Uncle Garabed's Notebook
Uncle Garabed’s Notebook (Aug. 8, 2015)
French Proverb
One meets his destiny often in the road he takes to avoid it.
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Dear Uncle Garabed.
All you write is interesting to me and I almost always enjoy reading them.
I just wanted to make one single point and invite your attention to the part named “what is in a name or origin of some Armenian names”. Please not that most if not all names that you say have Turkish roots is not correct since all those Turkish words have Arabic roots themselves. I think this IS an important issue, since non-Armenian readers(although maybe a few) would think that most Armenians are of Turkic origin which is totally wrong. May be(or better to say for sure) turks during the last five or six hundred years of appearance in our region, being quite primitive and lacking a complete language, have borrowed most of their words from Arabic and have imposed all those words (by force) as names to those people whom they conquered by sword and violence.
Therefor it is correct to say that those names have Arabic origin and NOT Turkic.
With My Best Regards
Vahe’ Martyrosyan-Iran
To continue the above mentioned comment and just want to give an example.
Let’s take that ‘katib’ that you interpreted in your above article. This word is Arabic and is derived from the root word ‘kataba’ ‘کتب’ which means ‘to write’ there are many derivatives from this root. One of them is ‘ketabکتاب’ which means ‘book’ or ‘something written’, one other is ‘kateb’ کاتب which means ‘one who writs’ or ‘writer’. Of course turks have changed the pronunciation to ‘katib’ and the meaning to ‘clerk’.
Dear Vahe:
Your point is valid. Ottoman Turkish, from which many Armenian names are derived, drew very heavily on Arabic and Persian. The late Lt. Col. Harry Sachaklian, who served in the U.S. Air Force , and was stationed in Turkey for a good many years, told me that the true Turkish terms are mainly military ones, and that the rest are all borrowed.
I chose the Turkish definition because I felt that our ancestors were influenced by their immediate surroundings, which was Turkic.