christian Armenians keep them. These Caucasian converts to Judaism wanted to signal their new identity by dropping at least one give-away aspect of their surnames -- the generic suffix "ian".
If their surnames were just Shagal instead of Shagalian, or Kushnir instead of Kusnerian, it makes them more plausibly Hebrew. They don't have that telltale Armenian suffix anymore.
IDK what the Armenian root of Kushnar / Kushner means or if its from ultimate Armenian origin or borrowed into Armenian from elsewhere. But it is clear that it seeded the Ashkenazi Jewish surname Kushner / Kushnir.
The root "wein" / "wine", phonetically "vayn", I speculate may derive from the Van region of Greater Armenia (as in Lake Van). There are 2 Armenian surnames that mean "of, from, relating to Van" -- Vanian and Vanetsian.
ReplyDeleteMy hunch is that when they tried to import "van" into Germanic, they couldn't find an easy false cognate. "Wann" means "when", which is not a good semantic root for a proper noun. If they tried to alter the vowel to "e", "wenn" means "if" and "wen" means "who", also bad for a name.
So they tried keeping "a" and making it a diphthong, namely "ay". This finally yielded a name that would match with a local false cognate, namely German "wein" = "wine".
Technically, there are a few rare surnames with "wein" in final position, but overwhelmingly this element appears in initial position, including where it can't have to do semantically with wine, like Weinstein, which cannot possibly mean "wine stone".
It does not come from Old Armenian "vayn", since that diphthong became "e" in Modern Armenian, and there are no Armenian surnames beginning with Ven.
Why was the Van region so important that it needed to be preserved in their surnames? Cuz it came from the self-designation of the Urartians, who were a precursor ethnicity to the Armenians. Similar to the French wanting to preserve Gaul in their surnames.
Finally, what about that most Jewish of surnames, Rose / Rosen? They cannot be borrowings of surnames from German, which only has Rosenkranz ("rosary") as a surname. And although Rose can be a female given name, as a personal name it's too new to have seeded these old Jewish surnames.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's doubtful that they are originally Armenian phonetically, since Armenian bans initial "r". There are several plausible phonetic matches among Armenian surnames: Rooshanian, Rousian, Roussinian, and Rouzanian. Of these, the only plausible ones, since they come in the same pair of with or without final "n", are Rous and Roussin. Still, they have "s" instead of "z" (as in German "Rose" or the Yiddish surname "Rose(n)"). And the main vowel is "u" rather than "o".
And the most likely origin of these surnames is "Rus" and "Rusyn", i.e. they are Armenian names for people of Russian origin -- not Armenian.
So, this is the one case where the carry-over was not phonetic but semantic, and given the phonetics of the local language. That is, they're descended from the Armenian word for the flower "rose".
And that leads us to the most famous of Armenian names, Vardan, whose earliest and most famous namesake was an Armenian military leader, martyr, and later saint, from the Dark Ages, who led his nation against the Sasanians. He's a symbol, icon, and legend of Armenia -- there's no way they couldn't carry over his name somehow, even after switching religions to Judaism and moving to Germany.
But if they tried to do this phonetically, the nearest they could find a false cognate is German "warten", which is the infinitive form of the verb "to wait". It's the wrong morphological form, and "to wait" is not exactly the stuff of legends.
There are a few German Jewish surnames beginning with Warten, and none ending in it, so it may represent the initial attempt to phonetically carry it over. But it just sounds wrong, as the infinitive of a verb rather than a noun or adjective, to serve as a name.
So instead what they did was translate the meaning of Armenian "vardan" into German -- and the name derives from "vard" in Armenian, which means "rose". It's actually an ancient borrowing from an old Iranian language, before the Iranian word evolved into "gul" / "gol" in the Medieval era.
Since the phonetic carry-over didn't work, and it was still necessary to preserve this most important of names and related surnames, the Ashkenazi Jews did a semantic carry-over instead, leading to the Yiddish surname "Rose".
They noticed that there was a local German surname similar to that, Rosenkranz (also having to do with roses), so they figured that "Rosen" might not be so bad either, and added it to their surnames. And from there, all the crazy meaningless Germanic 2nd elements in compounds, but never "rose" or "rosen" as the 2nd element, since this was an ancestral element.
A few twists and turns taken from Vardan to Rosen, but there it is...
PS, the fact that Rosen preserves the final "n" of Vardan probably helped it become the far more popular of the pair Rose / Rosen, in addition to Rosen being part of a local German surname while Rose was not.
ReplyDeleteIt was mainly a semantic carry-over -- but that final "n" provide enough of a phonetic match to the original Vardan that it gave it a phonetic edge over Rose.
In other words, Armenian "vard" = German "rose", but since the Armenian name was not just "vard" but "vardan", try sticking on a final "n" to "rose" as well, whether this final "n" means the same in both languages or not.
Neat.
We're also waiting for Putin and Xi Jinping to die so that Russia and China can realign out of the neoliberal era via nationalist hardliners and attack Europe for supporting Ukraine and attack Japan / South Korea for supporting Taiwan respectively.
ReplyDeleteWrong about Putin -- he's the first realigner in his nation, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first post-Soviet leader. That regime has only been going for 25 years, not 45-50 like most others around the world.
