ARMENIAN LANGUAGE

language that forms a separate branch of the Indo-European language family. (It was once erroneously considered a dialect of Iranian.) Armenian is the mother tongue of the Turkish Armenians and of the Armenians in Armenia and is also spoken by people in other parts of the former Soviet Union. Armenian emigrants and refugees have taken their language with them throughout Anatolia and the Middle East and from there to many European countries (especially Romania, Bulgaria, and France) and to the United States. Invaders from the north introduced Armenian into Transcaucasia, probably in the latter part of the 2nd millennium BC. These invaders occupied the eastern region of Anatolia near the shores of Lake Van (now in Turkey). By the 7th century BC the Armenian language seems to have replaced the tongues of the native population there. In the early 5th century AD, the Armenian language began to be written down; an alphabet of 36 characters was invented, according to tradition, by the bishop Mesrop Mashtots about AD 401. With the later addition of two letters, the same alphabet is still used by Armenians throughout the world. Grabar, the written language of the 5th century (the golden age of Armenian culture), is traditionally said to be based on the dialect of Tarawn on Lake Van. The language of the literature from the 5th to the 8th century is homogeneous, but by the 9th century the influence of the spoken dialects is noticeable. The best-known Middle Armenian variety of Grabar is the 12th- and 13th-century court language of the Armenian kingdom in Cilicia. More or less corrupted versions of Grabar continued as the literary language until the middle of the 19th century. In the 1800s, Armenian nationalists brought about a renewal of Armenian national consciousness, and, somewhat incidentally, a new literary language that was much closer to the spoken language. Two varieties of the Armenian language now prevail: East Armenian, now the official language of Armenia, which is based on the dialect spoken around Mount Ararat and the Armenian city of Yerevan; and West Armenian, which has its foundation in the dialect spoken around the Turkish city of Istanbul. The differences between these two written forms of Modern Armenian are slight and constitute no barrier to mutual intelligibility. The great variety of Armenian dialects, however, can cause difficulty in communication. Phonetic developments in Armenian have radically changed the sound system of the Indo-European parent language. In particular, the pattern of the plosive consonantsthe stopshas been reshuffled. In the central Armenian dialects, three series of stops are distinguished; in those of the periphery, these have been reduced to two. All Armenian dialects distinguish two types of r, one strongly trilled, one weakly trilled. Old Armenian also differentiated between two types of l, one of them neutral and the other velarized, that is, made by moving the back of the tongue nearer to the soft palate at the back of the mouth. Both in the spoken dialects and in the two literary languages, a fairly complicated system of noun declension has been maintained. Characteristic of the changes in the Old Armenian verbal system is the general replacement of simple present-tense forms by periphrastic expressions. These are groups of words, including auxiliaries, that take the place of a single word that is capable of being inflected to show tense or some other feature. The dialects are classified according to the various types of periphrastic forms. In Old and Modern Armenian, the main tense distinction is that between present, aorist (without reference to completeness or duration of the action), and periphrastic perfect tenses. The old subjunctive, still extant in Classical Armenian, has been lost in the modern language. To express future time, Old Armenian used the subjunctive forms; Modern Armenian uses periphrastic expressions, as English does in the future forms I shall go and he will work. Also characteristic of Modern Armenian is the importance of the passive forms of the verb and the emergence of a negative conjugation with differing forms for verbs in instances such as I read and I don't read. Whereas Old Armenian was rather close to Ancient Greek in many respects, Modern Armenian is typologically much closer to Turkish. The vocabulary of the written languages is purely Armenian, being based almost exclusively on that of Grabar, with very few loanwords from neighbouring languages. language that forms a separate branch of the Indo-European language family. (It was once erroneously considered a dialect of Iranian.) Armenian is the mother tongue of the Turkish Armenians and of the Armenians in Armenia, where it is spoken by 2,850,000 people. In other parts of the former Soviet Union, especially in the neighbouring republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan, it is used by some 1,300,000. Armenian emigrants and refugees have taken their language with them all over Asia Minor and the Middle East and from there to many European countries, especially Romania, Poland, and France, and to America, particularly the United States. In all, Armenian is probably spoken by about 5,500,000 people around the world. Additional reading S.L. Kogian, Armenian Grammar (1949); H. Hubschmann, Armenische Grammatik, Armenische Etymologie (1897); A. Meillet, Esquisse d'une grammaire compare de l'armnien classique, new ed. (1936); Gerhard Deeters, Armenisch und Sdkaukasisch in Caucasica (1927); Heinrich Zeller, Armenisch, in Geschichte der indogermanischen Sprachwissenschaft, vol. 4 (1927). For ancient Armenian, see A. Meillet, Altarmenisches Elementarbuch (1913); and H. Jensen Altarmenische Grammatik (1959). Medieval Armenian is treated in J. Karst, Historische Grammatik des Kilikisch-Armenischen (1901). For modern speech, see H. Adjarian, Classification des dialectes armniens (1909); and A. Abeghian, Neuarmenische Grammatik (1936). Hans K. Vogt