Classical Armenian – Introduction, Part 1
Kim, Ronald I.
Kölligan, Daniel
Introduction to the history of the Armenian language and people, with reference to the history of the Armenian alphabet, too.
 Hello, welcome to the first session of our module on classical Armenian. My name is Daniel Kulligan. I'm a private at the University of Cologne and the Heisenberg Fellow working in the Department of Linguistics, mainly on Greek and classical Armenian. Hello, my name is Ronald Kim. I'm Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Faculty of English of Adamic Scavic University in Poznań, Poland and a research assistant in the Institute of Comparative Linguistics of Charles University in Prague. My research interests include Tocarian, Armenian and other Indo-European languages and I'm currently carrying out a research project from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic on the verb in classical Armenian. In this video, we will give you a general introduction to the external history of the Armenian language and Ron will start with the first part. Let's begin with the roadmap. As Daniel has said, I will begin with the external history of Armenian, followed by the periodization of the language into Old, Middle and Modern Armenian. Daniel will then present some of the earliest sources on the Armenians, including important dates, and then he will present the Armenian alphabet. And examples of early writing, I will conclude with another example of early writing in Armenian. When the Armenians enter history in the middle of the 1st millennium BC, they are settled in the highlands of eastern Anatolia and the southern Caucasus. During the later 1st millennium AD, however, Armenian communities spread south and west along what was at that time the Byzantine Arab frontier, reaching the Mediterranean in Silicia, now in southeastern Turkey. Armenians have also been present for centuries in many different lands, including Iran, cities such as Tabriz and the capital Tehran, and throughout the eastern Mediterranean, most famously the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem. Armenians have spread throughout Anatolia, including Constantinople, Istanbul, which as the capital of the Ottoman Empire was one of the major centers of Armenian culture and intellectual life. Throughout the Caucasus, including the northern Caucasus, where Tifthis, modern Tbilisi, was another major center of Armenian culture. In Crimea and finally in eastern Europe, in places such as Romania and Galicia, in what is now Poland and Ukraine. This map shows the historical Armenian lands in Armenian language. This over here, in dark red, this is the boundary of the modern Armenian Republic since 1991, formerly the Armenian SSR in the Soviet Union. The lands around it belonged briefly to the Armenian Republic right after World War I. These are the lands that were heavily settled by Armenians until 1915. And over here, on the Mediterranean, we have Silicia, which I've already mentioned, which was home to an important kingdom in the later Middle Ages. This map shows the modern Republic of Armenia and its neighbors. Armenia is right here, with its capital Yerevan, Turkey to its west, Azerbaijan to the east, Georgia to the north. Armenian is traditionally divided into three periods, Old, Middle and Modern Armenian. Old or classical Armenian is known in the Armenian language as Grabar, the classical written language of the Bible and other works of the Oskarar or Voskatar Golden Age, i.e. the 5th and 6th centuries AD. This language was highly standardized. There is no detectable dialectal variation with one possible exception, two variant forms of the verb for wither, tar shamim or taramim. Otherwise, it's very difficult to detect any dialectal variation, suggesting that this was a standardized literary language used by all the writers of that Golden Age. Middle Armenian is best known from the Armenian kingdom of Silicia, which we have just seen on the historical map. That kingdom, from 1198 to 1375 AD, was much influenced in its society and culture by the western crusaders, with whom they were in frequent contact through trade, intermarriage and so on. Here, on this map, are the major centers of ancient Armenia. We see right here the ancient Urartian fortress of Erebuni, that's the oldest surviving site in modern Yerevan. To its west, Var Shapat, also known as Aegean Miatsin, has been for over a millennium home to the Armenian church, not also Garni, site of a very famous Roman temple, the only one surviving in the territory of the former USSR. We have the medieval capital of Ani, famously known as city of a thousand churches, of which many ruins survive. Tekor, which you will be hearing about later from my colleague Danya, home to, until its destruction in the 1960s, the oldest surviving inscription in the Armenian language. This map here shows the Armenian kingdom of Silicia, to which I have already referred, on the Mediterranean coast. And for almost 200 years, this kingdom was home to a thriving literary scene, and as a result, most of our middle Armenian sources come, not from today's Armenia, but from this kingdom of Silicia. After it was conquered in 1375, there was no significant Armenian state until the establishment of the first independent Republic of Armenia in 1918. Modern Armenian dialects are conventionally divided into Eastern and Western, the Eastern dialects being spoken in what was until 1917, the Russian Empire, and Persia, today's Iran. The Western dialects spoken in what was until World War I, the Ottoman Empire. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, two standards emerged, an Eastern in Tifthis, modern Tbilisi and Yerevan, and a Western in the Ottoman Empire centered on Constantinople. Standard Eastern Armenian is the official language of today's Republic of Armenia. Western Armenian was largely wiped out, sadly, in 1915, in its native territory, but continues to be spoken by survivors of the Armenian Genocide and their descendants in the USA, France, Lebanon, and many other lands. This map here shows the dialect situation in 1915. You will see that the Eastern dialects are represented here in green, the Western dialects in various shades of beige and yellow. The traditional classification is based on the formation of the present, which will not mainly concern us here. In the Eastern dialects, one says, for example, Behroum-M for I-Carry. In the Western dialects, something like Geperem with a prefix for I-Carry. There are also some transitional dialects in between, which resist such easy classification. And note that many of the dialects listed on this map were spoken off the map, such as those of Western Anatolia or even Southern Russia, Austria-Hungary, or Iran. Daniel will now talk about some of the earliest sources on the Armenians, introduce the Armenian alphabet, and present some of the earliest examples of Armenian writing. Thanks, Ron. I will now talk about the earliest attestations of Armenians in antiquity. Our earliest sources about speakers of Armenian are Greek and Iranian. In the West, it's the Greek historiographer Herodotus who tells us that the Phrygians of Anatolia originally were neighbors of the Macedonians on the Balkans, and that the Armenians are Phrygian settlers. You can see this here, the quotation from Herodotus, Book 7, where he says that So the Armenians who are settlers from Phrygia were armed like the Phrygians. And he tells us that the Macedonians say that the Phrygians were called Bregers as long as they dwelt in Europe, where there were neighbors of the Macedonians. And then they changed their home to Asia and also changed their name. So there seems to be a close connection between these two peoples in antiquity. The