ReplyDeleteDoes it look like Russia is sclerotic and paralyzed? They crushed all attempted internal / neighbor coups against them, like Georgia in 2008. Then they began taking back part of their core territory, beginning with Crimea in the 2010s, now expanding to take back all of Ukraine in the 2020s, and destroying Europe's biggest army is an insanely harder war than flicking away some Georgian dipshit in the South Caucasus.
Putin-led Russia is similar in age to the realignment in South Korea, i.e. the Sunshine movement by Kim Dae-jung. Just after that, North Korean realignment under Kim Jong-un. And Chavismo in Venezuela.
But correct about Xi, who is the latest in a long line of Deng-ists, back to circa 1980 like the other neoliberal movements, including the Likud realignment in Israel and the Islamic Rev in Iran.
And the Sudairi Seven in Saudi Arabia, going back to the early '80s. Very sclerotic and ripe for realignment, which the Iranian pummeling and abandonment by bitchslapped Uncle Sam will speed up.
ReplyDeleteThe actor who played Mannix in the iconic American detective series was Armenian -- stage name Mike Connors, who I just knew was a little too swarthy and strong-nosed to be Irish. Birth name: Krekor Ohanian, from Fresno, heheh.
ReplyDeleteLots of secret Armenians out there...
That's one of the best, possibly *the* best, of the detective / P.I. series, BTW. And it lasted 8 seasons. So much Midcentury Modern, All-American California atmosphere throughout the whole show. It's more Mad Men than Mad Men, and isn't even about creatives. But like all TV series from the good ol' days, it's loaded with style, cool, and babes.
Important chronicle of the transition from the Mod / Mad Men era into the funky, boho, proto-disco part of the '70s, starting in '67 and lasting through '75. Still Mod, but mixed with the back-to-nature vibe of the '70s.
The buildings, the couches, the carpeting, the clothes, the percolators -- everything is just so awesome. Aside from the great story-telling and action. There's a reason it was on for so long. Amazing series.
I just started it recently, and it'll take forever to get through it all.
Back to Armenian origins of Ashkenazi Jewish surnames, though following up on Wein / Wine. There's a phonetically similar surname Fein that's very common and Jewish, and almost always a first element rather than final element (notwithstanding Lloyd Blankfein's name). The local false cognate is German "fein" = "fine, delicate" as in English. But Germans don't use it for their surnames, so it is not cognate in its part of speech -- just an ordinary adjective, not used in proper nouns like surnames.
ReplyDeleteI figured it would trace back to the same phonetics as the Armenian Vanian that seeded Wein. That is, the root being "fan", which could not find a suitable false cognate in German, so the vowel was altered into a diphthong, the same "ai" as in Wein. That would derive Ashkenazi Fein from Armenian "Fanian".
Does this surname exist? Yes it does. It's rare, given that Armenian doesn't have "f" natively (which in other Indo-Euro languages evolved from aspirated "p", but Armenian kept that sound, and couldn't change it into fricative "f"). But whatever the foreign borrowing was into Armenian, it provided the basis for Ashkenazi Fein when they switched religions and moved to Germany.
Possibly it was an internal Armenian variant, devoicing the usual "Van(ian)" into "Fan(ian" -- but typically that only affected stops, not fricatives. So IDK what Armenian root "fan" means.
But wait, there's more on this theme of Armenian "a" -> Yiddish "ai", in order to match a local false cognate (not necessary if the original Armenian already matches a local false cognate).
Klein is another one of those super-Ashkenazi surnames, and doesn't appear as a 2nd element, but has zillions of compounds as the 1st element. The local false cognate is German "klein" = "little", which Germans do not use in their surnames. This should derive from Armenian Klanian -- and that is indeed a quite popular Armenian surname. IDK what "klan" means in Armenian, and won't investigate further, since I'm just interested in the Armenian origins of these Ashkenazi names, not necessarily what they originally meant.
There's a phonetically similar Yiddish surname Krein, which could be a subtle alteration of Klein (replacing one liquid consonant with the other). It's far less common than Klein, but it exists. It should derive from Armenian Kranian -- which does exist, but also at far lower frequency than Klanian. I don't think this has a local false cognate in German, which lends support to the idea that it is an alteration of Klein, which does have a local false cognate.
Finally, there's a not-so-common surname in both languages -- Yiddish Pine, and Armenian Panian, with the local false cognate being German "pein" = "pity". IDK what Armenian "pan" means in this name.
Why are so many Ashkenazi Jewish surnames from the New Testament, if they're supposed to be non-Christian -- Talmudic / Rabbinic Judaism, and the Old Testament for background.
ReplyDeleteThe answer is obvious -- they are former Christians who converted, in fact people who were Christian for so long that they took on given and family names from New Testament figures. Indeed, Armenians were among the earliest adopters of Christianity, way back to around 300 AD at the elite level, when the Roman elites were still transitioning from persecuting and suppressing Christianity (under Diocletian) to sponsoring it (under Constantine).
Old Testament figures do not prove Judaic-ness of their culture -- Christians adopted Old Testament figures for given and family names as well. It's paying homage to the background that Jesus and Christianity emerged from, at least according to tradition.
What would truly prove the contemporary Judaic-ness of Jewish names, is figures from the Talmudic / Rabbinic era itself, which no Christians adopted for their names. Christians only care about Jesus and earlier Jews, not the compilers of the Talmud from the Dark Ages, which was a competitor to Christianity in being a post-Second Temple religion that still drew inspiration or legitimacy from continuity with the Second Temple era.
