Diachronic and achronic characteristics of a dull sibilant ս (s) of Old Armenian language

Abstract

The vast majority of the Armenian words of Indo-European origin with ս (s) have the nasalized *ḱ as their prototype. By combining back-lingual prototypes (comp. *ḱ, *k, *g՛, *gh) from one side and all the sibilant prototypes (comp. *s, *(s)s, *z, *z / s, *(p)s, *s(p), *s(t), *s(kh)) from the other side, a 2 : 1 quantitative proportion can be established in favor of the posterior ones. The number of the words restored with nasalized voiceless back-lingual *ḱ is about 1.7 times higher than those restored with fricative voiceless sibilant *s. However, quantitative prevalence is not yet sufficient to consider Indo-European *ḱ the original prototype of the Armenian ս (s), thus the initial phoneme from which the Old Armenian sibilant ս (s) could have derived after the separation of Armenian from the common Indo-European language. There are two reasons preventing such a conclusion: 1) the prototype with *s is restored for numerous Armenian words in comparative Armenian studies; 2) the first and second nasalization of the Indo-European back-lingual, which also resulted in sibilant phonemes in Indo-European languages, all dating back to a later period. The twofold quantitative prevalence of the cases of transition of Indo-European *ḱ to Armenian ս (s) compared to the transition of *s > ս (s), is likely to have originated similarly to the transition from the nasalized back-lingual occlusives to fricatives and occlusive-fricatives. It was a common phenomenon not only in Armenian but also in almost all of the eastern (satəm) group languages.