same designation of Armenians is found in the East. In his large inscription of Bissutun, King Darius mentions both Armenia as one of the countries that he conquered, and Armenians as his vassals or opponents. So you see this here on the first column of the Bissutun inscription. Ima dachyava taiamani pati aisha. These are the countries which fell to my lot, and then we get a long list of the countries. And among these we have Yawna, that is the Unions, so the Greek speaking population of Ionia on the Anatolian coast. Mada, the media, and Armina, Armenia, are part of the Iranian Empire at the time. The Armenians mentioned in the Bissutun inscription bear Iranian names. So for example we find a person called Dadershi, so the brave one, literally, which betrays the deep impact of Iranian, especially Parthian and Middle Persian, that Ron has already talked about, on Armenian language and culture. So here Darius proclaims there is an Armenian, Dadershi nama Armenia, Manabandaka, Maivasul, him I sent to Armenia, Avam adam fraishayam, Arminam. So here we have both the person and the name of the country. So then he says to him, go forth, there is an army which is rebellious, and you shall defeat it. This is actually not very successful. This long-standing Iranian influence on Armenian is of course due to the rule of Iranian dynasties in Armenia. So from the Achaemenids in the 6th century BC, and Silucids after Alexander the Great, and the Arsacids up to the Cessonids in the up to the 7th century before the Arab invasion. Of very large importance is also for Armenian identity the adoption of Christianity as a state religion in the early 4th century, even before this happened in the Roman Empire under King Turdat. In the same century in 387 Armenia was divided between the Roman and the Persian Empire, so between the Emperor Teodosius and Shapur III, with a larger part going to Persia. So that means that there was a consistent influence of Iranian. The loss of political independence was to some extent compensated for by religion and literature. So the pressure from the Iranian side to convert to the Cessanian state religion of Mas Deism and from the Byzantine side to follow their interpretation of Christianity created the need for an independent Armenian version of the Bible. The invention of the alphabet by Mestrop Mastots in the early 5th century was the basis for the ensuing work of translating the Bible from Greek and Syriac into Armenian. And the conflict with the Cessanians reached its first climax in 451 when the Armenian nobles revolted against the Shah Yasker II, who tried to enforce Mas Deism as a state religion in Armenia. With the battle of Avaraia, the Armenians led by Vardan Mamikonyan secured religious freedom for the Armenians. And it was in the same year that the Council of Kalsadon led to a split between the Byzantine and the Eastern churches, including the Armenians and the Georgians, who declined to adopt the Diophasite Creed. Since this time, the Armenian Monophysite Church has been autonomous ever since. Now let's have a look at the alphabet. The Armenian alphabet invented for the translation of the Bible and evangelization more generally has 36 letters. Around the 10th century two more were added, an O for Monophtangized classical O and a letter F for loanwords such as Frank, for example, the Franks, that is, the European Crusaders. Only capital letters were used at first in a type of writing called Yer-Katagir, iron script, menoscuels developed after the 12th century. It is nearly a phonemic alphabet and so far as each symbol represents a different phoneme, but not every phoneme is regularly written, especially the mid-central vowel Æ, the schwa. Earliest specimens of the script, inscriptions in stone in the Church of Tikkor and on mosaic pavements excavated in Jerusalem. So here you can see what the alphabet looks like, the magi-schools that were used at first only, so A, B, D, etc. Here you have the minu-schools, so the non-capital letters. This is the name of each letter in the Armenian alphabet and here we give you more or less adequate transliteration. I will talk about that later in a moment. And here you can see that these letters are also used for numbers, so this is also something I'll come back to in a second. And here at the end of the alphabet with O and F, you see that these letters were added later, so the original alphabet stopped here with the aspirate k. Now the Greek alphabet was probably used as a model for this invention. This can be seen in various homologies, one might call them. The writing is from left to right, as in Greek. The order of letters follows that of the Greek alphabet with letters for phonemes absent from Greek interspersed. So you can see this here on this slide very nicely, that we have α, β, β, β, β, ε and the same order of elements in the Armenian version. And then in between, for example, the schwa that is not present in Greek, for that we get an extra letter in the Armenian or for g, for which there is no corresponding letter nor phoneme in standard Greek, or L and χ, for example, and other letters. So like the velarized L, for example, that is used here with λ, but for the other L we don't have this correspondence and so on. So we see that the sequence corresponds largely to that of the Greek alphabet. Also in form some letters correspond more or less to the Greek cursive writing, for example the b-betá, looks a bit like the Greek betá, and also the single digraph that we find in the Armenian alphabet, namely o-w, used to indicate the vowel u, follows of course the model of Greek, orμ, ε, the letters are also, as I said, used as symbols for numbers, as in Greek and other writing systems that also took Greek as their example. However, while the basic structure seems to be modeled on Greek, for most signs there are no hard and fast correspondences elsewhere. So one gets the impression that overall the script is a new invention of Messrop, Marshtotz. Just a short note on transliteration here. There are various transliteration systems into Latin script, usually by the addition of diacritics. So some authors transcribe the digraph I just mentioned, o-w, as u, others including us write o-w to maintain a one-to-one correspondence between the writing systems. Also the Asperd-Africates, ts and ch, are transliterated by some authors differently, but the dot below and the vowels e and o, either with a circumflex or a macron. One should note, however, that the macron in this case does not indicate phonemic vowel length. Armenian does not have such a system, neither in the classical nor in the modern language. Another note on pronunciation. The traditional pronunciation of classical Armenian as maintained by the Armenian churches, for example, and that's the one I also follow, reflects several post-classical sound changes that you can see in this table. So let's have a look at that. The classical pronunciation of the word for church, for example, would be yekheleitse, while the more traditional, let's say, church pronunciation would be yekheleitse, which means that word initial e becomes an additional glide in front of it and the velarized l of classical Armenian has become a velofrikative r in this word. So we have yekheleitse and on the other hand ekheleitse. In the case of otten fut, the classical pronunciation was probably, as I just said, while the traditional church pronunciation would be votten with an added v before the vowel at the beginning. Votsaniyah and the, so this refers to the word final diphthong ay, we have either the classical pronunciation as tsaniyay and the traditional one as tsanya. Similarly, the diphthong oy developed into ui in non-final position in the traditional pronunciation, so I