Even over 1000 years later, Ashkenazi Jews don't name themselves or their families after Ashi, Ravina, Rashi, Maimonides, etc.
Hillel the Elder, who does provide Ashkenazis with names, was a Second Temple figure who lived just before Jesus. Not from the Talmudic / Rabbinic era. This is still a distinctly Jewish name, since Christians never adopted it, but it still reveals how pre-Talmudic the figures are who provided Ashkenazi names.
We'll go through some major particular cases of this phenomenon, just laying out the obvious problem for the "Ashkenazis were always Jewish" dum-dum theory.
And we can eliminate the idea that Ashkenazis adopted their Christian names from their host society like Germany, since the Ashkenazi forms either cannot distinguish German from non-German origin, or they are distinctly non-German. Apart from their phonetic form, some names were not popular among Germans until recently, whereas they were common among the Ashkenazis -- and so, reflecting an earlier popularity outside of Germany, like in Armenia, Anatolia, and so on, but not in Germany, France, Britain, etc.
ReplyDeleteAlso there's Rein and Ranian, another pair where Armenian "a" corresponds to Yiddish "ai" (transcribed as "ei"). Rein only appears as the 1st element of Ashkenazi names, not the 2nd, so it's ancestral.
ReplyDeleteThe local false cognate is German "rein" = "pure".
Because it begins with "r", it can't be ultimately Armenian, but loaned into Armenian from a neighbor. IDK what "ran" or perhaps "rani" means in the Armenian surname, or to whoever donated it to them.
Uniquely Armenian place-name in Ashkenazi surnames -- Kars. The list of German-Jewish surnames includes both Kars and Cars, and they're common enough that there's a Wikipedia entry for a living pianist of Austrian Jewish origin, Jean-Rodolphe Kars.
ReplyDeleteIf you go to Wikipedia's disambiguation page for "Kars", you'll see that there's only two uses -- that Ashkenazi Jewish surname, and the name of an ancient city in historical Armenia, now part of NE Turkey. It was historically important, with major battles fought there, a cathedral, for a time the capital of the Bagratid Kingdom of Armenia. There's about 100,000 people living there today -- a big deal.
And indeed there are Armenian surnames referring to it, including the quite common Karsian. By removing the telltale Armenian suffix "ian", Kars and spelling variant Cars show up in German Jewish surnames. There's nowhere else they could have come from.
Also given that the Ashkenazi Jews were urban merchant types, they were likely concentrated in the major cities of the Southern Caucasus before converting from Christianity to Judaism. And Kars would have been one of the most common urban sources for this group.
BTW there is a local false cognate, which is the German surname Karsch. But this does not come in spelling variant Carsch, like Kars / Cars does. And Armenian has "sh", so if it was meant to mimic Karsch, they could have done so exactly. But they wanted it to be Kars -- since the name of the Armenian city ends in "s" rather than "sh".
Yet another uniquely Eastern Anatolian (i.e. Greater Armenian) place-name as an Ashkenazi Jewish surname!
Uniquely Armenian nickname in Ashkenazi surnames -- Karo / Caro, the short form of Karapet, originally the pre-Christian Armenian storm god, then identified with John the Baptist after adopting Christianity.
ReplyDeleteIt's a very common Armenian name -- if you were watching UFC during the 2000s, you may remember Karo "the Heat" Parisyan. And it serves as the root of Armenian surnames as well, like Karoyan.
This led to Ashkenazi surnames Karo, Karro, and Karov (probably with Slavic suffix "ov"), and spelling variants Caro, Carov.
This is very revealing since the name is an abbreviated form, which makes it even more unique to Armenian names. The full form, Karapet / Garabed, does not show up in Jewish names -- it sounds too exotic, and not plausibly Germanic.
But Karo sounds vaguely like Carolus (Charles in Latin) and some of its variants that kept the "o" -- except for German, which turned it into Karl. But it sounds like a nickname for Carolus, so German-speakers might let it slide. This local false cognate allowed Karo to catch on as an Ashkenazi surname, while the full form Karapet had no local false cognate, so they ditched that version altogether.
Nicholas is not only typically Christian, it's Eastern, coming from Greek Nikolaos. It didn't catch on in the West until the 13th C at the earliest, and then only in Italy, probably under Byzantine influence, or at least Venetian influence after they colonized the Eastern Mediterranean. Marco Polo's father, a Venetian, was named Niccolo. Generally, though, veneration of Saint Nicholas was Eastern until the Modern era.
ReplyDeleteThe name-sake saint was Christian, from Anatolia, during the 3rd and 4th centuries, with Greek origin of the name -- nothing to do with any stage of Judaism or the Old Testament.
And yet, German-Jewish surnames abound with references to this Christian saint, often with meaningless local suffixes or 2nd elements in a compound:
Nichelsberg, Nickel, Nickelsberg, Nickelsburg, Niclas, Niclasi, Nicolaier, Nicolauer, Nicolsburg, Niklas, Nikolsburg, Nikolstal
The local cognate is Niklaus, the popular German variation on the name, which allowed the Armenian version to be preserved -- it didn't sound totally alien, but somewhat familiar to German ears. It's not a false cognate this time -- cuz they all derive from the same Christian saint's name. But Ashkenazi Jews did not get this name from exposure to German Christians.
