Hunara: Journal of Ancient Iranian Arts and History

Abstract The Indo-European verbal root ^*peh₂- “to protect, guard; to graze, tend (livestock)” is represented in Armenian through native developments such as ^*ph₂-tēr “father” > hayr, ^*h₃eu̯i-peh₂- “sheep-herder” > hoviw (instrumental hovu-a-w), ^*peh2-i̯e- > hayim “to look, gaze on, observe, watch”, and ^*peh₂-tro- > hawr-an “flock, sheepfold”. It is also reflected in numerous words and personal names borrowed from Iranian sources, e.g. apat “inhabited/cultivated place”, darapan “porter, doorkeeper”, hpatak “subject, vassal”, šahap “vice-roy, governor, mayor”, pa(r)hem “to guard, preserve, keep”, pahapan “keeper, guard, watchman”, etc. This article attempts to present the corpus of such words in a concise form, supplemented with etymological notes. Special attention is devoted, on the one hand, to terms for pahanord, pahapan, pahpanak, grapanak—amulets or magical protective objects—and, on the other hand, to the etymology of pay/payn, the name of a protective spirit.

Abstract Hanashur, Sarmak, and Dohuk are villages in the Tasuj Rural District, in Dashti County, Bushehr Province. The Hanashuri, Sarmaki, and Dohuki dialects are varieties of the standard Persian language in Bushehr Province, south of Iran. This study is an etymological analysis of twenty words related to crafts spoken in the dialects in question. To conduct this research, ten speakers over fifty years of age and two young, literate speakers were interviewed. Their speech was recorded phonetically, and a linguistic corpus was developed using field and descriptive-analytical methods and desk research. These methods, combined with IPA transcription, were employed to collect and analyse the data. This study offers the etymology of twenty endangered words. Evidence shows that these varieties are from the southwestern Iranian language family and are remnants of one of the ancient Persian languages; they are related to other modern Iranian languages and dialects across the ancient, middle, and new historical periods. The vocabularies of these dialects have historically undergone phonetic changes, phonological processes (especially shift and deletion), and morphological and semantic changes. Furthermore, these dialects are more similar to Middle Persian in terms of word similarity and roots, while in terms of the absence of ergative features in their grammar, they resemble Old Persian.

Abstract This paper focuses on the etymology of Indo-Iranian words for camphor, particularly on Skt. karpūra-, briefly referring also to Gr. κέρβερος ‘Cerberus’. I argue that this form (of non-Indo-European origin) was modified due to secondary re-etymologization under a group of phonetically similar words with partly similar meanings (‘spotted, dappled’ etc.), some of which may refer to cheetah.