Fróðskaparrit

						Armenian mukn

Orðið Mukn úr Armenia

25

Hjalmar P. Petersen

Sandavágur

The word for mouse in Armenian is mukn.

Comparing mukn with the same word in

other IE languages shows that the -k in Ar-

menian is unoriginal, eg. ON. mús, OHG.

mus , Lat. mus and Old Indic muh . There is

no need for a reconstruction with a laryn-

geal sound for PIE - that is * muHxs. The

loss of the laryngeal should yield lengthen-

ing of the vowel in eg. ON, and is to be seen

as -k in Armenian.

How is the -k then to be explained?

According to Lindeman (1987:98) the

origin of -kn in mukn is to be found in the

word for fish. Lindeman's reconstruction

for the Armenian word for fish - that is jukn

- is from the root ghuk > pre. Arm. jhukh -

, whence by dissimilation of * jn ....kh - to

3huk - > Old Armenian jukn , gen. sg. jukan

(n -inflection).

The same word is found in Lithuanian

zúkmistras 'Fishmeister', zúkparnis 'Fish-

haar', Opruss. (acc. pl.) suckans 'Fish'.

In order to reconstruct the Armenian and

the Baltic words Lindeman uses the PIE

root *ghuk -.

Other languages do not show any stop in

the word for físh. Pokorny reconstruct the

root as ghou . It is seen in Greek ikhthus

'Fish'. We therefore need two PIE roots *

ghuk - and ghu - (ou and u is a matter of

ablaut). However, making use of language

typology, it is - in my opinion - possible to

reconstruct the root behind jukn as ghu -.

The stop originates in a hiat: * g"u-V > *

ghuw-V> ghu%-V> * g"uk -. This kind of de-

velopment is not unusual and can be seen in

other languages as well. They typically de-

velop a stop after vowels that are [+high| ...

(Petersen H. P. 1993). Se below for exam-

ples.

As the stop is in both Armenian and the

Baltic branch of PIE it might go back to the

protolanguage. There are, however, other

exampels in Lithuanian and Latvian which

might suggest a special development to a

stop in some words. It is as a soundchange

did start but never managed to spread to the

whole vocabulary. The words in question

are Lith. áuksas - Lat. auris , Lith. tuksan-

tis ~ Faroese túsund. Examples from Lat-

vian (Selsvegen) arejúks 'you' ~ Goth.j us

; brúkte 'bread' < * bhreu -. In the dialect of

Selsau we find examples such as oukss

'ear' Lat. auris < * ausis (Endzelin

1922:174).

What is of importance here is the devel-

opment of the stop after a [+high] vowel.

The same is seen in other languages, eg.

Faroese rógva 'row' < (xeg.va < jog.va <

roy.va < * row.wa < * rou.wa ON. róa )

and - (Robbins 1966:581-586) - Maru yuk

'bone' compared withe Burm. yóu . A stop

is also seen in Danish dialects in North- and

West-Iutland,  where  ON.  mús becomes

Fróðskaparrit 45. bók 1997: 25-26