will say luis and my colleague Ron will say luis. And similarly for the word, the name for John, yovanes, so the classical pronunciation would be yovanes and the traditional one would be hovanes because in post-classical Armenian word initial yod changed into an h. So both pronunciations are of course possible and allowable. Now to early evidence for writing in Armenian. The first evidence for Armenian writing is provided by inscriptions both in early Medieval Armenia and in Jerusalem where Armenian monasteries were established at least in the 6th century. For example, from the neighborhood of Musrarah an inscription was found in a rectangular room with an apse at the east end close to the Damascus gate. So here is a photograph of this inscription and here you can see the text. Vasan yishatakiyev purkutyan, amenayin hayots, zorots anvan stergite. So this is a part of the inscription found there and you can see the Armenian writing and the transliteration that we use here and the glossing below this. So the text means roughly for the memory. So Vasan yishatakiyev purkutyan and the salvation of all Armenians, amenayin hayots. So here we have the name that the Armenians give to themselves, haik in the genitive plural and then zorots anvan stergite. Whose names zorots anvan stergite, ter is the word for Lord, gite is the inherited word for to know inherited from Proto-European Voida as it were. So this is a very early inscription and the other one that is the one from Ticor. So Ron has already mentioned this place that is Kars in modern Turkey. This was the oldest inscription of Armenian that we had which is unfortunately no longer existent and here we can see another nice example of early writing. So sahak kamsarakan, shinyats zays vukayaran, srbosak siyur barekho sucian, ho suciun sorry, yev bolor asgiz yev amuzni yev vordekats yev sirilyats. So let's just have a short look at this. So first we get the personal name sahak, kamsarakan sahak is of course isaak, the biblical name. Then we have shinyats, he built an heiress form from shinelle to build and then we have the object zays vukayaran, vukka is the word for the martyr and vukayaran is a derivative from that so with the suffix aran that usually marks places. Of course this is an Iranian suffix so this is borrowed from Iranian inter-Omenian srbosak siyur, so of the holy sahakis or for his intercession, yur barekho suciun. So this is bari and hocell to speak as a compound so the benedictsio as it were. Yev bolor asgiz, asg is the word for family so and all his family, yev amuzni, amuzsin is the word for wife and vordekats is the diminutive form of the word for son, vordekats and sirelyats from sirely, the beloved ones. And now Ron will present another fascinating specimen of early Armenian literacy. Thank you very much, Danyan. Let's look at the next text example. Because of their long tradition of writing in the native alphabet, Armenians throughout the ages and today are justly proud that they have used their own alphabet to write not only their own language but other languages. For example among Armenians living in eastern Anatolia who adopted the Turkish language in recent centuries, well they sometimes wrote that Turkish language using Armenian letters. This is not a new practice but goes all the way back to antiquity and as a piece of evidence that the Armenian script after its creation by Mesrop Mastots did not remain confined to just a few scholars or church officials but basically spread among all Armenian speakers, we can present this Greek Papyrus in Armenian script from Egypt, dated to probably between the fifth and seventh centuries AD. This manuscript interestingly does not contain any Armenian words. It contains conversational phrases, basic verb conjugations and word lists. In other words, it was a sort of phrase book in the Greek language used widely in Egypt at that time for resident Armenians, a kind of guidebook for those who were living there or conducting business and this suggests rapid spread of the alphabet after its creation in the early fifth century. Let's look at an example. These are two excerpts from that manuscript, from that Papyrus. The first line here reads something like this probably Sevdis u hrosto, hrosdis u sevdo, you lie, I do not owe, you owe, I do not lie. Clearly a line that would have been useful for a merchant, someone who was always having to deal with these kinds of situations involving bartering for bargaining for prices or so on. The next line, epiuisen pos puis, pos ho dévo men dikson me odontin. And that corresponds to Greek in the pronunciation of that time, epiuisen pos puis, pos ho dévo men dikson me odontin. He made, how do you make? Notice different verb forms useful for someone who did not actually know Greek but had to communicate. Where do we go? Show me the road. So it's this kind of document that shows us that the alphabet very quickly is read. And in fact there must have been a relatively high rate of literacy among Armenian speakers very soon within the first couple of centuries after the creation of the alphabet. Snor Hakalutun, thank you for your attention. This concludes the first video in the introduction.
 Hello, welcome to the first session of our module on classical Armenian.  My name is Daniel Kulligan. I'm a private at the University of Cologne and the  Heisenberg Fellow working in the Department of Linguistics, mainly on  Greek and classical Armenian. Hello, my name is Ronald Kim. I'm Associate  Professor of Linguistics in the Faculty of English of Adamic Scavic University  in Poznań, Poland and a research assistant in the Institute of Comparative  Linguistics of Charles University in Prague. My research interests include  Tocarian, Armenian and other Indo-European languages and I'm currently  carrying out a research project from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic on  the verb in classical Armenian. In this video, we will give you a general  introduction to the external history of the Armenian language and Ron will start  with the first part. Let's begin with the roadmap. As Daniel has said, I will  begin with the external history of Armenian, followed by the periodization  of the language into Old, Middle and Modern Armenian. Daniel will then present  some of the earliest sources on the Armenians, including important dates, and  then he will present the Armenian alphabet. And examples of early writing, I  will conclude with another example of early writing in Armenian. When the Armenians  enter history in the middle of the 1st millennium BC, they are settled in the  highlands of eastern Anatolia and the southern Caucasus. During the later  1st millennium AD, however, Armenian communities spread south and west along  what was at that time the Byzantine Arab frontier, reaching the Mediterranean  in Silicia, now in southeastern Turkey. Armenians have also been present for  centuries in many different lands, including Iran, cities such as Tabriz  and the capital Tehran, and throughout the eastern Mediterranean, most famously  the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem. Armenians have spread throughout Anatolia,  including Constantinople, Istanbul, which as the capital of the Ottoman Empire  was one of the major centers of Armenian culture and intellectual life. Throughout  the Caucasus, including the northern Caucasus, where Tifthis, modern Tbilisi,  was another major center of Armenian culture. In Crimea and finally in eastern  Europe, in places such as Romania and Galicia, in what is now Poland and Ukraine.  