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In Armenian diminutive for personal names are formed by adding 'o' for some short part of the name (I'm intentionally not calling this short form "root" cause it's not necessarily a root), so some examples would be:

  • Արթուր → Արթո (Arthur → Artho)
  • Բաբկեն → Բաբո (Babken → Babo)
  • Զավեն → Զավո (Zaven → Zavo)
  • Լուդվիգ → Լուդո (Ludwig → Ludo)

The thing is the similar form of hypocorism exists in Turkish:

  • Abdullah → Apo
  • İbrahim → İbo
  • Mehmet → Memo
  • Süleyman → Sülo
  • Muzaffer → Muzo

And so on. My question would be: regarding the fact that these two-languages co-existed for centuries in the same geographical area, which one influenced which one on this aspect. Or, may be, it's just a coincidence?

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  • 1
    I think at lot of languages all over the world use the suffix -o to form diminutive names, e.g. Arabic, English, German ....
    – fdb
    Jan 27, 2018 at 15:58
  • 2
    -o is also used like this in Georgian (eg Mikho), Kurdish and in the Balkan Slavic (eg Haso i Mujo). The -ik diminutive is also all over the place.
    – Adam Bittlingmayer
    Jan 27, 2018 at 22:16
  • 3
    @A.M.Bittlingmayer so it's more of some kind of Sprachbund?
    – shabunc
    Jan 27, 2018 at 22:17
  • 2
    An exhaustive search should be done, but it is possible that no native Turkish lemma ends in -o.
    – Adam Bittlingmayer
    Jan 28, 2018 at 8:37
  • 2
    @AdamBittlingmayer That is correct, only words ending with -o is loan words. Even postfixes don't end with o.
    – kabraxis
    Mar 11, 2019 at 15:58

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