The mysterious prefix "Ha-"/"A-" found in many place names is actually a definite article from the Phoenician language and its heir Hebrew. The two varieties of the same article are easily explained: the Greek vowel "eta" (H) was often confused with the Latin consonant "H". It is for this reason that the Latin "H" is silent in many European languages today. In addition, the consonant "H" in some languages is pronounced as a barely audible aspiration, which also increases the chances of confusing it with a vowel.
By separating the article from the true roots of toponyms, we transform the Alazons into Lazones (into Lazona, "the country of the Laz"), the Iranian tribe of the Amardians into Mardians (both spellings of this tribe are recorded, and historians argue whether they are the same people), Aswan into Svan (the ancient name of Aswan is Svenet), Assyria into Syria (in fact, these are Assuria and Suria), Anatolia into Natolia, Alupka into Lubica, Aleppo (Halibon) into Lubon, Apulia into Puglia, Apkhaseti into Phaseti. But most importantly, the perception of the prefix as an article allows us to distinguish the Lubs from the Chalybes (Cha Lubes) and restore their dominance on three continents of the ancient world.
The abundance of the Phoenician article in toponyms around the world should not be confusing, since the Phoenicians were the main traders and travelers of antiquity, familiar with distant lands better than anyone else.
The topic of articles in the languages of the Kartvelian or, as it would be more correct to call it, the Iberian language family has a continuation. Today's Kartvelian languages officially do not have articles. But in Klimov's "Etymological Dictionary of Kartvelian Languages", the morpheme "a" is interpreted as a possible demonstrative pronoun both at the beginning of a word and at the end. And as is known, the definite article is a demonstrative pronoun.
The final "a" is the definite article in today's Basque language. An interesting entry in Chanturia’s dictionary shows that in Old Georgian the final “a” also played the role of an article: “დუნია [dunia] – † 1 (the) world”.
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