This map shows the historical Armenian lands in Armenian language. This over here,  in dark red, this is the boundary of the modern Armenian Republic since 1991,  formerly the Armenian SSR in the Soviet Union. The lands around it belonged  briefly to the Armenian Republic right after World War I. These are the lands  that were heavily settled by Armenians until 1915. And over here, on the Mediterranean,  we have Silicia, which I've already mentioned, which was home to an important kingdom  in the later Middle Ages. This map shows the modern Republic of Armenia and its  neighbors. Armenia is right here, with its capital Yerevan, Turkey to its west, Azerbaijan  to the east, Georgia to the north. Armenian is traditionally divided into three  periods, Old, Middle and Modern Armenian. Old or classical Armenian is known in the  Armenian language as Grabar, the classical written language of the Bible and other  works of the Oskarar or Voskatar Golden Age, i.e. the 5th and 6th centuries AD.  This language was highly standardized. There is no detectable dialectal variation  with one possible exception, two variant forms of the verb for wither, tar shamim  or taramim. Otherwise, it's very difficult to detect any dialectal variation,  suggesting that this was a standardized literary language used by all the writers  of that Golden Age. Middle Armenian is best known from the Armenian kingdom of  Silicia, which we have just seen on the historical map. That kingdom, from 1198 to  1375 AD, was much influenced in its society and culture by the western crusaders,  with whom they were in frequent contact through trade, intermarriage and so on.  Here, on this map, are the major centers of ancient Armenia. We see right here the  ancient Urartian fortress of Erebuni, that's the oldest surviving site in modern  Yerevan. To its west, Var Shapat, also known as Aegean Miatsin, has been for  over a millennium home to the Armenian church, not also Garni, site of a very  famous Roman temple, the only one surviving in the territory of the former  USSR. We have the medieval capital of Ani, famously known as city of a thousand  churches, of which many ruins survive. Tekor, which you will be hearing about  later from my colleague Danya, home to, until its destruction in the 1960s, the  oldest surviving inscription in the Armenian language. This map here shows the  Armenian kingdom of Silicia, to which I have already referred, on the Mediterranean  coast. And for almost 200 years, this kingdom was home to a thriving literary  scene, and as a result, most of our middle Armenian sources come, not from  today's Armenia, but from this kingdom of Silicia. After it was conquered in 1375,  there was no significant Armenian state until the establishment of the first  independent Republic of Armenia in 1918. Modern Armenian dialects are conventionally  divided into Eastern and Western, the Eastern dialects being spoken in what  was until 1917, the Russian Empire, and Persia, today's Iran. The Western dialects  spoken in what was until World War I, the Ottoman Empire. During the late 19th  and early 20th centuries, two standards emerged, an Eastern in Tifthis, modern  Tbilisi and Yerevan, and a Western in the Ottoman Empire centered on  Constantinople. Standard Eastern Armenian is the official language of  today's Republic of Armenia. Western Armenian was largely wiped out, sadly,  in 1915, in its native territory, but continues to be spoken by survivors of  the Armenian Genocide and their descendants in the USA, France, Lebanon,  and many other lands. This map here shows the dialect situation in 1915. You will  see that the Eastern dialects are represented here in green, the Western  dialects in various shades of beige and yellow. The traditional classification  is based on the formation of the present, which will not mainly concern us here.  In the Eastern dialects, one says, for example, Behroum-M for I-Carry. In the  Western dialects, something like Geperem with a prefix for I-Carry. There are  also some transitional dialects in between, which resist such easy  classification. And note that many of the dialects listed on this map were  spoken off the map, such as those of Western Anatolia or even Southern  Russia, Austria-Hungary, or Iran. Daniel will now talk about some of the earliest  sources on the Armenians, introduce the Armenian alphabet, and present some of  the earliest examples of Armenian writing. Thanks, Ron. I will now talk about the  earliest attestations of Armenians in antiquity. Our earliest sources about  speakers of Armenian are Greek and Iranian. In the West, it's the Greek  historiographer Herodotus who tells us that the Phrygians of Anatolia originally  were neighbors of the Macedonians on the Balkans, and that the Armenians are  Phrygian settlers. You can see this here, the quotation from Herodotus,  Book 7, where he says that  So the Armenians who are settlers from Phrygia were armed like the Phrygians.  And he tells us that the Macedonians say that the Phrygians were called  Bregers as long as they dwelt in Europe, where there were neighbors of the Macedonians.  And then they changed their home to Asia and also changed their name.  So there seems to be a close connection between these two peoples in antiquity.  The same designation of Armenians is found in the East. In his large  inscription of Bissutun, King Darius mentions both Armenia as one of the  countries that he conquered, and Armenians as his vassals or opponents.  So you see this here on the first column of the Bissutun inscription.  Ima dachyava taiamani pati aisha. These are the countries which fell to my lot,  and then we get a long list of the countries. And among these we have  Yawna, that is the Unions, so the Greek speaking population of Ionia  on the Anatolian coast. Mada, the media, and Armina, Armenia,  are part of the Iranian Empire at the time.  The Armenians mentioned in the Bissutun inscription bear Iranian names.  So for example we find a person called Dadershi, so the brave one, literally,  which betrays the deep impact of Iranian, especially Parthian and Middle  Persian, that Ron has already talked about, on Armenian language and culture.  So here Darius proclaims there is an Armenian,  Dadershi nama Armenia, Manabandaka, Maivasul, him I sent to Armenia,  Avam adam fraishayam, Arminam. So here we have both the person and the name  of the country. So then he says to him, go forth, there is an army which is  rebellious, and you shall defeat it. This is actually not very successful.  This long-standing Iranian influence on Armenian is of course due to the rule  of Iranian dynasties in Armenia. So from the Achaemenids in the 6th century BC,  and Silucids after Alexander the Great, and the Arsacids up to the  Cessonids in the up to the 7th century before the Arab invasion.  Of very large importance is also for Armenian identity the adoption of  Christianity as a state religion in the early 4th century, even before this  happened in the Roman Empire under King Turdat. In the same century in 387  Armenia was divided between the Roman and the Persian Empire, so between the  Emperor Teodosius and Shapur III, with a larger part going to Persia.  So that means that there was a consistent influence of Iranian.  The loss of political independence was to some extent compensated for by  religion and literature. So the pressure from the Iranian side to convert to  the Cessanian state religion of Mas Deism and from the Byzantine side to  follow their interpretation of Christianity created the need for an  independent Armenian version of the Bible. The invention of the alphabet by  Mestrop Mastots in the early 5th century was the basis for the ensuing work  of translating the Bible from Greek and Syriac into Armenian.  