Cox, Claude. Hovhann Zohrapian. The Zohrab Bible is a facsimile reproduction of an Venetian version of the entire Classical Armenian Bible in the Armenian alphabet. In unison with Bedrossian the student will be able to tackle any of these works upon completion of this text.
Descriptive Grammars Jensen, Hans. Altarmenische Grammatik. Meillet, Antoine. Altarmenisches Grammatik. Jensen is the definitive descriptive grammar of the language. There is a corresponding second volume Altarmenische Chrestomathie with ample texts and a glossary. An article giving a nice overview of the language is: Clackson, James.
Woodard ed. The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. Cambridge: A nice descriptive analysis of the deictic system is: Klein, Jared. On personal deixis in Classical Armenian. Dettelbach: J. Historical Grammars Innsbruck: Inst. Godel, Robert. An Introduction to the Study of Classical Armenian. Schmitt is an absolute for anyone studying the history of the language.
Three articles also offer nice discussion of the historical development of the language, the first having wide morphological breadth, the second a discussion of the historical development of the phonology as well as reference to Middle and Modern Armenian, and the last offering a very nice discussion regarding the early history of Indo-Europeanists working on Armenian in addition to specific phonological problems.
Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. EMBED for wordpress. They encountered the Urartuan culture in a period of decline and eventually came to rule over them and other Caucasian groups in the region.
Another theory draws on linguistic similarities between the Armenian language and the Caucasian languages of the area to say that the Armenians had originally been themselves a Caucasian tribe which adopted an Indo-European tongue, and this Caucasian substrate is responsible for the fact that Armenian is rather genetically isolated among the Indo-European languages.
Yet another theory is that the Armenians are the most sedentary members of the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European; that the Indo-European languages originated in the transcaucasian region, but the Armenians, who chose not to migrate out of the area, were marginalized during periods of Hittite and Urartuan dominance. Suffice it to say, the true origin of the Armenian peoples will remain shrouded in obscurity for some time to come. The Armenian land itself is a plateau located roughly feet above sea level and hemmed in by mountainous regions.
It lies roughly southeast of the Black Sea and southwest of the Caspian Sea. The ancient Armenian homeland was somewhat more expansive than the modern Armenian Republic, also including much of eastern Turkey, the northeastern corner of Iran, and parts of Azerbaijan and Georgia.
In the northeast the Kur River separates the highland region from lowlands which sweep to the Caspian Sea. The northern border is continued by the Pontus mountain range, which extends west from the source of the Kur and shields Armenia from the Black Sea.
The Taurus and Zagros mountain ranges create a natural boundary running along the entire southern expanse and cutting Armenia off from Mesopotamia. The Armenian plateau itself is divided by several smaller mountain ranges that furnish the sources for a number of unnavigable rivers.
The northermost section of the Euphrates was to form the boundary between Greater and Lesser Armenia in the subsequent imperial struggles. The status of Armenian within the Indo-European family of languages remains obscure. Few facts are certain, and those conclusions which have an air of certainty about them are often of a very general nature.
The fact that some propose Armenia to be the homeland of the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European would lead one to hope that Armenian represents the language of those speakers who did not migrate into other regions, but unfortunately this seems unlikely. On the other hand, Hurrian was an ergative language with some typological features not found in Armenian e.
The influence of the substratum or various substrata on Armenian is undeniable, as a large portion of Armenian vocabulary is of unknown origin, cf. Armenia was the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as the official religion traditionally in , but perhaps a decade later. However, it wasn't until or that the Armenian language was first written down.
He also invented the Armenian alphabet. His model was certainly the Greek alphabet, and some Armenian letters bear a resemblance to Greek originals, but there are also letters invented by Mesrop. Most of the early literature in Armenian consists of translations from Greek and Syriac, notably the works of Pcawstos Biwzant from Greek , and St.
Epcrem's Hymns from Syriac. There are no original manuscripts from the earliest period of the Armenian language. The most ancient manuscript, the Moscow Gospel, was copied in , and many works written originally in the fifth century were subsequently interpolated and substantially changed by recopying.
There are some early inscriptions from the 5th century, and the earliest ones seem to be inscriptions from Nazareth, from the first half of the 5th century see below. See Diakonoff , Greppin To all appearances, Classical Armenian had no dialects, and most Modern Armenian forms are easily derivable from it.
Cilician Armenian th centuries was already characterized by many West Armenian features e. The East Armenian standard is based on the dialect of Ararat. Both modern standard languages are heavily influenced by Classical Armenian. Meillet's brief comparative grammar , in French is still useful, as well as Jensen's descriptive grammar A more comprehensive grammar is Tumanjan's There are hardly any modern comprehensive dictionaries in Western European languages, but now there is the recently published etymological dictionary by Martirosyan Standard Indo-Europeanist treatments of Armenian morphology include Olsen on nominal morphology and Klingenschmitt verbal morphology.
An overview of the earlier 20th century literature on Armenian can be found in Schmitt Its Armenian name is «Erkatagir», or «iron alphabet». Some linguists e. In the post-classical period, it represents the reflex of classical —aw-. Although the order of letters partly follows the Greek model, the numerical values are not the same as in Greek, since letters for phonemes without Greek counterparts e.
This may be due to prehistoric language contacts with the languages of the Caucasus, where phonological systems are notoriously complex. Of all the Caucasian language families, Armenian shows the most affinities with Kartvelian, notably with Old Georgian Gippert The original pronunciation of the Classical Armenian stops is unknown, and there is considerable diversity in their reflexes among the modern dialects. It seems probable that the phonemes transcribed here as voiceless stops were indeed voiceless, since they correspond to Greek voiceless stops in loanwords, e.
This means tha the pronunciation of mnacc was bisyllabic, i. The vowels a, e, o and the diphthongs ay, aw, ew and iw were not affected by vowel reduction, cf. Solta Before nasals, mid-vowels are raised, i.
In some ill-understood cases, Arm. As can be gathered from above, the PIE opposition of long and short vowels disappeared in Armenian. It appears that laryngeals before consonants developed as prothetic vowels word- initially, similarly as in Greek, cp.
Although Arm. The Armenian diphthong aw develops into o in the post-classical period. The development in Arm. Voiced stops are devoiced: Arm. Aspirated stops develop into voiced stops or affricates: Arm. PIE velars are preserved as velars k, kc, g, cp. In Arm. The same development may be attested in Arm.
Likewise, Arm. Some of these examples can be explained by dialect borrowing, while other cases of the loss of h- may be generalized forms of the roots occurring after prefixes, when —h- is regularly lost, cf. It is preserved before stops, cp. In a few instances we find Arm. A similar explanation might hold for Arm. If Arm. The rule for the double reflexes cannot be established, 13 cf.
It drops between vowels, cp. Note, however, that maybe the same development can be observed in Arm. It is assumed that there was a strong penultimate accent in Proto-Armenian, which caused the apocope of the final syllables, which finally led to the oxytonesis we find in Classical Armenian.
0コメント