Eastern Armenian Research Articles

Intermediary Translations of Children’s Literature in Armenian Periodicals of the 19th Century

This article is dedicated to the study of intermediary translations of children’s literature into Eastern Armenian in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Juvenile Periodicals such as Aghbyur and Hasker were prominent publications during the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century and featured a wide range of literary works, including translations of foreign literature. This study is focused on the translations of English literature, however, other languages are also considered. These periodicals, along with others, were important sources of literature and education for Armenian children. They contributed to the development of Armenian children’s literature, fostered a love for reading, and played a vital role in preserving Armenian cultural identity. Additionally, Armenian authors and educators adapted and retold European children’s stories to make them more accessible and relatable to Armenian audiences. This practice allowed for the cultural exchange of ideas and the incorporation of foreign literature into the Armenian literary landscape.

Հայերը «50»-ի պրոցեսում / The Armenians in the «process of 50»

The Russian revolutionary populist movement left a huge mark on the history of the socio-political life of the Russian Empire in the 70-80s of the 19th century. This movement spread not only in the metropolis but also in the national outskirts of the empire including the Eastern Armenian reality. Representatives of the Armenian intellectuals and youth took an active part in this movement spreading the ideas of revolutionary populism among the Armenian community. The tsarist government persecuted the participants in this movement in the early 70s of the 19th century. One of the high-profile cases against populism was the “Trial of 50” over members of the “All-Russian Social Revolutionary Organization”. Armenian members of the organization Stepan Kardashian and Ekaterina Tumanova were also convicted in this case. Through their activities, they contributed to the spread of the ideology of revolutionary populism in Transcaucasia and in Armenian reality.

Borrowings in Middle Armenian (Persian Borrowings, Continuation)

Key words: middle Armenian-Persian borrowings, semantic groups of words, modern literary Armenian, Lori dialect, transliterated phonetic changes of vowels and consonants, word formation, lexicalization, derivation Persian borrowings are considerably large in number in Middle Armenian, but few words are used in the modern Eastern Armenian literary language. There are incomparably many words preserved in Lori dialect. They refer to almost all spheres of social life: colors, plants, flowers, bushes, trees, fauna, medicine, names of body parts, mental conditions, statuses, religion, worship, spirituality, precious metals, stones, ores, household, accessories, profession, occupation, money, monetary unit, fee, time, closed-class parts of speech, non-identified dialectical words. Persian borrowings passed to Middle Armenian with various phonetic changes of vowels and consonants. They are simple root, complex, derived words. These compositions were sometimes made using word formation techniques specific to Armenian, in which sometimes the Persian compounds were observed. The same applies to derivation: there are both Armenian and Persian words composed of suffixes.

On One Important Peculiarity of the Imperative Singular in the Dialect of Ararat

Morphological rules of forming the Imperative in the dialect of Ararat mainly correspond to those applied in the colloquial speech of Literary Modern Eastern Armenian. Nonetheless, some subdialects have an important peculiarity – an ա vowel-final rather than ի vowel-final form in the Imperative singular of transitive simple verbs of the the է (< Old Arm. ե and ի) conjugation - which, to our knowledge, so far has not been explained properly from either a diachronic or synchronic perspective. It is argued that the form in question has been created through analogy with the Imperative singular of three high-frequency transitive verbs (namely, ասել, Imp. sg. ասա՛, ածել, Imp. sg. ածա՛, անել, Imp. sg. արա՛)․ Therefore, it is no accident that only transitive simple verbs of the է conjugation usually show the ending ա in the Imperative singular, whereas intransitive ones in the same conjugation class have regularly preserved the standard ending ի, the latter, in its turn, dating back to the Old Arm. ending իր, or, possibly, the stem-final diphthong եա՛ via the intermediate stage of է (that is, եա՛> է > ի)․ Later the ending ա of the Imperative singular has also been extended analogically from transitive simple verbs of the է conjugation to causative verbs in some subdialects (most regularly in the subdialect of Vaɫaršapat (Ēǰmiacin), where this has become a productive morphological rule that admits of no exceptions).