And the conflict with the Cessanians reached its first climax in 451 when  the Armenian nobles revolted against the Shah Yasker II, who tried to  enforce Mas Deism as a state religion in Armenia. With the battle of  Avaraia, the Armenians led by Vardan Mamikonyan secured religious freedom  for the Armenians. And it was in the same year that the Council of Kalsadon  led to a split between the Byzantine and the Eastern churches, including  the Armenians and the Georgians, who declined to adopt the Diophasite  Creed. Since this time, the Armenian Monophysite Church has been autonomous  ever since. Now let's have a look at the alphabet. The Armenian alphabet  invented for the translation of the Bible and evangelization more generally  has 36 letters. Around the 10th century two more were added, an O for  Monophtangized classical O and a letter F for loanwords such as Frank, for  example, the Franks, that is, the European Crusaders. Only capital letters were  used at first in a type of writing called Yer-Katagir, iron script,  menoscuels developed after the 12th century. It is nearly a phonemic  alphabet and so far as each symbol represents a different phoneme, but  not every phoneme is regularly written, especially the mid-central vowel  Æ, the schwa. Earliest specimens of the script, inscriptions in stone in the  Church of Tikkor and on mosaic pavements excavated in Jerusalem. So here  you can see what the alphabet looks like, the magi-schools that were used  at first only, so A, B, D, etc. Here you have the minu-schools, so the  non-capital letters. This is the name of each letter in the Armenian  alphabet and here we give you more or less adequate transliteration. I will  talk about that later in a moment. And here you can see that these letters  are also used for numbers, so this is also something I'll come back to in a  second. And here at the end of the alphabet with O and F, you see that  these letters were added later, so the original alphabet stopped here with the  aspirate k. Now the Greek alphabet was probably used as a model for this  invention. This can be seen in various homologies, one might call them. The  writing is from left to right, as in Greek. The order of letters follows that  of the Greek alphabet with letters for phonemes absent from Greek interspersed.  So you can see this here on this slide very nicely, that we have α, β,  β, β, β, ε and the same order of elements in the Armenian version. And  then in between, for example, the schwa that is not present in Greek, for that  we get an extra letter in the Armenian or for g, for which there is no  corresponding letter nor phoneme in standard Greek, or L and χ, for example,  and other letters. So like the velarized L, for example, that is used here  with λ, but for the other L we don't have this correspondence and so on. So we  see that the sequence corresponds largely to that of the Greek alphabet. Also  in form some letters correspond more or less to the Greek cursive writing, for  example the b-betá, looks a bit like the Greek betá, and also the single  digraph that we find in the Armenian alphabet, namely o-w, used to indicate  the vowel u, follows of course the model of Greek, orμ, ε, the letters are also,  as I said, used as symbols for numbers, as in Greek and other writing systems  that also took Greek as their example. However, while the basic structure seems  to be modeled on Greek, for most signs there are no hard and fast  correspondences elsewhere. So one gets the impression that overall the script  is a new invention of Messrop, Marshtotz. Just a short note on  transliteration here. There are various transliteration systems into  Latin script, usually by the addition of diacritics. So some authors transcribe  the digraph I just mentioned, o-w, as u, others including us write o-w to  maintain a one-to-one correspondence between the writing systems. Also the  Asperd-Africates, ts and ch, are transliterated by some authors differently,  but the dot below and the vowels e and o, either with a circumflex or a  macron. One should note, however, that the macron in this case does not indicate  phonemic vowel length. Armenian does not have such a system, neither in the  classical nor in the modern language. Another note on pronunciation. The  traditional pronunciation of classical Armenian as maintained by the Armenian  churches, for example, and that's the one I also follow, reflects several  post-classical sound changes that you can see in this table. So let's have a look  at that. The classical pronunciation of the word for church, for example, would  be yekheleitse, while the more traditional, let's say, church pronunciation would  be yekheleitse, which means that word initial e becomes an additional  glide in front of it and the velarized l of classical Armenian has become a  velofrikative r in this word. So we have yekheleitse and on the other hand  ekheleitse. In the case of otten fut, the classical pronunciation was probably,  as I just said, while the traditional church pronunciation would be votten  with an added v before the vowel at the beginning. Votsaniyah and the, so this  refers to the word final diphthong ay, we have either the classical  pronunciation as tsaniyay and the traditional one as tsanya. Similarly,  the diphthong oy developed into ui in non-final position in the traditional  pronunciation, so I will say luis and my colleague Ron will say luis. And  similarly for the word, the name for John, yovanes, so the classical  pronunciation would be yovanes and the traditional one would be hovanes  because in post-classical Armenian word initial yod changed into an h. So both  pronunciations are of course possible and allowable. Now to early evidence for  writing in Armenian. The first evidence for Armenian writing is provided by  inscriptions both in early Medieval Armenia and in Jerusalem where Armenian  monasteries were established at least in the 6th century. For example, from the  neighborhood of Musrarah an inscription was found in a rectangular room with an  apse at the east end close to the Damascus gate. So here is a photograph of  this inscription and here you can see the text.  Vasan yishatakiyev purkutyan, amenayin hayots, zorots anvan stergite. So this is  a part of the inscription found there and you can see the Armenian writing and  the transliteration that we use here and the glossing below this. So the text  means roughly for the memory. So Vasan yishatakiyev purkutyan and the  salvation of all Armenians, amenayin hayots. So here we have the name that the  Armenians give to themselves, haik in the genitive plural and then zorots anvan stergite.  Whose names zorots anvan stergite, ter is the word for Lord, gite is the  inherited word for to know inherited from Proto-European Voida as it were.  So this is a very early inscription and the other one that is the one from Ticor.  So Ron has already mentioned this place that is Kars in modern Turkey. This was  the oldest inscription of Armenian that we had which is unfortunately no longer  existent and here we can see another nice example of early writing.  So sahak kamsarakan, shinyats zays vukayaran, srbosak siyur barekho sucian,  ho suciun sorry, yev bolor asgiz yev amuzni yev vordekats yev sirilyats.  So let's just have a short look at this. So first we get the personal name sahak,  kamsarakan sahak is of course isaak, the biblical name. Then we have shinyats,  he built an heiress form from shinelle to build and then we have the object  zays vukayaran, vukka is the word for the martyr and vukayaran is a derivative  from that so with the suffix aran that usually marks places. Of course this is  an Iranian suffix so this is borrowed from Iranian inter-Omenian  srbosak siyur, so of the holy sahakis or for his intercession, yur barekho suciun.  So this is bari and hocell to speak as a compound so the benedictsio as it were.  