ipat(t)armayan

The word occurs in bird oracle reports and a text about the cult of Nerik.

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Checked against the photographs in the Mainzer Fotoarchiv.

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The understanding of ipat(t)armayan as a cardinal direction goes back to Laroche 1956e:423. Later, Puhvel 1983a:225 interpreted the opposition of ipattarmayan arš- and ^Dutu-i aršanu- in the description of the U-turn of the Maraššanta-river (near the modern city of Kargi) plausibly as ‘to flow westward’ and ‘to let flow towards the Sun-god (i.e. eastward)’. Confirmation comes from its Hieroglyphic-Luwian cognate /ipam(i)-/ ‘west’. The meaning is adopted in, e.g., HW:354, 387 and Archi 1975a:166 (cardinal direction without further identification), CLL:91, HED A, E, I:375-377, Görke 2013a:129f., HW 2nd ed. I:69 (with question mark)Various other attempts now outdated were made by Güterbock 1961b:93 n. 42 (‘astray’), Deighton 1982a:83 (‘in a different course’), and Neumann 1971b:300 (syntagm ipatar-maya- ‘big turn’), the last still followed in HEG A-K:364, Starke 1990a:504, HHw:62; undecided Ünal 2007a:261.

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The adverb represents the neuter nom./acc. sg. in -an built from an -i(ya)- derivative of the gloss wedge word ipatarma ‘west(ward)’.cf. for the identification of the -i(ya)- suffix, Kronasser 1966a:168 and, much later, CLL:91 (still -ay(a)-). Neumann 1971b:300 takes ipatarmayan as a syntagm of the abstract noun ipatar + mayan ‘big turn’. He is followed in HEG A-K:364, Starke 1990a:504-509 (with detailed research history and argument), and HHw:62. However, this is incompatible with the shorter stem ipatarma. Starke’s (Starke 1990a:505) attempt to defend the solution with the assumption that ipatarma is an abbreviation is not convincing, because Hittite abbreviations that are longer than two signs always contain the final sign, e.g. ku-uš-za for kuštayaza. Also, Puhvel’s (HED A, E, I:375-377) suggestion that ipatarma is a compound made of *ipa- ‘west’ and tarma- ‘nail, peg, stake’ (developing to ‘western cardinal point’) must be rejected for being semantically highly questionable.

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The use of the gloss wedges, the root ip-, and the suffixes productive in Luwian, point decidedly to a Luwian origin (thus widely assumed since Laroche 1956e:423 and Güterbock 1961b:93 n. 42, see e.g. DLL:52, Kronasser 1966a:400, Starke 1990a:504, CLL:91, Melchert 1994a:254, HHw:62, HEG A-K:364, van den Hout 2006a:246, HW 2nd ed. I:69; but doubts are expressed in HED A, E, I:377).

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For the lemma head see CLuw. *ip(a)-.