The telling forms are those that end in "l" -- Armenian has both the full form, Nikolayos (whose "l" is the velarized one, becoming "gh" in Modern Armenian), as well as the shorter form Nikol. This Armenian short form also has the "o", which not all short forms do.
The German forms either lack the "o" (Niklaus), or when they have "o", they don't end in "l" (Nikolaus, Nikolas, Niko, etc., but not Nikol).
Armenian does in fact use this short form as the root of a surname, Nikolian or Nigolian, later with "gh" instead of the velar "l".
Also telling is that the Jewish surnames with compounding all use Nikol as the root, not Niklas. Slapping random Germanic words onto the end of a surname, usually meant the root was ancestral to the Ashkenazi Jews, and they wanted it to have a Germanic covering. But Germans didn't use Niklas as the root and slap a bunch of random German words onto the end -- they already knew they were German, and didn't have to go the extra mile to convince anyone.
And so, the deeply Christian Armenians, even after converting to Judaism, kept their surnames if they were based on central figures to their culture, even if they were Christian figures with originally Greek names. Armenians were part of Eastern Christianity, so they kept that influence going even after converting to Judaism.
I dedicate this little piece of scholarship to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, also from the Greek-influenced Eastern Christian sphere, as his name shows.
Last for tonight is Leo / Leon, one of the most stereotypically Ashkenazi Jewish names by now -- on Seinfeld, Jerry's uber-Jewish uncle was named Leo. And indeed the list of German-Jewish surnames includes Leo and Leon.
ReplyDeleteThis name is originally Greek, meaning "lion", and it was borrowed into Latin as "leo". It became popular during the Dark Ages, among Roman Catholic popes and Byzantine emperors -- including one Leo the Armenian (and even Leo the Khazar and Leo the Isaurian -- this was during the twilight stage of the Byzantine Empire, when it got taken over by foreigners). It was also a common name for Armenian kings of that time.
In German-speaking lands, it only caught on in compounds like Leonhart or something similar, meaning "lion heart". So all those Ashkenazi Jews with given or family name Leo / Leon, did not pick it up from their local host society. They were preserving it from their pre-Judaic days, when they were part of Eastern Christianity, looking to the Byzantine Empire for cultural inspiration.
How can we tell the Ashkenazis got Leon via Armenian and not from Greek or some other language's borrowing from Greek. Because both Armenian and the Ashkenazi forms have a very distinct variant -- with "v" between the vowels, Levon (and less commonly, Levo). This may be due to Old Armenian not having a diphthong "eo", so they wanted to break it up with a dummy consonant.
Regardless of the phonological motivation, it is a fact that only Armenian did this. Russian only adds a "v" after "Le" when there's no following vowel -- Lev, but Leon if there's 2 vowels.
So there's a distinctly Armenian fingerprint in Ashkenazi surnames such as Levon, Lewo, and the baroque Lewontisch (these written "w"s are pronounced "v").
I had to look up that last one -- it's based on Latin Leontice or Greek Leontike (which the Latin is based on), meaning "like a lion", and serving as the name for some plant / flower species. Put aside the final consonant being a sibilant instead of a stop (which points to a satem-like language). The main thing is -- what's that "v" sound doing between the "e" and "o" in Lewontisch? Only one language inserts this consonant to break up that vowel sequence, at least for Leon -- Armenian!
So even in a baroque derived form with Leon as the root, Ashkenazi Jews still spoke it with the telltale Armenian "v" inside of Leon -- Levon.
Not only does this point to their Armenian linguistic background, but also their Christian background, before converting to Judaism. They wanted to keep these mostly Eastern Christian Dark Age names still in circulation, even if they had converted to Judaism -- does that mean you just throw your entire heritage away? No!
And so, more than 1000 years later, in another part of the world, Ashkenazi Jews are still using Leo as a stereotypical name of theirs in the most Jewish of TV series, like Seinfeld.
To emphasize, none of these names are from the Old Testament, nor really from the New Testament. They're Christian, and from the Dark Ages when Christianity really flowered. So there is zero Judaic cultural connection to them, and zero Semitic linguistic connection to them. They reflect the dominance of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire in crafting Christianity, and Christian culture.
ReplyDeleteWhy are they so popular among Ashkenazi Jews? The answer cannot be their Judaic or Semitic connection -- rather, it reveals that they were converts from an Eastern Christian culture in the orbit of the Byzantines. Together with the telltale linguistic quirks like "v" in Levon, it can only be Armenian.
Nor are they part of a broader cultural appreciation for the Dark Ages, or even just the Abrahamic religions of the same time -- as I said before, Ashkenazis show no awareness or affection for Medieval Jewish figures. They were too busy being Christians in Armenia. Nor did they adopt distinctly Muslim names from major icons in that part of the world.
They were simply preserving their own cultural lineage, which excluded Judaism and Semitic languages, and included Christianity and Indo-Euro languages from Anatolia to the Caucasus to Iran.
Berk is an uber-Jewish surname, with local 2nd elements like Berkheim, Berkowitz (Son of Sam serial killer), etc. It never appears as the 2nd element, and so is ancestral.
ReplyDeleteWhaddaya know, Armenian has a surname Berkian, which is common, despite not being on the list at Armeniapedia. (They do list Bergian, although that Berg refers to a village in Kars province, which is not a dialectal variant of Berk.) In Berkian, the "k" is actually aspirated "kh". "Berkh" means "fruits, bounty, harvest" in Armenian (not a resident of the village Berg).
