Armenian

[Gavur]

Quick Facts


Type Alphabetic
Family Proto-Canaanite
Location Armenia, West Asia
Time 5th century CE to Present

http://www.ancientscripts.com/armenian.html

The Armenian alphabet was created in the 5th century CE by Saint Mesrop under influences from Greek (as reflected in the alphabetical order and the left-to-right direction of writing). The alphabet's original 36 letters were well suited for the Old Armenian language. Two additional letters, "o" and "fe", were added later during the late Middle Ages to write loan words, bringing the total number of letters to 38.

The Old Armenian language was the only written form of the language from the 5th to the 19th century, while in the intervening centuries, phonological changes have split the Armenian language into two dialects, namely Eastern and Western. However, only the Eastern dialect is taught as the written form at school nowadays as it is closer to the historical Old Armenian form, even though the Western dialect is more widely spoken.

In the following chart, both the Eastern (EA) and Western (WA) phonetic values for each letter are given. The name of the letters are given in the Eastern dialect, but you can directly translate any name to its Western version by simply mapping all the Eastern phonetic values to their Western counterparts.

[Gavur]

Ancient Armenia gave faith an alphabet

By Rich Barlow | October 29, 2005

Boston Globe
Oct 29 2005

Few birthdays are cause for a global scholars' conference at Harvard,
but they're raising a metaphorical glass in Cambridge to toast the
Armenian alphabet. It's not just that at 1,600 years old the alphabet
makes Methuselah look like a youngster. These three dozen letters gave
a written language of faith to a pivotal country in Christian history.

Years before the Roman emperor Constantine's famous conversion, Armenia
was the first country to adopt Christianity as its state religion,
in the year 301. At the time, Armenian was a spoken tongue only,
meaning worshipers relied on translators during services to interpret
a Bible that was written in other languages.

"Bare oral translations," an Armenian theologian later wrote, "were
insufficient to satisfy the aspirations of the heart."

A fifth-century priest, Mesrob Mashtotz, sated those aspirations,
devising a 36-letter script (two more letters were added later) so the
Old and New Testaments could be rendered in Armenian. For Armenians
worldwide, including the Armenian Apostolic Church, religion and
language would become intertwined as the life supports keeping the
nation's culture and heritage alive outside the homeland, says James
R. Russell, Mesrob Mashtotz professor of Armenian studies at Harvard.

The two-day conference, which ends today, featured a speech last
night by one of two leaders of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Aram I,
who is on an American tour.

>>From the life spans of Biblical figures to the millenia-long survival
of Christianity itself, longevity is a leitmotif of religion, and
Mashtotz's alphabet is another case in point. His Armenian is phonetic,
and its spelling has survived with little change, making it "very easy
for an Armenian schoolchild to pick up a manuscript 1,000 years old
and read it," says Russell. (Armenian and Protestant clerics, however,
have undertaken a translation of the Bible into updated Armenian.)

The first words Mashtotz transcribed with his new alphabet were from
the introduction to the Book of Proverbs, "that men may appreciate
wisdom." The alphabet gave birth not just to an Armenian-language
Bible but to translations of other Christian texts and a voluminous
scholarship.

The effects spilled over beyond Armenia's border; for example,
Russell says that many works of Philo of Alexandria, the great Jewish
theologian of the Greco-Roman era, have come down to us only because
they survived in Armenian and subsequently were translated into Greek.

The language written by a holy man for religious purposes became
the very muscle of Armenian national identity. While Joseph Stalin
force-fed the Russian alphabet to several conquered peoples of the
Soviet Union, Armenian was one of the rare languages he left untouched,
says Russell. The dictator, "being from the Caucasus [where Armenia
is located], knew when to keep hands off," Russell argues. After a
brutal history that included Soviet domination and a genocide by the
Ottoman Empire (though modern Turkey disputes the use of that term to
describe the slaughter), millions of Armenians live abroad, including
about 1 million in the United States. Although Armenia gained freedom
after the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, political turmoil and
poverty have swollen the diaspora, with an estimated million Armenians
leaving the homeland since independence.

Aram I's extended tour -- he's visiting various American cities in
addition to the Boston area -- is in observance of two anniversaries,
the alphabet's and that of the Antelias Seminary, the 75-year-old
institution in Lebanon that has educated generations of Armenian
clergy. Aram lives in Antelias, where his branch of the church, the
house of Cilicia, is based. (A second branch under another catholicos,
or spiritual leader, operates out of Armenia.)

