Some Hittite and Armenian Reduplications and Their (P)IE Ramifications

Abstract

In this paper I summarize the literature on, and generate and defend formally and semantically, explicit derivations for, the Hittite reduplicated pairings {“ GIŠ ḫaḫ(ḫa)r(a)- ‘rake’”, “ḫaḫḫarie- ‘to rake’”} and {“ GIŠ sesarul- ‘sieve’”, “sesarie- ‘to sift’”} and the reduplicated Armenian nouns mamul ‘press; vice’, mamuṙ, ‘moss’, and mamur ‘sawdust’, all adduced by Joseph (1992). In addition, I give an explicit derivation for the Hittite reduplicated noun mēmal ‘grits, meal’. The first Hittite pairing, the three Armenian nouns, and hitt. Mēmal are shown to represent regular instantiations of the noun-reduplication process formulated in Cohen (forthc. a); the second Hittite pairing, perhaps surprisingly, turns out to be based on a (P)IE verb-reduplication process. In the course of the exposition, a previously-unreported Armenian sound-change affecting inherited word-final syllabic liquids emerges, and a well-known, but controversial, Armenian sound-change of *e to a is buttressed via a phonological explanation, which has a strong parallel in Old English, eliminating the only putative counterexample. Ultimately, the derivations lead to an elucidation of the semantic functions (thematic roles) of (P)IE reduplicated nouns, with the support of an analogous morphological process in Swahili.