In Roman transliteration, it's simply "k". And so it is in Ashkenazi Jewish names -- since German and Slavic don't have aspirated "kh". And for that matter, neither does Yiddish -- and some point, Armenian aspiration was lost, so that's all the more reason for Ashkenazis to write this name with "k" instead of "kh" -- they stopped pronouncing it with aspiration, too.
When they immigrated to America, some of them Anglicized the name to Burk (like Anglo Burke), as did some of their German ancestors, but this form with "u" is far less common and has fewer compound forms than original and ancestral Berk.
There is no local false cognate spelled with "k", although the native German pronunciation of "berg" = "mountain" is "berk", so perhaps that allowed Armenian Berk to pass through the filter of "does it sound similar to our host society's names?" Whereas names with no plausible local false cognates, like the ubiquitous Armenian name Sargis / Sarkis, were left to fall by the wayside...
A couple quickies. First, the ubiquitous Ashkenazi surname element "gruen" appears only at the start, not at the end of the name, so it's ancestral rather than a local element used in a hodgepodge.
ReplyDeleteHowever, like Rose(n) coming from Vardan, it is a semantic carry-over or translation, not a phonetic carry-over. There's no Armenian surname that sounds like it -- but there is one that means the same thing, the color green. In Armenian, it's "kanach'" (aspirated "ch"), and it's common enough that the composer of their national anthem is named Ganatchian (initial "g" is a dialectal variant).
Since "kanach'" has no plausible local false cognates, they went for the semantic translation instead. This translated form Gruen does have a minor appearance in German surnames, also Gruen, but it's much rarer among Germans. Most people named Gruen, or any of its myriad compound forms, are Jews.
Second, the Ashkenazi surname Peretz (with variants like Peres, etc.), refers to a rather obscure Old Testament figure. Did they just open the Torah and point at a random page for this name? No, it was already quite popular among Armenians, as Peretzian. Where the Armenians learned about this highly obscure person from, and why they love him so much, IDK. Nevertheless, it is a distinctly Armenian preference in Old Testament names. It doesn't show up as a common given or family name in other Christian cultures.
The only plausible conduit for this name in Ashkenazis is from their Armenian heritage.
The over-the-top love that Ashkenazis have for Mark as a surname reveals their Eastern Christian origins. This one is so popular that even its variants and compound forms are popular in their own right -- Marcus, Marcuse, Marks, Marx, Markov, Markowitz, and so on.
ReplyDeleteWe can rule out a Judaic / Semitic connection, since it's a New Testament name of Greco-Roman origin, Greek Markos / Roman Marcus, with the Roman being the original, and an adjectival form of the name of their pre-Christian Indo-European war god Mars.
The evangelist from the New Testament with a gospel attributed to him, only assumed Marcus as a by-name in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world of his time. His real name was Semitic, John (YoHanan, with pharyngeal "H"), and he was from North Africa.
After the Greco-Roman culture faded away from the Med, there was no further reason to assume Greco-Roman by-names for Semitic speakers, and so none of them went by Marcus after that era -- unless they were Christian, and they kept it as a tribute to the evangelist from the New Testament.
Mark was always more popular in the East than the West. There are more Roman Catholic popes named Marcellus or Marcellinus, which are diminutives by which the evangelist was not known, than Marcus itself. In the Western descendants of Roman culture, Marcellus would prove more popular than Marcus, like the French name Marcel being more popular than Marc.
Really the only part of Western Europe that idolizes Mark is Venice -- which was a protectorate of the Byzantine Empire, when the rest of Italy had been over-run by Germanic, Frankish, etc. armies, and whose Venetian Republic expanded to the east.
He's the legendary founder of the Coptic Church in Egypt, and was popular in Greece, Armenia, Russia, more than in the West.
Sure enough, there are Armenian surnames testifying to his popularity, Markosian and Margosian. And it was via their Armenian Eastern Christian tradition that the Ashkenazis preserved this widely popular Christian name, even after converting to Judaism and migrating to Western Europe, where he was less popular.
I normally blame the collapse of the Ottoman Empire for all the troubles in the Middle East, but the collapse of the last Iranian empire, the Safavid / Qajar, was just as bad. And the collapse of the Russian Empire in the 1990s.
ReplyDeleteNow all these wannabes, who are low-trust anarchic shitholes that can rarely get their act together, are flying off the rails and sparking regional / international problems.
Israel, whose Ashekanzi elite have (half) Caucasian origins, kicking off regional / world war.
The Caucasus itself, with Georgia and Armenia thumbing their nose at their former Russian sponsor, cozying up like gullible morons to America's Gay-Flag Empire, getting sold out and left high-and-dry, and then crying afterward.
Random Chechen / Dagestani / NE Caucasian chaos.
Azerbaijan, a thorn in Iran's side, while also turning against Russia, not to mention their Armenian neighbor. If Armenians were cohesive rather than trying to "trade up" who their patron is every 6 months, they'd still have Russian protection from Azerbaijan. And where were their new American patrons when Armenians were getting marched out of their homeland? Nowhere to be found -- but Armenians themselves are to blame for that, since America has never done anything other than sell out their gullible allies, when push comes to shove. Armos should've known who they were getting in bed with, and compared that to the Russian Empire elevating Armos to high levels of society, and kept that good thing going.