Armenian (Yerevan Eastern Armenian and Beirut Western Armenian)

Armenian (or , /hɑjeˈɾen/, ISO 639-1 hy) comprises an independent branch of the Indo-European language family.1 Its earliest attested ancestor is Classical Armenian in the fifth century CE (see Godel 1975; Thomson 1989; DeLisi 2015; Macak 2016). Modern Armenian is classified into two dialect families: Eastern Armenian (ISO 639-3 hye) and Western Armenian (ISO 639-3 hyw). Eastern Armenian is spoken in modern-day Armenia, and large speaker communities also exist in Georgia, Russia and Iran (shown in Figure 1). Western Armenian was historically spoken in the Ottoman Empire, but now includes varieties spoken throughout the Armenian diaspora in the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas (Donabédian 2018). There are substantial Western Armenian speaker communities in Turkey (Istanbul), Lebanon (Beirut), Syria (Aleppo, Damascus), California (Fresno, Los Angeles County), France (Marseilles), Australia (Sydney) and Argentina (Buenos Aires). There are also recent diaspora communities of Eastern Armenian speakers in California (Karapetian 2014), as well as communities of Western Armenian speakers in Armenia who escaped the Armenian genocide during World War I, who repatriated after World War II, or who fled the ongoing Syrian civil war. UNESCO lists Western Armenian as an endangered language in Turkey, and there are significant language promotion efforts in many diaspora communities that are intended to combat declining use by speaker generations born in the Americas and Europe (Al-Bataineh 2015; Chahinian & Bakalian 2016).

THE SEMANTIC-ARTISTIC VALUE OF THE VERBAL PREDICATE IN THE POEM “ABU-LALA-MAHARI” BY AV. ISSAHAKIAN

The article is devoted to revealing the content-stylistic value of the subjunctive in the language of Avetik Isahakyan's poem "Abu-Lala Mahar", the evaluation of the peculiarities of the expression of the verbal subjunctive. The problem of the article is the subjunctive mood, its verbal manifestation and role in revealing the ideas of the poem, the thoughts of the lyrical hero. Addressing this issue is due not only to the need to reveal the role of the subjunctive in artistic speech, but also to the fact that despite its role as the sum of the linguistic realities of literary Eastern Armenian, the language of the poem has not been subjected to comprehensive and comprehensive examination. Due to the tendency to fill that gap in a private way, we have chosen methods by applying complex examination, analysis and comparison methods. We have analyzed the discussed linguistic reality in the language of the poem, referred to all its features, observing all the manifestations characteristic of Isahakyan's language thinking at the lexical, morphological and syntactic levels. We have found out the substantive, stylistic-aesthetic values arising from the part-of-speech meaning of the verb, which are particularly specific to the language of the poem and reveal the unprecedented quality of the language of the poem and are closely related to the reality of the period and the thoughts of the lyricist

Validation of an Eastern Armenian breast cancer health belief survey.

With the fourth highest breast cancer mortality rate in the world, breast cancer prevention and early detection is a priority for Armenia. The Ministry of Health recently initiated efforts to expand access to breast cancer screening. However, little is known about the population's understanding and perception of breast cancer screening programs. This cross-sectional telephone-based study sought to develop and validate an Eastern Armenian language version of the Champion's Health Belief Model Scale (CHBMS) for future use. The English-language CHBMS survey was first rigorously translated by two Armenian nationals and evaluated for face validity. Telephone surveys were then administered to randomly-selected women of approximately screening age (35-65 years) with no prior history of breast cancer living in Armenia's capital between 2019-2020 (n = 103). The translated survey's psychometric properties were evaluated, examining (1) content equivalence, (2) test-retest reliability and (3) internal consistency. Content equivalence and test-retest reliability of the Armenian CHBMS were characterized using correlational analysis with Pearson's coefficient ranging from 0.76-0.97 (p<0.001) and 0.72-0.97 (p<0.001), respectively, for all five CHBMS domains. The translated survey's internal consistency was comparable to the original English-language CHBMS with a Cronbach's alpha greater than 0.7 for all five domains (0.75-0.94 (p<0.001). The translated Eastern Armenian version of CHBMS is a valid, internally-consistent, and reliable research tool that is ready for imminent use among screening-age women to investigate breast cancer perceptions and beliefs as the Armenian government seeks to expand screening access.

