Andrea Scala

Because of its antiquity (V-VI cent.), the old Armenian translation of John Chrysostom’s Letter to Theodore is a very interesting source for the investigations regarding the history of the Greek text. The text which the translation is based on does not agree sistematically with the text of any conserved Greek manuscript. In some very interesting cases the Armenian translation supposes a Greek text which does not find correspondences in any known Greek manuscript and which can not be explained with misreadings or special choices of the translator. After demonstrating the indipendence of the translation from the known Greek manuscript tradition, the autor, through the comparison between some passages of the Greek and the Armenian text, gives some examples in order to show the philological value of the Armenian translation.

L’etimologia fino ad ora accettata per arm. dirt ‘feccia, morchia’ considera il lessema un prestito dal pers. durd ‘deposito’, tale derivazione non è però priva di difficoltà. Sulla base di confronti lessicali e semantici con altre lingue, si propone di ascrivere arm. dirt al fondo indeuropeo della lingua armena.