Yev bolor asgiz, asg is the word for family so and all his family,  yev amuzni, amuzsin is the word for wife and vordekats is the  diminutive form of the word for son, vordekats and sirelyats from sirely,  the beloved ones. And now Ron will present another fascinating specimen of  early Armenian literacy. Thank you very much, Danyan. Let's look at the next  text example. Because of their long tradition of writing in the native alphabet,  Armenians throughout the ages and today are justly proud that they have used their  own alphabet to write not only their own language but other languages. For example  among Armenians living in eastern Anatolia who adopted the Turkish language  in recent centuries, well they sometimes wrote that Turkish language using Armenian  letters. This is not a new practice but goes all the way back to antiquity and as  a piece of evidence that the Armenian script after its creation by Mesrop  Mastots did not remain confined to just a few scholars or church officials but  basically spread among all Armenian speakers, we can present this Greek  Papyrus in Armenian script from Egypt, dated to probably between the fifth  and seventh centuries AD. This manuscript interestingly does not contain  any Armenian words. It contains conversational phrases, basic verb  conjugations and word lists. In other words, it was a sort of phrase book in the  Greek language used widely in Egypt at that time for resident Armenians, a kind  of guidebook for those who were living there or conducting business and this  suggests rapid spread of the alphabet after its creation in the early fifth  century. Let's look at an example. These are two excerpts from that manuscript,  from that Papyrus. The first line here reads something like this probably  Sevdis u hrosto, hrosdis u sevdo, you lie, I do not owe, you owe, I do not lie.  Clearly a line that would have been useful for a merchant, someone who was  always having to deal with these kinds of situations involving bartering for  bargaining for prices or so on. The next line, epiuisen pos puis, pos  ho dévo men dikson me odontin. And that corresponds to Greek in the  pronunciation of that time, epiuisen pos puis, pos ho dévo men dikson me odontin.  He made, how do you make? Notice different verb forms useful for someone who did  not actually know Greek but had to communicate. Where do we go? Show me the  road. So it's this kind of document that shows us that the alphabet very quickly  is read. And in fact there must have been a relatively high rate of literacy  among Armenian speakers very soon within the first couple of centuries after  the creation of the alphabet. Snor Hakalutun, thank you for your attention.  This concludes the first video in the introduction.
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Hello, welcome to the first session of our module on classical Armenian. My name is Daniel Kulligan. I'm a private at the University of Cologne and the Heisenberg Fellow working in the Department of Linguistics, mainly on Greek and classical Armenian. Hello, my name is Ronald Kim. I'm Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Faculty of English of Adamic Scavic University in Poznań, Poland and a research assistant in the Institute of Comparative Linguistics of Charles University in Prague. My research interests include Tocarian, Armenian and other Indo-European languages and I'm currently carrying out a research project from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic on the verb in classical Armenian. In this video, we will give you a general introduction to the external history of the Armenian language and Ron will start with the first part. Let's begin with the roadmap. As Daniel has said, I will begin with the external history of Armenian, followed by the periodization of the language into Old, Middle and Modern Armenian. Daniel will then present some of the earliest sources on the Armenians, including important dates, and then he will present the Armenian alphabet. And examples of early writing, I will conclude with another example of early writing in Armenian. When the Armenians enter history in the middle of the 1st millennium BC, they are settled in the highlands of eastern Anatolia and the southern Caucasus. During the later 1st millennium AD, however, Armenian communities spread south and west along what was at that time the Byzantine Arab frontier, reaching the Mediterranean in Silicia, now in southeastern Turkey. Armenians have also been present for centuries in many different lands, including Iran, cities such as Tabriz and the capital Tehran, and throughout the eastern Mediterranean, most famously the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem. Armenians have spread throughout Anatolia, including Constantinople, Istanbul, which as the capital of the Ottoman Empire was one of the major centers of Armenian culture and intellectual life. Throughout the Caucasus, including the northern Caucasus, where Tifthis, modern Tbilisi, was another major center of Armenian culture. In Crimea and finally in eastern Europe, in places such as Romania and Galicia, in what is now Poland and Ukraine. This map shows the historical Armenian lands in Armenian language. This over here, in dark red, this is the boundary of the modern Armenian Republic since 1991, formerly the Armenian SSR in the Soviet Union. The lands around it belonged briefly to the Armenian Republic right after World War I. These are the lands that were heavily settled by Armenians until 1915. And over here, on the Mediterranean, we have Silicia, which I've already mentioned, which was home to an important kingdom in the later Middle Ages. This map shows the modern Republic of Armenia and its neighbors. Armenia is right here, with its capital Yerevan, Turkey to its west, Azerbaijan to the east, Georgia to the north. Armenian is traditionally divided into three periods, Old, Middle and Modern Armenian. Old or classical Armenian is known in the Armenian language as Grabar, the classical written language of the Bible and other works of the Oskarar or Voskatar Golden Age, i.e. the 5th and 6th centuries AD. This language was highly standardized. There is no detectable dialectal variation with one possible exception, two variant forms of the verb for wither, tar shamim or taramim. Otherwise, it's very difficult to detect any dialectal variation, suggesting that this was a standardized literary language used by all the writers of that Golden Age. Middle Armenian is best known from the Armenian kingdom of Silicia, which we have just seen on the historical map. That kingdom, from 1198 to 1375 AD, was much influenced in its society and culture by the western crusaders, with whom they were in frequent contact through trade, intermarriage and so on. Here, on this map, are the major centers of ancient Armenia. We see right here the ancient Urartian fortress of Erebuni, that's the oldest surviving site in modern Yerevan. To its west, Var Shapat, also known as Aegean Miatsin, has been for over a millennium home to the Armenian church, not also Garni, site of a very famous Roman temple, the only one surviving in the territory of the former USSR. We have the medieval capital of Ani, famously known as city of a thousand churches, of which many ruins survive. Tekor, which you will be hearing about later from my colleague Danya, home to, until its destruction in the 1960s, the oldest surviving inscription in the Armenian language. This map here shows the Armenian kingdom of Silicia, to which I have already referred, on the Mediterranean coast. And for almost 200 years, this kingdom was home to a thriving literary scene, and as a result, most of our middle Armenian sources come, not from today's Armenia, but from this kingdom of Silicia. After it was conquered in 1375, there was no significant Armenian state until the establishment of the first independent Republic of Armenia in 1918. Modern Armenian dialects are conventionally divided into Eastern and Western, the Eastern dialects being spoken in what was until 1917, the Russian Empire, and Persia, today's Iran. The Western dialects spoken in what was until World War I, the Ottoman Empire. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, two standards emerged, an Eastern in Tifthis, modern Tbilisi and Yerevan, and a Western in the Ottoman Empire centered on Constantinople. Standard Eastern Armenian is the official language of today's Republic of Armenia. Western Armenian was largely wiped out, sadly, in 1915, in its native territory, but continues to be spoken by survivors of the Armenian Genocide and their descendants in the USA, France, Lebanon, and many other lands. This map here shows the dialect situation in 1915. You will see that the Eastern dialects are represented here in green, the Western dialects in various shades of beige and yellow. The traditional classification is based on the formation of the present, which will not mainly concern us here. In the Eastern dialects, one says, for example, Behroum-M for I-Carry. In the Western dialects, something like Geperem with a prefix for I-Carry. There are also some transitional dialects in between, which resist such easy classification. And note that many of the dialects listed on this map were spoken off the map, such as those of Western Anatolia or even Southern Russia, Austria-Hungary, or Iran. Daniel will now talk about some of the earliest sources on the Armenians, introduce the Armenian alphabet, and present some of the earliest examples of Armenian writing. Thanks, Ron. I will now talk about the earliest attestations of Armenians in antiquity. Our earliest sources about speakers of Armenian are Greek and Iranian. In the West, it's the Greek historiographer Herodotus who tells us that the Phrygians of Anatolia originally were neighbors of the Macedonians on the Balkans, and that the Armenians are Phrygian settlers. You can see this here, the quotation from Herodotus, Book 7, where he says that So the Armenians who are settlers from Phrygia were armed like the Phrygians. And he tells us that the Macedonians say that the Phrygians were called Bregers as long as they dwelt in Europe, where there were neighbors of the Macedonians. And then they changed their home to Asia and also changed their name. So there seems to be a close connection between these two peoples in antiquity. The same designation of Armenians is found in the East. In his large inscription of Bissutun, King Darius mentions both Armenia as one of the countries that he conquered, and Armenians as his vassals or opponents. So you see this here on the first column of the Bissutun inscription. Ima dachyava taiamani pati aisha. These are the countries which fell to my lot, and then we get a long list of the countries. And among these we have Yawna, that is the Unions, so the Greek speaking population of Ionia on the Anatolian coast. Mada, the media, and Armina, Armenia, are part of the Iranian Empire at the time. The Armenians mentioned in the Bissutun inscription bear Iranian names. So for example we find a person called Dadershi, so the brave one, literally, which betrays the deep impact of Iranian, especially Parthian and Middle Persian, that Ron has already talked about, on Armenian language and culture. So here Darius proclaims there is an Armenian, Dadershi nama Armenia, Manabandaka, Maivasul, him I sent to Armenia, Avam adam fraishayam, Arminam. So here we have both the person and the name of the country. So then he says to him, go forth, there is an army which is rebellious, and you shall defeat it. This is actually not very successful. This long-standing Iranian influence on Armenian is of course due to the rule of Iranian dynasties in Armenia. So from the Achaemenids in the 6th century BC, and Silucids after Alexander the Great, and the Arsacids up to the Cessonids in the up to the 7th century before the Arab invasion. Of very large importance is also for Armenian identity the adoption of Christianity as a state religion in the early 4th century, even before this happened in the Roman Empire under King Turdat. In the same century in 387 Armenia was divided between the Roman and the Persian Empire, so between the Emperor Teodosius and Shapur III, with a larger part going to Persia. So that means that there was a consistent influence of Iranian. The loss of political independence was to some extent compensated for by religion and literature. So the pressure from the Iranian side to convert to the Cessanian state religion of Mas Deism and from the Byzantine side to follow their interpretation of Christianity created the need for an independent Armenian version of the Bible. The invention of the alphabet by Mestrop Mastots in the early 5th century was the basis for the ensuing work of translating the Bible from Greek and Syriac into Armenian. And the conflict with the Cessanians reached its first climax in 451 when the Armenian nobles revolted against the Shah Yasker II, who tried to enforce Mas Deism as a state religion in Armenia. With the battle of Avaraia, the Armenians led by Vardan Mamikonyan secured religious freedom for the Armenians. And it was in the same year that the Council of Kalsadon led to a split between the Byzantine and the Eastern churches, including the Armenians and the Georgians, who declined to adopt the Diophasite Creed. Since this time, the Armenian Monophysite Church has been autonomous ever since. Now let's have a look at the alphabet. The Armenian alphabet invented for the translation of the Bible and evangelization more generally has 36 letters. Around the 10th century two more were added, an O for Monophtangized classical O and a letter F for loanwords such as Frank, for example, the Franks, that is, the European Crusaders. Only capital letters were used at first in a type of writing called Yer-Katagir, iron script, menoscuels developed after the 12th century. It is nearly a phonemic alphabet and so far as each symbol represents a different phoneme, but not every phoneme is regularly written, especially the mid-central vowel Æ, the schwa. Earliest specimens of the script, inscriptions in stone in the Church of Tikkor and on mosaic pavements excavated in Jerusalem. So here you can see what the alphabet looks like, the magi-schools that were used at first only, so A, B, D, etc. Here you have the minu-schools, so the non-capital letters. This is the name of each letter in the Armenian alphabet and here we give you more or less adequate transliteration. I will talk about that later in a moment. And here you can see that these letters are also used for numbers, so this is also something I'll come back to in a second. And here at the end of the alphabet with O and F, you see that these letters were added later, so the original alphabet stopped here with the aspirate k. Now the Greek alphabet was probably used as a model for this invention. This can be seen in various homologies, one might call them. The writing is from left to right, as in Greek. The order of letters follows that of the Greek alphabet with letters for phonemes absent from Greek interspersed. So you can see this here on this slide very nicely, that we have α, β, β, β, β, ε and the same order of elements in the Armenian version. And then in between, for example, the schwa that is not present in Greek, for that we get an extra letter in the Armenian or for g, for which there is no corresponding letter nor phoneme in standard Greek, or L and χ, for example, and other letters. So like the velarized L, for example, that is used here with λ, but for the other L we don't have this correspondence