The Armenian alphabet ( or ) or, more broadly, the Armenian script, is an alphabetic writing system developed for Armenian and occasionally used to write other languages. It was developed around 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader. The script originally had 36 letters. Eventually, two more were adopted in the 13th century. In the reformed Armenian orthography (1920s), the ligature , is also treated as a letter, bringing the total number of letters to 39.
The Armenian word for 'alphabet' is , named after the first two letters of the Armenian alphabet: , and . Armenian is written horizontally, left to right.
History and development
Possible antecedents
One account of the existence of an Armenian alphabet before Mesrop Mashtots comes from the third century Roman theologian, Hippolytus of Rome (170–235), in his Chronicle, while writing about his contemporary, Emperor Severus Alexander (), mentions that the Armenians are amongst those nations who have their own distinct alphabet.
Philostratus the Athenian, a sophist of the second and third centuries, wrote:
According to the fifth-century Armenian historian Movses Khorenatsi, Bardesanes of Edessa (AD 154–222), who founded the Gnostic current of the Bardaisanites, went to the Armenian castle of Ani and there read the work of a pre-Christian Armenian priest named Voghyump, written in the script of the Armenian temples, named after Mihr, the Armenian national god of light, truth, and the sun. In Voghyump's work, amongst other histories, an episode was noted of the Armenian King Tigranes VII (who reigned from 144 to 161, and again from AD 164–186) erecting a monument on the tomb of his brother, the Mithraic High Priest of the Kingdom of Greater Armenia, Mazhan. Movses of Khoren notes that Bardesanes translated this Armenian book into Syriac (Aramaic), and later also into Greek. Another important evidence for the existence of a pre-Mashtotsian alphabet is the fact that the pantheon of the ancient Armenians included Tir, who was the patron god of writing and science.
A 13th-century Armenian historian, Vardan Areveltsi, in his History, notes "that an Armenian script existed of old is attested" during the reign of King Leo the Magnificent (), after coins naming idolatrous kings were found stamped with the script.
The evidence that the Armenian scholars of the Middle Ages knew about the existence of a pre-Mashtotsian alphabet can also be found in other medieval works, including the first book composed in the Mashtotsian alphabet by the pupil of Mashtots, Koriwn, in the first half of the fifth century. Koriwn notes that Mashtots was told of the existence of ancient Armenian letters which he was initially trying to integrate into his own alphabet.
Creation by Mashtots
The Armenian alphabet was introduced by Mesrop Mashtots and Isaac of Armenia (Sahak Partev) in CE 405. Medieval Armenian sources also claim that Mashtots invented the Georgian and Caucasian Albanian alphabets around the same time. However, most scholars link the creation of the Georgian script to the process of Christianization of Iberia, a core Georgian kingdom of Kartli. The alphabet was therefore most probably created between the conversion of Iberia under Mirian III (326 or 337) and the Bir el Qutt inscriptions of 430, contemporaneously with the Armenian alphabet. Traditionally, the following phrase translated from Solomon's Book of Proverbs is said to be the first sentence to be written down in Armenian by Mashtots:
Various scripts have been credited with being the prototype for the Armenian alphabet. Pahlavi was the priestly script in Armenia before the introduction of Christianity, and Syriac, along with Greek, was one of the alphabets of Christian scripture. Armenian shows some similarities to both. However, the general consensus is that Armenian is modeled after the Greek alphabet, supplemented with letters from a different source or sources for Armenian sounds not found in Greek. This is suggested by the Greek order of the Armenian alphabet; the ow ligature for the vowel , as in Greek; the similarity of the letter in shape and sound value to Cyrillic Ии and (Modern) Greek Ηη; and the shapes of letters which "seem derived from a variety of cursive Greek", including Greek/Armenian pairs /, /, and /. It has been speculated by some scholars in African studies, following Dimitri Olderogge, that the Ge'ez script had an influence on certain letter shapes, but this has not been supported by any experts in Armenian studies.
There are four principal calligraphic hands of the script. , or 'ironclad letters', seen as Mesrop's original, was used in manuscripts from the 5th to 13th century and is still preferred for epigraphic inscriptions. , or 'cursive', was invented in the 10th century and became popular in the 13th. It has been the standard printed form since the 16th century. , or 'minuscule', invented initially for speed, was extensively used in the Armenian diaspora in the 16th to 18th centuries, and later became popular in printing. , or 'slanted writing', is now the most common form.
The earliest known example of the script's usage was a dedicatory inscription over the west door of the church of Saint Sarkis in Tekor. Based on the known individuals mentioned in the inscription, it has been dated to the 480s. The earliest known surviving example of usage outside of Armenia is a mid-6th century mosaic inscription in the chapel of St Polyeuctos in Jerusalem. A papyrus discovered in 1892 at Fayyum and containing Greek words written in Armenian script has been dated on historical grounds to after the creation of the script, i.e. after 400, and on paleographic grounds between the 5th and 7th centuries. It is now in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. The earliest surviving manuscripts written in Armenian using Armenian script date from the 9th–10th century.
