Many religious terms in Armenian language are loanwords from Christian and Iranian periods. This means that the native or the older vocabulary is lost.

 Many religious terms in Armenian language are loanwords from Christian and Iranian periods. This means that the native or the older vocabulary is lost.

Hrach Martirosyan tries to recover an Armenian religious term from Urartian texts. It is the word iarani meaning holy place or shrine. This word can be compared to Greek ieros/iaros ( ἱερός , ῐ̔ᾰρός ) meaning holy, related to gods. The word has Indo-European origin and has parallels in Sanskrit. This mean that chances are quite high that ancient Armenians also had a such term which was lost later. Indeed this Urartian word is a good indication that such a word existed.

The proposed Armenian word *iaran would have the root iar- and a suffix -an similar to another word damb-an ( grave with a memorial stone ).

Once more we see that Greek and Indo-Iranian parallels can be useful to confirm the Armenian origin of a word. In this manner the Urartian term arcibini was compared to Armenian arciw ( eagle ). Which leaves little doubt that the term is a loanword in Urartian from Armenian language.

Source: "Vishap between fairy tale and reality" 2019 . Collection of articles.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/.../%E1%BC%B1%CE%B5%CF%81%CF...

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