Then the Kurds, who are about to get sold out by Uncle Sam for the 117th time, promising to launch a ground invasion against Iran. Seeing the Caucasian / Armenian accent that they speak their Iranian language with, made me fully understand this aspect of them -- just another low-trust anarchic Caucasian shithole polity that will never have its own truly independent government.
All these Caucasian-related cultures think they're smart, cunning, James Bond villain geniuses, just cuz they trust no one, not even their own people. But this lack of cohesion just spells their own perpetual doom, and that's why they've never amounted to much on the geopolitical scoreboard.
When there was a strong state and society and culture there, there was usually some degree of influence from an actually cohesive society, like the Persians or Anatolians. For example, the ruling dynasty of Georgia when they Christianized and became a regional power during the Dark Ages (the Chosroid Dynasty), were one of the major noble families of Iran (the House of Mihran). Their counterpart in Armenia at the same time (the Arsacid Dynasty), who were also about to Christianize and become relatively strong and independent, were a branch of the Parthian nobility from Iran.
Ashkenazi Jews weren't blowing up the world when they had strong empires as their hosts -- Russian, German, Austrian, even somewhat the French and British. Once those empires collapsed in WWI, and Jews sought their own state in Palestine, it was over for them, and everyone else. Another low-trust anarchic Caucasus culture on the loose, thinking it can hold together a proper polity against regional powers.
Now there's no Anatolians, no Iranians, and no Russians to hold that place together. It looks like the worst of the anarchy is coming to a head, and Anatolia will gain control in the western part of Asia, Iran will gain in Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf, and maybe Russia will take pity on Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan and bring them forcefully back into the fold after they get sold out by America.
The insane levels of suspicion, paranoia, and hostility in the Caucasus does lead to their women being among the hottest in the world -- just like every anarchic shithole, where guys mainly choose based on good looks (Northern Lebanon, Southern Italy, Kansai, Catalonia, New Jersey, etc.). But it's also an endless source of regional, and now global instability, not in a fun-and-exciting way either.
ReplyDeleteWe should all be praying for the healing of the regional powers, Anatolia and Iran mainly, and Russia, although they're currently using their recovery to take care of their own problems. So, pray for Ukraine's swift defeat and annexation, so Russia can use its political recovery to subdue the Caucasus again.
Iran's in a tough spot, having to deal with Caucasian anarchy, as well as the other source of low-trust anarchic shithole societies in the region -- the Arabian Desert. Deserts are like mega-mountains, where you can sweep down, run amok, and retreat back home, without the enemy easily following you, given how uninhabitable your home turf is.
At this point, I'd settle for -- and actually cheer on, as a Dark Age revival -- Turkic or Mongolic nomads to sweep down from the Steppe and bitch-slap the Middle East into harmony. But the return of nomads in the Old World is still a few hundred years away, according to the cycle of 1000 years in either direction, toward civilization or nomadism, and the last inflection point was around 1300. Hopefully the cosmic RNG will let the next inflection point come 1 century earlier than the expectation...
One last mini-post on Caucasian origins of Ashenazi surnames, this time relating to Georgia for a change. Well, the language is Iranian, but it's their name for Georgia, and the source of our name Georgia -- Persian "gorğān", which ultimately comes from the old Iranian word "warka" for "wolf".
ReplyDeleteLater, that "w" will become "v", and Yiddish doesn't have "w" anyway, so it'll make it "v", although transliterated as "w" in German writing.
On a hunch, I looked through the German-Jewish surname list -- and BAM:
Warkas, Warkos, Warkum, Warkus
These seem to have different inflectional (?) endings from the Iranian original, so they're probably not from Iranian speakers themselves, but still using the Iranian root to describe Georgians. These are very old names, since they borrowed from the Iranian forms with initial "w" instead of later "g" (like Georgia).
We'll see some REAL Georgian influence on Ashkenazi given and surnames tomorrow. This is just to set that up with a mini-example for now, to remind that it wasn't only Armenians who became Ashkenazi, although they were the dominant group. Georgians were there, too.
Since "varka" means "wolf", that's also the source for Ashkenazi Wolf and its many compound surnames. There's not much of a local false cognate for "varka", so they went with semantic carry-over instead (translation). "Wolf" just about only appears as the 1st element, not the last element, and it has tons of suffixes and compound forms, so it's ancestral.
ReplyDeleteIt is used by native Germans, so it sounded familiar enough to pass through the filter, in translated form. However, native Germanic speakers *did* use it as the final element of compounds, like Aethelwulf, Beowulf, Rudolf, Adolf, and on and on and on. So the fact that Ashkenazis did not, means they're from different traditions.
BTW, there's also Workum, like Warkum but with "o" -- perhaps under influence of German "wolf", once that form began circulating.
There's also a related form with first vowel "ue" (rounded "i") -- Wurkheim (without the diacritic over "u"), Würkheim, Wuerkheim. Yiddish doesn't actually have rounded "i", this was some kind of unusual spelling for "i". Thus, the root here is "virk" -- and that's the Old Armenian name for the country of Georgia, which is derived from the same Iranian source that yielded "varka", based on the region being called "wolf" country.
So rather than referring to the animal itself, Wolf (the semantic carry-over) and Warka, Wuerkheim, etc. (phonetic carry-over), likely referred to the Georgian nation, territory, or ethnicity.
