Greek, Syriac and Iranian Loanwords in Ancient Armenian: Reflexes of Voiceless Stops in Word-Initial Position

In the Late Antiquity plurilingualism was a very widespread phenomenon in Armenia. As a consequence a significant part of Ancient Armenian lexicon consists in lexical borrowings from Middle Iranian, Syriac and Greek. However, these languages were in turn in contact with one another outside Armenia and, for this reason, it is important to establish criteria to identify / find the real source of the loanwords penetrated in Armenian from these languages. In some cases for example Greek words entered the Armenian lexicon with the intermediation of Middle Iranian or Syriac. Voiceless stops in word initial position can provide some interesting evidence about this issue. Thanks to the phonological contrast existing in Armenian between aspirate and non-aspirate voiceless stops, aspiration is very accurately reproduced in Armenian, when it was present in the donor language. The article discusses several aspects regarding the reproduction in Armenian of initial aspirate and non-aspirate voiceless stops in loanwords coming from Syriac, Greek and Middle Iranian. In particular Armenian seems to provide significant clues to help reconstruct the pronunciation of initial stops in different Middle Iranian dialects.