The Armenian Language

Armenian language is an Indo-European language. It is isolated, not paralleled by any language of similar aspect, as the Slavic is with the Baltic, or the Italic with the Celtic. In its earliest known form, it appears to have had no dialects. From the beginning, it has been manifested in one form only, and the modern speech does not present any trace that would indicate the existence of dialects greatly differing from one another even in the fifth century A.D.. For at least a thousand years it was not written, and therefore, there are no documents in existence to enlighten us about its origin and about the influence exercised upon it by the idiom spoken by the natives of the area which was later occupied by the Armenians.

Contacts with subdued nations and later, with conquering ones and others, introduced a great many foreign elements into the Armenian language. In the early centuries of the Christian era, the Armenians were frequently under Iranian domination. For more than three centuries the country had an Arshakid dynasty, and during that time the nobility had a strong Parthian flavor. Hence the numerous Iranian words in the Armenian vocabulary, whose forms indicate that they were borrowed, not from the old Persian, but from an archaic Pehlevi. There are Iranian elements in the Armenian vocabulary that the language was for a long time regarded as an Iranian dialect. However, the Armenian grammar remained almost free from the influence of the Persian, which has neither declension nor gender. The Syriac and Greek words found in the Armenian proceed from ecclesiastical and scientific borrowings and are of little linguistic importance.

The introduction of Christianity into Armenia and the desire for evangelization brought into existence the Grabar or written language, in classic form. Like the Gothic and the Slavic, the Armenian was first written by a scholar who put into words its system of grammar and a vocabulary facilitating the translation from Greek of the sacred books and writings, expressed in an alphabet well adapted to the phonetics of the tongue. The irregularities of writers accused of vulgarisms, like Lazarus of Parb (Ghazar Parbetsi), are chiefly lexical. Where grammatical, it is by no means certain that they were perpetrated by the authors; they may be innovations by writers or copyists. Almost all the existing manuscripts of these authors were written no earlier than the Middle Ages. Certain translations of philosophical text in an artificial style, almost always imitations of Greek originals, have also peculiarities, manifestly novel, which are departures from the originals.

Because of the absence of ancient dialectal differences, it cannot be determined in what region the classical Armenian was evolved and stabilized. As the language of scholars and the Church, the classic Grabar has remained in use to the present time. It passed gradually out of popular use in the Middle Ages, being replaced among the people by the modern common vernacular (Ashkharh abar, from Ashkharh , "world", "country") which was in general use in the fifteenth century. It is to be noted that there are a number of phonetic variations between Eastern and Western vernaculars of the modern Armenian, as for example the sonorous labial, guttural and dental letters, b , g , and d , heard in the East, are in the West turned into p , k and t . For example, the word Grabar , so pronounced in the East, would in the West be pronounced Krapar . Sourb Grigor in the East become Sourp Krikor in the West. The Eastern is nearer to the classical Armenian.