Re: Armenia, homeland of the Etruscans?


Franz Gnaedinger wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Franz Gnaedinger wrote:

Yesterday I found this book: Armenian and Iranian Studies,
by James R. Russel, Harvard Armenian Texts and Studies 9,
Armenian Heritage Press, Harvard University Press 2004.
On page 1,369, in a footnote, in the tiniest print, and in
brackets he says that he had been very badly attacked for
agreeing on the late academician Igor Dyanakov's opinion
that Armenian is no autochthonous language. This carefully
hidden remark didn't escape me, and set my phantasy in
motion: what happened with the autochthonous language?

What does "is no autochthonous language" mean?

That's clearly your rephrasing of something a native speaker of English
could not have written, so what he actually said could be illuminating.

The bulky volume compiles 91 articles by Russel, mostly
photomechanical reprints of articles published between
1980 and 1997, plus photomechanical reproductions of
some typescripts: four lectures, and a couple of previously
unpublished papers. In the said footnote he tells that he
wrote a biographical essay on the Armenian poet Yegishe
Ch'arents', but his statement about the poet's bisexuality
(apparently well known in Armenia) was not welcome to
the publisher, so he withdrew all his material and published
it instead in the Ararat Quarterly. Quote of the bracket:

(Subsequently, a friend of his whom I had met and
befriended in New York published an _ad hominem_
critique of all my Armenological work in the once-
scholarly _Patma-banasirakan Handes_. My ostensible
crime is this instance was to have agreed with the late
Academician Igor Dyakanov's position that the Armenian
language is not autochthonous.)

Setting aside all the irrelevant psychobabble, Mr. Russell is simply
stating the obvious: Armenian is an Indo-European language, and so came
from somwhere else.

"Academician Igor Dyakanov" (whom you concealed behind "Igor Dyanakov")
is of course the great Russian linguist I. M. Diakonoff, and he had
nothing to do with the above assertion.

Mr. Russell is the author of an utterly loony article on the origin of
the Armenian alphabet in Le Museon 107 (1994): 317-33 -- he scrabbles
it together from every alphabet in the area, including some that aren't
attested until after Armenian is.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Armenia, homeland of the Etruscans?
    ... Armenian and Iranian Studies, ... that Armenian is no autochthonous language. ... The bulky volume compiles 91 articles by Russel, ... the publisher, so he withdrew all his material and published ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Armenia, homeland of the Etruscans?
    ... Sophus Bugge attempted to explain Etruscan as Armenian (or ... I uphold my Armenian hypothesis - with a crucial modification. ... Armenian Heritage Press, Harvard University Press 2004. ... that Armenian is no autochthonous language. ...
    (sci.lang)