OLD ARMENIAN DENOMINATIONS OF RITUAL CLOTHING AS A SOURCE OF ENRICHMENT OF MODERN ARMENIAN VOCABULARY

The aim of the present article is the examination of Armenian ritual terms, in particular, the words characterising church clothing. To this aim, we have considered it necessary to distinguish between the names of church clothes, to indicate the sources of the origin of the root words, to provide original examples for the considered words in order to reveal their semantic peculiarities. Various studies devoted to religious and other term-systems, well-known explanatory and professional dictionaries and various literary and bibliographic sources have served as material for this research. We have found it expedient to interpret each word expressing ritual clothing from the semantic point of view, which has become the basis for, on the one hand, the division of these church terms, and on the other hand, for evaluating them as such, from both synchronic and diachronic points of view, thereby, valuing the most important role of Grabar in the Modern Eastern Armenian language in terms of vocabulary enrichment as well as term system formation and replenishment. The terminology system of any field is not separate from the general vocabulary, but is a subsystem of it, a set of specific terms. Of course, the religious and ecclesiastical word layer of the Armenian vocabulary is mainly traditional, many words and terms belonging to that layer are from the pre-written period, dating back to the fifth century, however, in the course of historical development, various semantic changes have taken place here as well. The ritual terms presented by us - the names of the outfit - are part of the terminological system of Armenian, therefore, they have significance for Armenian terminology, and the study of the mentioned field also has a certain scientific value

On the persistence of SVO: the case of Modern Eastern Armenian

AbstractThis study addresses the issue of unmarked word order in Modern Eastern Armenian (MEA), typologically considered a flexible (S)OV language due to its being strongly left-branching as well as the syntactic properties of its VP (focus, bare objects, low adverbs). However, Armenian grammars generally consider (S)VO to be the canonical order. We have conducted a corpus study and two sentence production experiments to tackle this controversy. These studies show that the placement of direct objects (DOs) is mainly triggered by definiteness. While definite DOs are overwhelmingly postverbal, indefinite DOs display a strong preference for preverbal placement. This implies a “typological discrepancy”: although MEA is a strongly left-branching language, the unmarked placement of definite DOs is postverbal. We account for this “discrepancy” based on areal, historical and cognitive factors. Contact with OV languages has resulted in a consistent shift from right to left-branching in Armenian, whereas word order at the clausal level has resisted the shift because MEA makes optimal use of each order in accordance with their cognitive advantages. The evolution of word order in MEA is an illustration of the universal crosslinguistic bias toward SVO.

Fluctuations in allomorphy domains: Applying Stump 2010 to Armenian ordinal numerals

Numerals and ordinals occupy a special place in the typology of suppletion. In generative work, one basic cross-linguistic parameter is whether ordinal allomorphy displays internal vs. external marking. Internal marking is when irregular forms propagate from lower ordinals to higher ones (English ‘first’$ \to $‘twenty-first’), whereas external marking is the lack of propagation. We catalog ordinal formation in Armenian dialects through both formal-generative and functional-typological perspectives. We find that Eastern Armenian and Early Western Armenian are uniformly external-marking systems for the ordinals of ‘1–4’. However, Modern Western Armenian is a mixed system: ‘1’ displays external-marking while ‘2–4’ display internal-marking. Simultaneously, the ordinal of ‘1’ uses a suppletive portmanteau, while the ordinals of ‘2–4’ use agglutinative allomorphs. We formalize these differences in a derivational approach to morphology (Distributed Morphology). We argue that mixed systems arise from allomorphy rules that are sensitive to either constituency or linearity. The Western mixed system seems typologically rare and novel. Given our formal analysis, we then uncover other asymmetries in the propagation of irregular ordinals and the retention of portmanteau morphology across 35 Armenian varieties. The end result is a strong functional correlation between suppletion, external marking, and lower numerals.