and so on. So we see that the sequence corresponds largely to that of the Greek alphabet. Also in form some letters correspond more or less to the Greek cursive writing, for example the b-betá, looks a bit like the Greek betá, and also the single digraph that we find in the Armenian alphabet, namely o-w, used to indicate the vowel u, follows of course the model of Greek, orμ, ε, the letters are also, as I said, used as symbols for numbers, as in Greek and other writing systems that also took Greek as their example. However, while the basic structure seems to be modeled on Greek, for most signs there are no hard and fast correspondences elsewhere. So one gets the impression that overall the script is a new invention of Messrop, Marshtotz. Just a short note on transliteration here. There are various transliteration systems into Latin script, usually by the addition of diacritics. So some authors transcribe the digraph I just mentioned, o-w, as u, others including us write o-w to maintain a one-to-one correspondence between the writing systems. Also the Asperd-Africates, ts and ch, are transliterated by some authors differently, but the dot below and the vowels e and o, either with a circumflex or a macron. One should note, however, that the macron in this case does not indicate phonemic vowel length. Armenian does not have such a system, neither in the classical nor in the modern language. Another note on pronunciation. The traditional pronunciation of classical Armenian as maintained by the Armenian churches, for example, and that's the one I also follow, reflects several post-classical sound changes that you can see in this table. So let's have a look at that. The classical pronunciation of the word for church, for example, would be yekheleitse, while the more traditional, let's say, church pronunciation would be yekheleitse, which means that word initial e becomes an additional glide in front of it and the velarized l of classical Armenian has become a velofrikative r in this word. So we have yekheleitse and on the other hand ekheleitse. In the case of otten fut, the classical pronunciation was probably, as I just said, while the traditional church pronunciation would be votten with an added v before the vowel at the beginning. Votsaniyah and the, so this refers to the word final diphthong ay, we have either the classical pronunciation as tsaniyay and the traditional one as tsanya. Similarly, the diphthong oy developed into ui in non-final position in the traditional pronunciation, so I will say luis and my colleague Ron will say luis. And similarly for the word, the name for John, yovanes, so the classical pronunciation would be yovanes and the traditional one would be hovanes because in post-classical Armenian word initial yod changed into an h. So both pronunciations are of course possible and allowable. Now to early evidence for writing in Armenian. The first evidence for Armenian writing is provided by inscriptions both in early Medieval Armenia and in Jerusalem where Armenian monasteries were established at least in the 6th century. For example, from the neighborhood of Musrarah an inscription was found in a rectangular room with an apse at the east end close to the Damascus gate. So here is a photograph of this inscription and here you can see the text. Vasan yishatakiyev purkutyan, amenayin hayots, zorots anvan stergite. So this is a part of the inscription found there and you can see the Armenian writing and the transliteration that we use here and the glossing below this. So the text means roughly for the memory. So Vasan yishatakiyev purkutyan and the salvation of all Armenians, amenayin hayots. So here we have the name that the Armenians give to themselves, haik in the genitive plural and then zorots anvan stergite. Whose names zorots anvan stergite, ter is the word for Lord, gite is the inherited word for to know inherited from Proto-European Voida as it were. So this is a very early inscription and the other one that is the one from Ticor. So Ron has already mentioned this place that is Kars in modern Turkey. This was the oldest inscription of Armenian that we had which is unfortunately no longer existent and here we can see another nice example of early writing. So sahak kamsarakan, shinyats zays vukayaran, srbosak siyur barekho sucian, ho suciun sorry, yev bolor asgiz yev amuzni yev vordekats yev sirilyats. So let's just have a short look at this. So first we get the personal name sahak, kamsarakan sahak is of course isaak, the biblical name. Then we have shinyats, he built an heiress form from shinelle to build and then we have the object zays vukayaran, vukka is the word for the martyr and vukayaran is a derivative from that so with the suffix aran that usually marks places. Of course this is an Iranian suffix so this is borrowed from Iranian inter-Omenian srbosak siyur, so of the holy sahakis or for his intercession, yur barekho suciun. So this is bari and hocell to speak as a compound so the benedictsio as it were. Yev bolor asgiz, asg is the word for family so and all his family, yev amuzni, amuzsin is the word for wife and vordekats is the diminutive form of the word for son, vordekats and sirelyats from sirely, the beloved ones. And now Ron will present another fascinating specimen of early Armenian literacy. Thank you very much, Danyan. Let's look at the next text example. Because of their long tradition of writing in the native alphabet, Armenians throughout the ages and today are justly proud that they have used their own alphabet to write not only their own language but other languages. For example among Armenians living in eastern Anatolia who adopted the Turkish language in recent centuries, well they sometimes wrote that Turkish language using Armenian letters. This is not a new practice but goes all the way back to antiquity and as a piece of evidence that the Armenian script after its creation by Mesrop Mastots did not remain confined to just a few scholars or church officials but basically spread among all Armenian speakers, we can present this Greek Papyrus in Armenian script from Egypt, dated to probably between the fifth and seventh centuries AD. This manuscript interestingly does not contain any Armenian words. It contains conversational phrases, basic verb conjugations and word lists. In other words, it was a sort of phrase book in the Greek language used widely in Egypt at that time for resident Armenians, a kind of guidebook for those who were living there or conducting business and this suggests rapid spread of the alphabet after its creation in the early fifth century. Let's look at an example. These are two excerpts from that manuscript, from that Papyrus. The first line here reads something like this probably Sevdis u hrosto, hrosdis u sevdo, you lie, I do not owe, you owe, I do not lie. Clearly a line that would have been useful for a merchant, someone who was always having to deal with these kinds of situations involving bartering for bargaining for prices or so on. The next line, epiuisen pos puis, pos ho dévo men dikson me odontin. And that corresponds to Greek in the pronunciation of that time, epiuisen pos puis, pos ho dévo men dikson me odontin. He made, how do you make? Notice different verb forms useful for someone who did not actually know Greek but had to communicate. Where do we go? Show me the road. So it's this kind of document that shows us that the alphabet very quickly is read. And in fact there must have been a relatively high rate of literacy among Armenian speakers very soon within the first couple of centuries after the creation of the alphabet. Snor Hakalutun, thank you for your attention. This concludes the first video in the introduction.
history of the Armenian language and Ron will