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Concept
Karabakh
Summary
Karabakh (Qarabağ ɡɑˈɾɑbɑɣ; Ġarabaġ ʁɑɾɑˈbɑʁ) is a geographic region in present-day southwestern Azerbaijan and eastern Armenia, extending from the highlands of the Lesser Caucasus down to the lowlands between the rivers Kura and Aras.
It is conventionally divided into three regions: Highland Karabakh, Lowland Karabakh (the steppes between the Kura and Aras rivers), and the eastern slopes of the Zangezur Mountains (roughly Syunik and Kalbajar–Lachin).
The Russian name Карабах, transliterated Karabakh, derives from the Azerbaijani Qarabağ, which is generally believed to be a compound of the Turkic word kara (black) and the Iranian word bagh (garden), literally meaning "black garden." However, there are some other hypotheses.
Russian Orientalist Vladimir Minorsky believed that the name possibly connected to an extinct Turkic tribe of the same name. By comparison, there are similar toponyms in Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan.
According to Iranian linguist Abdolali Karang, kara could have derived from kaleh or kala, which means "large" in the Harzani dialect of the extinct Iranian Old Azeri language. The Iranian-Azerbaijani historian Ahmad Kasravi also speaks of the translation of kara as "large" and not "black." The kara prefix has also been used for other nearby regions and landmarks, such as Karadagh (dagh "mountain") referring to a mountain range, and Karakilise (kilise "church") referring to the largest church complex in its area, built mainly with white stone, the Monastery of Saint Thaddeus. In the sense of "large," Karakilise would translate to "large church," and Karabakh would translate to "large garden."
Another theory, proposed by Armenian historian Bagrat Ulubabyan, is that, along with the "large" translation of kara, the bagh component was derived from the nearby canton called Baghk, which at some point was part of Melikdoms of Karabakh within modern-day Karabakh — Dizak and the Kingdom of Syunik (in Baghk, the -k suffix is a plural nominative case marker also used to form names of countries and regions in Classical Armenian).
Official source
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