Reduplication in old Armenian and its functional implementations (experience of comparative diachronic analysis)

Abstract

The reduplication in the Indo-European languages has been studied quite thoroughly both in connection with the issues of the origin and development of the language, and with the issues of assessing their functional content. Regarding the latter, scientists are more inclined to believe that this is due to the reproduction of child’s or imperfect speech. The article examines the reduplicates in the Armenian language, which is central to the territory of settlement of the Indo-Europeans. Using the example of the translation of the Bible, the authors show that only in Armenian the reduplicates had a stylistic significance, fixed a high style. This conclusion is drawn on the basis of the fact that the synonyms of reduplicates in Armenian in the era of the Bible translation (V century AD) were used in folklore and historical works, that is, the translator used the reduplicates consciously, emphasizing the high importance of the Holy Scriptures. This is also indicated by comparisons of Armenian examples with reduplicates with corresponding examples from the original source and translations of the Bible into Latin, English, Old Bulgarian and German. This testifies to the fact that by the V century AD the Armenian language was not only finally formed, but also contained style awareness.