Armenian Language & Alphabet

The prehistory of the Armenian Language

By James Russell

Armenian is an Indo-European language. Much of the core of its vocabulary is related to other languages of this family, such as English, Sanskrit, Persian, and Russian. The words for mother and father, hayr and mayr, are obviously cognates to English, once the particular sound laws of Armenian are recognized-in this case, that -t- is lost between vowels and that initial  p- (English f-) becomes an h-. Some IndoEuropean bases are harder to recognize. For example, Armenian erku ("two") and erkayn ("long") do not outwardly resemble words of similar meaning in other Indo-European languages; but it has been established that proto-Indo-European *dw- becomes erk- in Armenian, so Greek duo ("two") and dweron ("far") are in fact cognates to the Armenian words. Such great changes would indicate that the Armenians separated at a very early stage from their closest Indo-European cousins (the protoGreeks, it has been surmised), when they migrated to eastern Anatolia.

It is possible that the word in Armenian for "Armenian," hay, is the result of the loss of an intervocalic -t-, as in the cases just described, and comes from an original form *Hati-yos, ("Hattian"). This indicates that the Armenians adopted the name of the great Hittite nation over whose lands they passed in their eastward migrations from southeastern Europe. Perhaps their migration was even connected to the crisis and decline of the Hittite Empire. Certain Armenian terms of religious connotation have cognates in Hittite and in Phrygian, signifying the conservation of very archaic beliefs. Such linguistic affmities are important data in determining the origins of the Armenian people.

Some words in Armenian appear to be related to other languages, but if similar words appear in different language families and cannot be shown to have been borrowed, they must be classified only as "areal " that is, reflecting the culture of a common geographical area, in which diverse language groups have long coexisted. The Armenian word for wine, gini, cognate to English "wine" and Greek oinos, for example, seems to be related also to Georgian (Caucasian) gvini and Hebrew (Afro-Asiatic) yayin. Another example is Armenian kamurj, Greek gephyra, Hebrew gesher, all meaning "bridge." Although the early Armenian languages developed in some isolation from the other IndoEuropean tongues, the Armenians shared with their other neighbors of the Mediterranean basin the economic and cultural features that bridge differences of religion and language-even as Turkish, Armenian, Greek, and Arab cuisine today are very similar.

Other words in Armenian, still, are loans from neighboring languages of various periods. The word dzov, "sea," for example, comes from Urartean sue. Urartean, which seems to have been related to the modern Caucasian languages, was probably already dead long before the birth of Christ, but the word survives, in Hebrew form, as Ararat, the name by which the Bible knows the mountainous land where Noah's ark rested. The Urarteans called themselves Biaina, a name that survives in Armenian Van; Urartu seems to come from an Assyrian word meaning "high place." The word for "sea" is a fairly basic one, which replaced the proto-Armenian Indo-European term, so one can assume the Armenians had already fully assimilated dzov at a very early date. In the Behistun inscription discussed earlier, the name of Armenia is still represented in Babylonian as "Urartu," and one Armenian is named Haldita, a word that probably means "servant of Haldi." Haldi was the chief divinity of the Urartean pantheon, so it is possible that Haldita's parents had been worshippers of the Urartean god. The Armenian words for plum, apple, and mulberry (salor, khndzor, and tut), fruits native to the Armenian plateau, are also from the non-Indo-European HurroUrartean. Had the Armenians been living in Anatolia as long as the Hurro-Urarteans, probably they would have had native, Indo-European words for these fruits. More likely, they settled and learned the names of these fruits from the older, settled population who cultivated them.

It is also sometimes possible to assign loan words in Armenian from the same language family to different periods; this helps us to establish the cultural ties Armenians maintained over time with neighbors belonging to these language families. The Armenian place name Til comes from a Semitic word for "hill" and may be a relic of Assyrian trading settlements along the upper Euphrates in the second millennium B.C.., but selan (now pronounced seghan), "table," from Semitic shulhan, probably came into Armenian only with the introduction of Syriac Christianity around the third century A.D. Armenian ties with the Semitic world to the south were evidently ancient. Many Armenian terms having to do with trade (e.g., shuka, "market"; Syriac shuqa) are Semitic, as are later Christian terms (e.g., kahana, "priest"). Much of the vocabulary of Armenian comes from Parthian, testimony to the extent to which Armenia was permeated by the political and religious institutions of pre-Islamic Iran. And, as suggested, the oldest identifiable stratum of loan words comes from the Anatolian civilizations, both Hittite and Hurro-Urartean, with which the proto-Armenian colonists first came into contact.

To sum up, the evidence of language allows us to construct a tentative model of Armenian origins. Related Phrygian and Armenian populations in the middle of the second millennium B.C. crossed from southeastern Europe into Anatolia. The people whose descendants became the Armenians were the ones who moved the farthest eastward. The latter took their ethnic name from the Hattian people whose state they overran. They settled down, learning the words for some local fruits and other everyday items from the native Hurro-Urarteans. Other aspects of their culture had the common Mediterranean stamp. They interacted in trade with the Assyrians to the south; from the south, too, Christianity was to come to the country many centuries later. As the Iranian states of the Medes, then the Persians, on the east, became the dominant force in the region, Armenian language and culture acquired the additional riches of that civilization.

Just as ancient civilizations reflect through language a process of continuous cross-fertilization, so racial characteristics also become shared with the interaction of peoples in areas like the ancient Near East. Thus, when one speaks of the ancient Armenians, what is meant is a people identifying themselves as such, their main common denominator usually being the Armenian language. Racial characteristics cannot be paired with language, except in conditions of extreme physical and cultural isolation. The Armenians emerged from a complex process of cultural interaction, as the inheritors of a rich and ancient mixture of civilizations-and the same can be said of virtually all their neighbors.