St. Grigor Narekats‘i’s Use of Extra-Canonical Writings: Two Examples

St. Grigor Narekats‘i’s Use of Extra-Canonical Writings: Two Examples1 Senior Archimandrite Shahe Ananyan (bio) Translated from Eastern Armenian by Roberta R. Ervine -I- The Repentance of Solomon and St. Grigor Narekats‘i One might well say that the study of Narek’s Book of Prayers is one of Armenology’s most rewarding fields. Theologians, philologists, philosophers, linguists and, more recently, medical psychologists, have taken note of St. Grigor Narekats‘i’s work, and continue to do so. However, despite the existence of so many studies, there remains much to be done with regard to ferreting out the sources used in the Book of Prayers. The present article is devoted to an examination of one such source, which by virtue of both its form and its content may be considered both theoretically and theologically fundamental to the central theme of Narek’s work: repentance. [End Page 89] The work referred to is the apocryphal writing, From the Commentary on the Paralipomena, Concerning the Repentance of Solomon. Its influence, as well as traces of direct citation, are noticeable in Narek’s Ban 48. Michael E. Stone, who published the critical text of this apocryphal work, already noted that the expression From the Commentary refers to a commentary pseudepigraphically attributed to Ephrem the Syrian. It is an expansion on an episode in the Book of Chronicles; in the published text, the pseudonymous commentary follows after two narratives of Solomon’s repentance.2 According to one apocryphal writing concerning the penitence of Solomon, the story of the king’s repentance was related in two different versions. The Armenian texts to the following variants and excerpts are found in Stone, Appendix I. 3 Variant 1 Variant 2 But Solomon made himself many wives, seven hundred . . . and he openly fornicated opposite the Temple and in front of his enemies. But it happened that he had free time in his room; he pondered in his mind, remembering the injunction of his father David, “Walk you,” said he, “in the ways of the Lord and in the law of Moses his servant.” When he remembered this injunction of his father and the hour of David’s death, he wept from the depths of his heart, till he watered his room and his bed in the winter palace of his kingdom. And as a limit of repentance, he set for himself that the door of his room would open of itself, without anyone opening it. According to another [source], thus: But Solomon, becoming saddened over these many transgressions, hopelessly called his chamberlain and ordered him to burn the multitude of his writings, which he had spoken through the grace of the Spirit, and he carried out the order. Then Solomon asked, “What did you see?” And he said, “An uncontainable light rose up to heaven together with the fire.” And for that he wept from the depths of his heart. [End Page 90] Commentary on these episodes is drawn from three excerpts of the Commentary on the Paralipomena: Excerpt 1 Excerpt 2 The blessed Ephrem says thus: that Solomon the Wise, after his sins and his distancing himself from God because of the deceptions of his wives, was sitting one day in his winter palace, in the house of his father David, and he recalled his injunction at the time of his death, and he went into his room and wept before the Lord with great weeping. And he set for himself a limit, to weep until the door of the room should open without a hand. Others say [until] it should close, but to open is more fitting, as a sign of the opening of the door of God’s mercy, as also took place. For the door of the room opened of itself. And when he was rejected from the help of God, he ordered his chamberlain to burn his writings, which were through the knowledge of the Spirit: three thousand proverbs, from the cedars of Lebanon to the hyssop that goes up the wall, and the birds and beasts and reptiles. However, taking part of them, he hid them, which later the friends of Hezekiah wrote [down]. And when Solomon asked concerning...