It's not the native Georgian name for themselves, which is based on "kart". It's the Iranian and Armenian name for Georgia. So it still reveals the linguistically Armenian background of Ashkenazi Jews. And who knows, it could have been referring to ethnic Armenians who lived in Georgia instead of Greater Armenia.
That's why "wolf" was not used as the 2nd element in Jewish names, unlike native German names -- it doesn't refer to the animal, which could be modified by all sorts of adjectives like "noble", "lucky", etc. It's a place-name, which doesn't yield to modifiers so easily as an animal name.
Those suffixes on Warka etc. look like Armenian case endings, specifically the locative -- where something is at. That supports the idea that this referred to the territory of Georgia, not the animal wolf.
ReplyDeleteIn Modern Armenian, the locative ending is "um", which shows up in Warkum and Workum.
In Classical Armenian, it was null in the singular but "s" in the plural, descending from "oysu" in P-IE. If the root was Warka, the "s" yields Warkas. Then Warkos and Warkus would reflect an epenthetic vowel similar to the P-IE one -- high/back rounded, still followed by "s".
So this class of Warka-like surnames came specifically through Armenian (judging from case endings), and they're the locative case for the place-name of Georgia.
But they didn't exactly sound very German-ish, so they were abandoned in favor of semantic carry-over -- Wolf etc.
And the "heim" final element in Wuerkheim means "home", which is another kind of locative ending -- not a case suffix, but a meaningful word that still has to do with where something or someone is located or hails from.
ReplyDeleteAgain, that makes no sense if the root "virk" meant the animal wolf, but it makes total sense if it referred to the territory of Georgia.
And there's no German word "wuerk", they weren't adapting a local German word there.
So, Wuerkheim meant someone whose home was "virk" -- that is, someone who came from Georgia.
Caucasian influence on Medieval Judaism, and Ashkenazi names, revealed by word for "pearl". There's a German-Jewish surname Margalith (with two variants in the plural), which is wrongly claimed to mean "pearl" in "Hebrew". But figuring out how this came to be, will show how central Caucasus people have been in shaping Judaic culture since the Talmudic era.
ReplyDeleteIn Ancient Greek, the word for pearl is "margarites", which was borrowed from Indo-Iranian, but then loaned out to all sorts of languages from Greek. I assume this is from the popularity of Jesus' saying to not "cast pearls before swine", since the New Testament was written in Greek.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BC%CE%B1%CF%81%CE%B3%CE%B1%CF%81%CE%AF%CF%84%CE%B7%CF%82
By that point that the New Testament is being written and shared and catching on as a new religion, Hebrew was dead as a spoken language. Rather, Aramaic was taking its place (as it was with Jesus himself). And Aramaic borrowed this Greek word, but with a crucial change to one of the consonants -- the consonant after "g" was changed from "r" to "n" -- "marganita". This was also used for the literary, liturgical form of Aramaic, Classical Syriac.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/מרגניתא
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%DC%A1%DC%AA%DC%93%DC%A2%DC%9D%DC%AC%DC%90#Classical_Syriac
This form, with "n", is what appears in the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible used in Babylonia, Targum Jonathan, which was written during the 2nd C AD. In Exodus 28:15-21, God gives a instructions for making a Breastplate of Judgement, with certain stones to be placed in certain rows. One of those is "marganitha", the first time any variation of "margarita" was used, since Hebrew lacked it entirely.
In a later Aramaic translation of the same passage, in the Jerusalem Targum (AKA Targum Pseudo-Jonathan), this word is written as "margalitha" -- with "l" instead of earlier "n" or even earlier "r". It is this later form that was used as a surname for German Jews, and later becoming a popular first name as well during the the Hebrew revival of the Zionist era.
The Jerusalem Targum was written much later than the Targum Jonathan, probably in the 12th C in Italy. So sometime between 200 and 1200, the "n" changed to "l" -- how did that happen?
Well, Old Armenian also borrowed the Ancient Greek term, as "margarit", still with "r". From here, it was borrowed into Old Georgian and other Caucasian languages from all families -- but with "l"! Suddenly it was "margal", "margalit", etc. See under "descendants":
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%B4%D5%A1%D6%80%D5%A3%D5%A1%D6%80%D5%AB%D5%BF#Old_Armenian
Literate Georgian Christians have had a major presence in the Holy Land from ancient times, judging from the pilgrim's graffiti and inscriptions from Nazareth and Sinai from the mid-1st millennium AD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_graffiti_of_Nazareth_and_Sinai
So what must have happened is that these Caucasian monks / scribes / officials, likely Georgians, left their own regional word for "pearl" in the translations of Exodus that were made after they borrowed this word from Old Armenian. So instead of "marganitha" with "n" as in 200 AD, they left the distinctly Caucasian variant "margalitha" with "l", sometime before 1200.
Not only is the "l" a constant in the 3 unrelated families of the Caucasus (perhaps aside from Armenian), it is not found anywhere else. It is a Caucasus fingerprint.
Since the Ashkenazi Jewish surname, and after that the given name, only comes in the "l" form, not the original Aramaic "n" form, they must have converted after the "n" -> "l" change had already taken place. This is from Exodus, hardly an obscure part of their Bible. That's where they got the inspiration for the surname.