Later development
Certain shifts in the language were at first not reflected in the orthography. The digraph (au) followed by a consonant used to be pronounced [au] (as in luau) in Classical Armenian, but due to a sound shift it came to be pronounced , and has since the 13th century been written (ō). For example, classical (, , 'day') became pronounced , and is now written (). (One word has kept aw, now pronounced : () 'pigeon', and there are a few proper names still having aw before a consonant: Tauros, Faustos, etc.) For this reason, today there are native Armenian words beginning with the letter (ō) although this letter was taken from the Greek alphabet to write foreign words beginning with o .
The number and order of the letters have changed over time. In the Middle Ages, two new letters ( , ) were introduced in order to better represent foreign sounds; this increased the number of letters from 36 to 38. From 1922 to 1924, Soviet Armenia adopted a reformed spelling of the Armenian language. The reform changed the digraph and the ligature into two new letters, but it generally did not change the pronunciation of individual letters (see the footnotes of the chart). Those outside of the (former) Soviet sphere, including all Western Armenians as well as Eastern Armenians in Iran, have rejected the reformed spellings and continue to use the traditional Armenian orthography. They criticize some aspects of the reforms and allege political motives behind them.
Alphabet
Forms Name Letter Numericalvalue Classical Reformed Pronunciation Pronunciation Transliteration Classical Eastern Western Classical Eastern Western Classical ISO 9985Ա • ա 1Բ • բ 2Գ • գ 3Դ • դ 4Ե • ե , word-initially 5Զ • զ 6Է • է 7Ը • ը 8Թ • թ 9Ժ • ժ 10Ի • ի 20Լ • լ 30Խ • խ 40Ծ • ծ 50Կ • կ 60Հ • հ 70Ձ • ձ 80Ղ • ղ 90Ճ • ճ 100Մ • մ 200Յ • յ , 300Ն • ն 400Շ • շ 500Ո • ո , word-initially 600Չ • չ 700Պ • պ 800Ջ • ջ 900Ռ • ռ 1000Ս • ս 2000Վ • վ 3000Տ • տ 4000Ր • ր r 5000Ց • ց 6000Ւ • ւ , , — 7000Ու • ու — — — — — -Փ • փ 8000Ք • ք 9000Օ • օ — — -Ֆ • ֆ — — -և — , — — , word-initially -
Listen to the pronunciation of the letters in or in .
Notes: Primarily used in classical orthography; after the reform used word-initially and in some compound words. Except in 'who' and 'those (people)' in Eastern Armenian. Iranian Armenians (who speak a subbranch of Eastern Armenian) pronounce the sound represented by this letter with a retracted tongue body : post-alveolar rather than alveolar. In classical orthography, and are considered a digraph ( + ) and a ligature ( + ), respectively. In reformed orthography, they are separate letters of the alphabet: is the 37th letter of the alphabet, and is the 34th letter, taking the place of . In reformed orthography, the letter appears only as a component of . In classical orthography, the letter usually represents , except in the digraph . The spelling reform in Soviet Armenia replaced with the trigraph . Except in the present tense of 'to be': 'I am', 'you are (sing.)', 'we are', 'you are (pl.)', 'they are'. The letter is generally used only at the start or end of a word, and so the sound is typically unwritten between consonants. One exception is (Western Armenian indefinite article, when followed by a word beginning with a vowel), e.g., 'one more time'. The ligature has no majuscule form; when capitalized it is written as two letters (classical) or (reformed). By the time this lowercase was included (Armenian alphabet reform of 1922–24 in the Soviet Union) in the alphabet, counting was conducted with Arabic numbers. Numbers over 9999 were achieved by putting a line over smaller letters-numerals
Handwritten forms In handwriting, the upper- and lower-case letters look more similar than they do in print, and the stroke order is more apparent.
Ligatures Ancient Armenian manuscripts used many ligatures. a commonly used ligature is (composed of and ). Armenian print typefaces also include many ligatures. In the new orthography, the character is no longer a typographical ligature, but a distinct letter, placed in the new alphabetic sequence, before "o".
Punctuation
Armenian punctuation marks outside a word « »The are used as ordinary quotation marks. They are placed like French guillemets, just above the baseline (preferably vertically centered in the middle of the x-height of Armenian lowercase letters). They can be angled or rounded. The computer-induced use of English-style single or double quotes (vertical, diagonal or curly forms, placed above the baseline near the M-height of uppercase or tall lowercase letters and at the same level as accents) is strongly discouraged in Armenian as they look too much like otherunrelatedArmenian punctuation marks. ,The is used as a comma, and placed as in English. ՝The (which looks like a comma-shaped reversed apostrophe) is used as a short stop, and placed in the same manner as the semicolon to indicate a pause that is longer than that of a comma, but shorter than that of a colon; in many texts it is replaced by the single opening single quote (a 6-shaped, or mirrored 9-shaped, or descending-wedge-shaped elevated comma), or by a spacing grave accent. ․The (whose single dot on the baseline looks like a Latin full stop) is used like an ordinary colon, mainly to separate two closely related (but still independent) clauses, or when a long list of items follows. ։The (whose vertically stacked two dots look like a Latin colon) is used as the ordinary full stop, and placed at the end of the sentence (many texts in Armenian replace the by the Latin colon as the difference is almost invisible at low resolution for normal texts, but the difference may be visible in headings and titles as the dots are often thicker to match the same optical weight as vertical strokes of letters, the dots filling the common x-height of Armenian letters).
The following Armenian punctuation marks are placed above and slightly to the right of the vowel whose tone is modified in order to reflect intonation: