Acharian's Etymological Validation Trail as an Epistemic Apparatus
Abstract
The paper examines the dictionary entry not only as a unit of lexicographical documentation but as an epistemic document characterised by provenance and authority. Thus, the presented research has two objectives. First, to model the substantive - morphological, phonological, semantic, chronological, source of evidence, linguistic parallels, alternative etymology - and structural (in which section of the article the etymological proposition is placed and who is the validating authority) validation procedures used by Acharyan based on the text of HAB's Preface․ Second, to apply the created validation pipeline to a sample selection of the letters Ա and Բ, as a computational method. The pilot computation shows that roughly half of the entries bear no trace of validation whatsoever; the measured share of Acharian's own etymologies (≈ 12%) matches the figure of 1,604 declared in the Preface (≈ 14.6%), which independently validates the pilot procedure. The HAB's validation trail therefore is applicable as a design requirement for present-day computational etymology.
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BibTeX
@misc{hovhannisyan2026acharians,
title = {{Acharian's Etymological Validation Trail as an Epistemic Apparatus}},
author = {Gayane R. Hovhannisyan},
howpublished = {Zenodo},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.23559081},
url = {https://zenodo.org/records/23559081},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Acharian's Etymological Validation Trail as an Epistemic Apparatus
AU - Gayane R. Hovhannisyan
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/22
PB - Zenodo
DO - 10.5281/zenodo.23559081
UR - https://zenodo.org/records/23559081
AB - The paper examines the dictionary entry not only as a unit of lexicographical documentation but as an epistemic document characterised by provenance and authority. Thus, the presented research has two objectives. First, to model the substantive - morphological, phonological, semantic, chronological, source of evidence, linguistic parallels, alternative etymology - and structural (in which section of the article the etymological proposition is placed and who is the validating authority) validation procedures used by Acharyan based on the text of HAB's Preface․ Second, to apply the created validation pipeline to a sample selection of the letters Ա and Բ, as a computational method. The pilot computation shows that roughly half of the entries bear no trace of validation whatsoever; the measured share of Acharian's own etymologies (≈ 12%) matches the figure of 1,604 declared in the Preface (≈ 14.6%), which independently validates the pilot procedure. The HAB's validation trail therefore is applicable as a design requirement for present-day computational etymology.
ER -