A New Look at Old Armenisms in Kartvelian
Treats the most ancient layer of Armenian loanwords in the Kartvelian languages. Because Kartvelian historical phonology is relatively conservative compared with Armenian, these borrowings occasionally preserve more archaic forms, recoverable by the comparative method. Thorsø re-examines six previously proposed Armenian loans (including the words for 'ford', 'stream', 'wine', 'juniper', 'kidney' and 'mushroom') and advances one new proposal. He argues this stratum of loans probably dates to the latter half of the second millennium BC, before the breakup of Proto-Georgian-Zan, which would push the first identifiable Armenian-Kartvelian contacts back to that period.