Armenian (endonym: , , ) is the sole member of an independent branch in the Indo-European language family. It is the native language of the Armenian people and the official language of Armenia. Historically spoken in the Armenian highlands, today Armenian is also widely spoken throughout the Armenian diaspora. Armenian is written in its own writing system, the Armenian alphabet, introduced in 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots. The estimated number of Armenian speakers worldwide is between five and seven million.
History
Classification and origins
Armenian is an independent branch of the Indo-European languages. It is of interest to linguists because of its distinctive phonological changes within the Indo-European family. Armenian exhibits more satemization than centumization, although it is not classified as belonging to either of these subgroups.
Some linguists have proposed that Armenian, Greek (and Phrygian), Albanian, and the Indo-Iranian languages were dialectally close to one another. Within this hypothetical dialect continuum, Proto-Armenian has been situated between Proto-Greek, traditionally classified as a centum language, and Proto-Indo-Iranian, traditionally classified as a satem language. The relationship between Armenian and Greek has been the subject of particular attention. Armenian and Greek share phonological, morphological, and lexical features, although scholars differ over whether these similarities reflect a common Graeco-Armenian subgroup, prolonged contact, or a combination of shared inheritance and areal influence. Using computational methods adapted from evolutionary biology, Donald Ringe and Tandy Warnow proposed a phylogenetic model in which Pre-Armenian and Pre-Greek formed a closely related subgroup after 2500 BC. David W. Anthony has likewise suggested that Pre-Armenian may have begun to diverge by approximately 2800 BC.
Recent archaeogenetic research has contributed to discussions of Armenian prehistory. Steppe-related ancestry appeared in the South Caucasus during the Middle Bronze Age, coinciding with the emergence of the Trialeti-Vanadzor culture, and has been linked to a western Yamnaya-related source also found in contemporaneous Aegean populations. Several scholars have associated the Trialeti-Vanadzor culture with Indo-European populations, and some recent studies have proposed it as an early Proto-Armenian cultural horizon.John A. C. Greppin and I. M. Diakonoff, "Some Effects of the Hurro-Urartian People and Their Languages upon the Earliest Armenians", Journal of the American Oriental Society 111, no. 4 (1991), p. 721. These findings have also been interpreted as supporting the Graeco-Armenian hypothesis and the emergence of Proto-Armenian in the Armenian Highlands during the Bronze Age. Ronald I. Kim has noted unique morphological developments connecting Armenian to the Balto-Slavic languages.
The Armenian language has a long literary history, with a 5th-century Bible translation as its oldest surviving text. Another text translated into Armenian early on, and also in the 5th-century, was the Armenian Alexander Romance. The vocabulary of the language has historically been influenced by Western Middle Iranian languages, particularly Parthian; its derivational morphology and syntax were also affected by language contact with Parthian, but to a lesser extent. Contact with Greek, Persian, and Syriac also resulted in a number of loanwords. There are two standardized modern literary forms, Eastern Armenian (spoken mainly in Armenia) and Western Armenian (spoken originally mainly in modern-day Turkey and, since the Armenian genocide, mostly in the diaspora). The differences between them are considerable but they are mutually intelligible after significant exposure. Some subdialects, such as Homshetsi, are not mutually intelligible with other varieties.
Although Armenians were known to history much earlier (for example, they were mentioned in the 6th-century BC Behistun Inscription and in Xenophon's 4th century BC history, The Anabasis), the oldest surviving Armenian-language writing is etched in stone on Armenian temples and is called Mehenagir. The Armenian alphabet was created by Mesrop Mashtots in 405, at which time it had 36 letters. He is also credited by some with the creation of the Georgian alphabet and the Caucasian Albanian alphabet.
While Armenian constitutes the sole member of the Armenian branch of the Indo-European family, Aram Kossian has suggested that the hypothetical Mushki language may have been a (now extinct) Armenic language.
Early contacts
W. M. Austin (1942) concluded that there was early contact between Armenian and Anatolian languages, based on what he considered common archaisms, such as the lack of a feminine gender and the absence of inherited long vowels. Unlike shared innovations (or synapomorphies), the common retention of archaisms (or symplesiomorphy) is not considered conclusive evidence of a period of common isolated development. There are words used in Armenian that are generally believed to have been borrowed from Anatolian languages, particularly from Luwian, although some researchers have identified possible Hittite loanwords as well. One notable loanword from Anatolian is Armenian xalam, "skull", cognate to Hittite ḫalanta, "head".
In 1985, the Soviet linguist Igor M. Diakonoff noted the presence in Classical Armenian of what he calls a "Caucasian substratum" identified by earlier scholars, consisting of loans from the Kartvelian and Northeast Caucasian languages. Noting that Hurro-Urartian-speaking peoples inhabited the Armenian homeland in the second millennium BC, Diakonoff identifies in Armenian a Hurro-Urartian substratum of social, cultural, and animal and plant terms such as ałaxin "slave girl" ( ← Hurr. al(l)a(e)ḫḫenne), cov "sea" ( ← Urart. ṣûǝ "(inland) sea"), ułt "camel" ( ← Hurr. uḷtu), and xnjor "apple (tree)" ( ← Hurr. ḫinzuri). Some of the terms he gives admittedly have an Akkadian or Sumerian provenance, but he suggests they were borrowed through Hurrian or Urartian. Given that these borrowings do not undergo sound changes characteristic of the development of Armenian from Proto-Indo-European, he dates their borrowing to a time before the written record but after the Proto-Armenian language stage.
Contemporary linguists, such as Hrach Martirosyan, have rejected many of the Hurro-Urartian and Northeast Caucasian origins for these words and instead suggest native Armenian etymologies, leaving the possibility that these words may have been loaned into Hurro-Urartian and Caucasian languages from Armenian, and not vice versa. A notable example is arciv, meaning "eagle", believed to have been the origin of Urartian Arṣibi and Northeast Caucasian arzu. This word is derived from Proto-Indo-European *h₂r̥ǵipyós, with cognates in Sanskrit (ऋजिप्य, ṛjipyá), Avestan (ərəzifiia), and Greek (αἰγίπιος, aigípios). Hrach Martirosyan and Armen Petrosyan propose additional borrowed words of Armenian origin loaned into Urartian and vice versa, including grammatical words and parts of speech, such as Urartian eue ("and"), attested in the earliest Urartian texts and likely a loan from Armenian (compare to Armenian , ultimately from Proto-Indo-European ). Other loans from Armenian into Urartian includes personal names, toponyms, and names of deities. More recent scholarship is even more sceptical, suggesting that fewer than 10 Armenian words are of assuredly Hurro-Urartian origin, and that no secure loans can be established in the other direction.
Further evidence for early contacts involving Armenian comes from the distribution of Indo-European horse terminology and related Wanderwörter. Rasmus G. Bjørn argues that descendants of Proto-Indo-European *h₁eḱwos spread with Armenian across the Caucasus into Southwest Asia in the late 3rd millennium BC, contributing to a widespread Wanderwort attested in early literary languages from Hurrian through Sumerian and Egyptian. He associates this linguistic distribution with the Bronze Age expansion of horses from the Western Steppe Zone, noting that the dated genetic signal for this expansion coincides with the proposed spread of Armenian into the Caucasus. Bjørn further argues that loanwords from a likely early Armenian source preserve evidence for an earlier meaning of Armenian ēš, later attested with the meaning "donkey", and interprets this as a semantic shift from "horse" to "equid". He relates this development to the spread of Armenian into the Hurrian-speaking area in the late 3rd millennium BC and the subsequent introduction of new horse populations associated with Mitanni Aryan speakers in the early 2nd millennium BC. The alternative Sumerian designation for the horse, which can be translated as "donkey of the mountains", is likewise interpreted as evidence for a montane route of entry into Southwest Asia.
Loan words from Iranian languages, along with the other ancient accounts such as that of Xenophon above, initially led some linguists to erroneously classify Armenian as an Iranian language. Scholars such as Paul de Lagarde and F. Müller believed that the similarities between the two languages meant that Armenian belonged to the Iranian language family. The distinctness of Armenian was recognized when philologist Heinrich Hübschmann (1875) used the comparative method to distinguish two layers of Iranian words from the older Armenian vocabulary. He showed that Armenian often had two morphemes for one concept, that the non-Iranian components yielded a consistent Proto-Indo-European pattern distinct from Iranian, and that the inflectional morphology was different from that of Iranian languages.
Graeco-Armenian hypothesis
The hypothesis that Greek is Armenian's closest living relative originates with Holger Pedersen (1924), who noted that the number of Greek-Armenian lexical cognates is greater than that of agreements between Armenian and any other Indo-European language. Antoine Meillet (1925, 1927) further investigated morphological and phonological agreement and postulated that the parent languages of Greek and Armenian were dialects in immediate geographical proximity during the Proto-Indo-European period. Meillet's hypothesis became popular in the wake of his book Esquisse d'une histoire de la langue latine (1936). Georg Renatus Solta (1960) does not go as far as postulating a Proto-Graeco-Armenian stage, but he concludes that considering both the lexicon and morphology, Greek is clearly the dialect to be most closely related to Armenian. Eric P. Hamp (1976, 91) supports the Graeco-Armenian thesis and even anticipates a time "when we should speak of Helleno-Armenian" (meaning the postulate of a Graeco-Armenian proto-language). Armenian shares the augment and a negator derived from the set phrase in the Proto-Indo-European language ("never anything" or "always nothing"), the representation of word-initial laryngeals by prothetic vowels, and other phonological and morphological peculiarities with Greek. Nevertheless, as Fortson (2004) comments, "by the time we reach our earliest Armenian records in the 5th century AD, the evidence of any such early kinship has been reduced to a few tantalizing pieces".
Greco-Armeno-Aryan hypothesis
Graeco-(Armeno)-Aryan is a hypothetical clade within the Indo-European family, ancestral to the Greek language, the Armenian language, and the Indo-Iranian languages. Graeco-Aryan unity would have become divided into Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian by the mid-3rd millennium BC. Conceivably, Proto-Armenian would have been located between Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian, consistent with the fact that Armenian shares certain features only with Indo-Iranian (the satem change) but others only with Greek (s > h).