Classical Armenian - Introduction 1/3
Channel: Victor Pfeiffer
Date: 2021-09-08

Classical Armenian also called Grabar, is the oldest attested form of Armenian. Written in a dedicated alphabet invented by the Christian monk Mesrop Maštoc', most early texts are translations from Greek or from Syriac (see introduction). Until the late 19th century Armenian was considered to be an Iranian dialect. It was only in 1879 that the German scholar Hübschmann was able to peel away the massive Iranian borrowings and to demonstrate that the language forms its own branch of Indo-European and is most closely related to Greek. Armenian has three sets of plosives (see sounds). Its morphology is partly fusional and partly agglutinative. The case system is rich, but gender is lost (see words). The language is SVO, albeit with a high degree of variation (see structures). 



external history of Armenian; periods: Old, Middle, Modern Armenian; sources and dates, Armenian alphabet and earlier writing