"Most of our candidates for the priesthood, wherever they're from,
usually go through that seminary," says the Rev. Antranig Baljian,
the pastor of St. Stephen's Armenian Apostolic Church in Watertown,
where Aram presided at a welcoming service this week. "I've done it;
my son's done it."

A key thrust of Aram's visit is to raise money to endow the seminary,
as well as raise its profile. "Even though that's a seminary where
many of our priests in America have attended," says Baljian, "our
people don't know about the seminary generally, the rank and file."

Aram is treading on familiar territory. St. Stephen's is part of the
Armenian church's Eastern Prelacy, which runs south to Florida and west
to Wisconsin. The prelacy has five Massachusetts parishes with about
2,000 member families, and St. Stephen's is the largest. This will
be the third visit by the catholicos to that parish in the last decade.

Says Baljian, "He always comes to Watertown."

[Gavur]

Armenia's Remarkable Alphabet

By Ken Gewertz

Harvard University Gazette, MA
Nov 3 2005

Saint's sturdy Armenian alphabet focus of meetings
Harvard News Office

In Yerevan, capital of Armenia, the manuscript library known as the
Matenadaran possesses an almost sacred status. Situated on a hill,
it is approached by a long cascade of white marble steps flanked
by statues of the great figures of Armenian literature. Chief among
these is St. Mesrops Mashtots, who gave Armenia its alphabet.

According to James Russell, the Mashtots Professor of Armenian
Studies at Harvard, the fifth-century saint gave Armenia much more
than an efficient system for rendering its language into written
form. By means of his invention, Mashtots gave Armenians a cultural
and religious identity as well as the means to survive as a people
despite the efforts of larger and more powerful neighbors to subsume
or destroy them.

Armenians pride themselves on being the first nation to adopt
Christianity, an event that is supposed to have occurred in the
early fourth century when St. Gregory the Illuminator succeeded in
converting Trdat, the king of Armenia. But according to Russell,
there is much evidence that after Trdat's death, the country was in
the process of reverting to paganism.

"Mashtots' principal purpose in inventing the alphabet was to
change Armenia's cultural orientation from the Iranian East to the
Mediterranean West," Russell said. "He gave Armenia the means and
the incentive to remain Christian."

Having an alphabet allowed Armenians not only to translate the Bible
into their own language but works of Christian theology, saints' lives,
history, and works of classical literature as well. It also allowed
them to develop scholarly institutions and a literature of their own.

"Within a century, Armenians had a library of classical and Christian
learning and were able to build their own literary tradition. As a
result, they became independent and almost self-sufficient, and they
became impervious to attempts by Rome to Hellenize them or attempts
by the Sassanian empire to re-impose Persian culture on them."

On Oct. 28 and 29, Harvard hosted an international conference to
consider the achievement of Mashtots, its historical background, and
its wider influence. Organized by Russell, the conference was sponsored
by the Armenian Prelacy of New York, the Davis Center for Russian
and Eurasian Studies, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages
and Civilizations at Harvard. It was held under the patronage of His
Holiness Aram I, Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia.

Fortunately for scholars, Mashtots is known in the historical record.

One of his disciples, named Koriun, wrote a biography of his mentor,
which records many details of his life as well as the process by which
he formulated his alphabet. The biography tells us that Mashtots came
from an aristocratic family, that he served in the royal court, and
that he was ordained a priest and founded several monasteries. With
the support of King Vramshapuh, and with the aid of a Greek scribe
named Ruphanos, he embarked on a project to develop an Armenian
writing system.

Mashtots studied various scripts as models, including Greek and
Syriac. He might also have given careful consideration to a version of
Aramaic script developed by the Parthian prophet Mani, promulgator of
the gnostic doctrine of Manichaeism. According to Koriun, Mashtots'
synthesis of all these elements came to him in a dream, resulting
in a 36-character alphabet. Two more characters were added during
the Middle Ages, bringing the number of letters in the present-day
Armenian alphabet to 38.

According to Russell, this synthesis reflects a deliberate effort on
Mashtots' part to borrow elements from Eastern scripts but reorient
them to give them a more Western character. All known alphabets are
derived ultimately from the letterforms of the Phoenicians, but Eastern
writing tends more toward the horizontal while Western alphabets
emphasize the vertical. Mashtots' preference for vertical elements
reflects his effort to reorient Armenia toward the Christian West.