ReplyDeleteWe already knew from other evidence that they converted in the late 1st millennium AD, but this is further support of that conclusion. If they had converted much earlier, like around 300-500, their word for "pearl" would likely have been the original Aramaic, with "n". But they were following their Khazar overlords, who converted in the 9th C, so either the 9th or 10th. By that point, the Georgians in the Holy Land had left their distinctive Caucasian fingerprint, "margalitha", in translations of Second Temple texts. And that's the version that the Ashkenazi picked up.
We can tell that they picked it up from a late Medieval milieu, rather than preserve their original Armenian version, since Old Armenian used "r" as in Greek. If the name was simply meant to be "pearl" -- then the Ashkenazi surname and later given name, would have remained "Margarit". But if it was supposed to be borrowed from a holy text of their new religion, and not just any ol' reference to pearls, then the form in the Jerusalem Targum was required, "Margalitha".
And that's why it has Georgian or other non-Armenian Caucasian fingerprints -- Georgians, not Armenians, are responsible for leaving this "l" form in the Holy Land. So when Armeninians who converted to Judaism later adopt the word from the Judaic context, they end up adopting a Georgian form of the word -- not by proximity to Georgians in the Caucasus region.
Technically, even non-Armenians who converted around the same time, will borrow this "l" form, if they too consulted the Jerusalem Targum, or had heard from someone who had heard from someone in the Holy Land (who was Georgian), that the word was "margalitha". Sephardic Jews like this name as well, and they were never Armenian speakers or residents of the Caucasus. Apparently they were also in contact with the Holy Land after the "l" form was deposited by Georgian scribes.
So, using the "l" form for a given or surname doesn't prove they're Armenian or Caucasian, since Sephardics use it as well. But the whole episode does show the role of former Christians converting to Judaism during the Dark Ages, more like the 2nd half of the 1st millennium and even later. They are not the ancestors of the Second Temple culture, or anywhere nearby -- or else, they would be using the "n" form "marganitha".
As for a uniquely Armenian surname that looks like "Margalith", and that became very popular among Ashkenazi Jews, that will have to wait until tomorrow. That's the whole family of names resembling Margolis...
Final one for tonight, Ashkenazi surname Perl and its variants and compound forms, are an obvious semantic carry-over of whatever the original was -- perhaps "Margarit" if they were still Christian, perhaps "Margalit" if they had already converted to Judaism. "Perl" means what it sounds like in English, "pearl".
ReplyDeletePerl has tons of compounds, but only as the 1st element, not final element, so it's ancestral. But it's a semantic rather than phonetic carry-over from the Armenians' earlier history.
The phonetic carry-over actually did somewhat succeed, since although Germanic used some variant of "perl", they were still Christians who had heard of Jesus most famous sayings, and Latin also borrowed the Greek word and spread it around the Romance-speaking world as a name, although still with "r". Germans would have interacted with at least some of those Romance speakers.
So, "margarita" wasn't so unfamiliar to Germans, allowing the Ashkenazis to preserve a form of it that they brought with them, albeit with "l" instead of "r".
Perl was not a surname or given name for Germans, so Jews did not copy it from the locals. They were translating into the local language, a surname that they'd brought with them, Margalith.
Ashkenazi surname Saks is of Armenian origin, derived from the Armenian form of the Old Testament name Isaac. It's uber-Jewish, showing up in the name of Wall Street mega-bank Goldman Sachs, Saks Fifth Avenue, and so on and so forth.
ReplyDeleteFirst, the Ashkenazi root is just "sak", without "s" following it, and it comes in 3 variants -- Saack, Sack, and Sak. The first of those points to a long "a" or maybe two separate "a" vowels brought together by a deleted consonant that used to be between them.
The "sak" root has suffixes that do not begin with "s", like Sackel and Sackler, as well as those that do have "s", like Sachs, Sacks, and Saks. These are Germanic suffixes.
Notably "sak" does not appear at the end of compounds, only the beginning, so it's ancestral.
Only 1 language uses a form of the name Isaac that begins with "s" (lacking the "i" of most other languages, like Greek, Roman, Aramaic, Arabic, etc.), which is Armenian, and also Georgian which borrowed the Armenian form.
In Old Armenian, it's Sahag or Sahak, with a medial consonant that preserves the Hebrew original back fricative ("H" in Hebrew, "h" in Armenian). However, this comes in variants Saag and Saak, including in surnames like Saagian and Saakian. Possibly the medial "h" from OA was deleted under Greek influence, which lacks any consonant there, and just has a long "a" vowel (likewise in the Latin borrowing of the Greek form).
So, only Armenian Saag / Saak can provide the seed for Ashkenazi Sa(c)k. Again the fact that it comes in a version with 2 "a"s, Saack, supports the Armenian origin. Georgian could provide the seed as well, but it's unnecessary since Armenian already does so, and the model should be as simple as possible, only proposing Georgian seeds where Armenian cannot. And Georgian borrowed it from Armenian anyway.
The local false cognate is Germanic Sachse, meaning Saxon. We can tell this is a false cognate cuz Sachse requires an "s" after the velar "ch", but the Ashkenazi root is without that "s", only Sa(a)(c)k. Harmonizing Armenian "saak" with Germanic "sachse" led to a different transliteration of the Ashkenazi surname as Sachs -- which is still pronounced with a velar stop, though, not fricative.