More information about Mashtots' alphabet has been gleaned through
careful study of manuscripts. In recent years, computer analysis has
helped scholars to focus with greater precision on the formation and
evolution of letter shapes. One of the pioneers in this field, Michael
Stone, professor of Armenian at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was
the keynote speaker at the conference. Stone is the chief author of
the recently published "Album of Armenian Paleography," which uses
computer techniques to analyze the development of letters over time
and is a great help in accurately dating manuscripts.

Besides studying the letter shapes, scholars have also tried to
understand Mashtots' reasons for ordering the letters as he did.

Russell, who has studied this problem and delivered a paper on
the subject, believes that the order of the letters reflects his
familiarity with number symbolism of the sort found in a Hebrew text
called the "Sepher Yetsira," or "Book of Creation," thought to be an
early work in the kabbalistic tradition.

One measure of the alphabet's success is the fact that there have
been few changes in the letters or in the spelling of words since
Mashtots created it in the fifth century.

"This is a very striking circumstance," Russell said, "especially
when you compare it with English where spelling has changed a great
deal in just the last 500 years. It shows that the Armenian alphabet
was already so perfect that there was little reason for it to change."

Perhaps an even more convincing argument for the importance of
Mashtots' achievement is the survival of the Armenian people through
a long and often trying history.

"Mashtots' real achievement was to create a culture that became
a repository for both Eastern and Western traditions, that was
cosmopolitan, but had a strong anchor of its own. He made Armenia
a culture of the book, a 'bibliocracy,' and that has been their key
to survival, because you can carry a book into exile, but you can't
carry mountains and trees."

Photo: James Russell organized a conference to discuss the fifth
century Armenian alphabet invented by St. Mesrops Mashtots. Said
Russell, 'Mashtots' principal purpose in inventing the alphabet was
to change Armenia's cultural orientation from the Iranian East to
the Mediterranean West.' (Staff photo Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News
Office) http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/...-mashtots.html

[Gavur]

Ulan Fikirsiz Fikret,
Aklinin uzanamadigi yerlere
Bakiyorum gotun uzaniyor

Hey Thoughtless Toad,
I see your ass is trying to reach
places your mind can't reach

[Gavur]

Thank you mods
I like to say this to my other Turkish brothers
If your going to make a baseless hatefull attack
At least have the guts to make it in a civilized manner
in English.

[Gavur]

Transalated!


S.P.

[Reincarnated Am]

swearin a turk in turkish....what kind of a forum is it

You don't have to be here if you don't like it

[Gavur]

Missionary Tells Latest Condition In Adana Province

Christian Science Monitor (1908-Current file). Boston, Mass.: May 6, 1909. pg. 5, 1 pgs

Document types: article
Text Word Count 313
Document URL:

Abstract (Document Summary)
ADANA Asiatic Turkey, via Constantinople--The Rev. Stephen R. Irow bridge, a missionary of the American board of commissioners for foreign missions, estimates the number of Armenian victims in the province of Adana since the outbreak of the antichristian rioting at 23,000.

[Gavur]

Turk Troops Save American Missions From Hadjin Mobs

TURK TROOPS SAVE AMERICAN MISSIONS FROM HADJIN MOBS; General Cheftek Pasha, Turks' Military Genius, Is a Thin Arab of Bagdad
Christian Science Monitor Boston, Mass.: May 17, 1909. pg. 7, 1 pgs



Abstract (Document Summary)
LONDON--Turkish troops from Constantinople have at last relieved the Armenian defenders of Hadjin, according to a delayed message that reached here today. The despatch pays the highest tribute to the bravery and loyalty of the Armenians, who are credited not only with saving the American mission from the ravages of the Moslem mobs, but of practically protecting the entire town.

[Gavur]

Turks To Absolve Islam Rioters And Blame Armenians

Christian Science Monitor Boston, Mass.: May 21, 1909. pg. 4, 1 pgs



Abstract (Document Summary)
CONSTANTINOPLE--Messages today from the commission sent to Asia Minor to investigate the recent massacres there indicate clearly that the report will absolve the Mohammedans and place the blame for slaying nearly 40,000 Christians upon the Armenian population.