Comparative Analysis of Hidden Markov Model and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory for POS Tagging in Eastern Armenian

This scientific article introduces a novel POS tagging system specifically developed for the Eastern Armenian language. The primary objective of the study is to conduct a comparative analysis of two well-established methods for part-of-speech (POS) tagging: the hidden Markov model (HMM) coupled with the Viterbi algorithm, and an artificial neural network in the form of a recurrent neural network. The study places particular emphasis on the Eastern Armenian language and employs the ArmSpeech-POS Eastern Armenian part-of-speech tagged corpus for conducting comprehensive experiments and evaluations. POS tagging is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP) that involves assigning grammatical tags to words in a given text. Accurate POS tagging is crucial for various NLP applications, including machine translation, information retrieval, and sentiment analysis. The Viterbi algorithm is a well-established probabilistic method that utilizes a hidden Markov model (HMM) to determine the most likely sequence of POS tags. On the other hand, RNNs, a type of deep learning model, can capture complex patterns and dependencies in sequential data. Experimental results indicate that both methods achieve reasonable accuracy in POS tagging for Eastern Armenian. However, the RNN outperforms the Viterbi algorithm, exhibiting higher accuracy rates. This can be attributed to the RNN’s ability to capture long-range dependencies and learn intricate linguistic patterns. The article concludes by discussing the implications of the study’s findings and potential areas for further research. It emphasizes the significance of accurate POS tagging for improving NLP applications in Eastern Armenian and suggests exploring advanced neural network architectures and incorporating linguistic features to enhance POS tagging performance.

ArmSpeech-POS: Eastern Armenian Part-of-Speech Tagged Corpus

Text chunking, Part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and named entity recognition (NER) are fundamental tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Part-of-speech (POS) tagging involves assigning grammatical labels to words in a sentence. Research shows that Armenian is a low-resourced language and there are not enough materials for developing higher accurate part-of-speech tagging systems in the Armenian language. This paper presents a fresh dataset for POS tagging in Armenian that follows the naming conventions of both Penn Treebank and Universal Dependencies tagsets, with two versions available. The dataset consists of 6081 sentences that were automatically annotated and then manually verified. The data was sourced from Armenian news websites, focusing on topics such as culture, medicine, and lifestyle, as well as 22 Armenian fairytales. The reason for having two versions of the POS tagset was to ensure compatibility and integration with all-natural language processing tools and models that use these standards. By standardizing the tagset, it becomes easier to compare and evaluate the effectiveness of different POS tagging models. The paper also describes data collection, cleaning, preprocessing, and processing steps. The ISMA translator was used for the annotation of the dataset, which not only performs machine translation but also conducts a syntactic and semantic analysis of the text and assigns a POS tag for each word in the sentence. The final corpus contains 13 groups of part-of-speech tags and a total of 57160 tagged tokens including the distinction between singular and plural parts of speech.

Амиан Марцелин и западноарменският консонантизъм

If not the most essential, but at least the most noticeable difference between the two forms of the modern Armenian language – the Eastern and the Western – is the difference in the pronunciation of a large part of the consonants. In initial position and within the word, the voiceless consonants of Eastern Armenian language have voiced pronunciation in Western Armenian and the voiced consonants of the Eastern Armenian, especially the explosive ones, have voiceless pronunciation in Western Armenian. The devoicing has been already found in Old Armenian texts from the 10th – 11th centuries, but a similar case has been discovered much earlier – in the 7th century, in a text of the so-called ‘Anonymous interpreter’ (Armenian: Անանուն մեկնիչ), a commentator of ‘The Art of Grammar’ of Dionysius Thrax (170 – 90 BC), whose work had been translated into Old Armenian in the 5th century AD. In the commentaries of the Anonymous Interpreter there is an alternating use of the forms bazuk ~ pazuk ~ p'azuk (‘hand, arm’), which suggests that the devoicing of the explosive consonants in the Armenian language was a very old phenomenon. An even earlier and neglected example of devoicing of the explosive consonants in the Old Armenian language (Grabar) could be found in the Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus, a Latin speaking author who worked in the second half of the 4th century. Writing about the events of 368 – 369 AD, Ammianus mentions an Armenian eunuch named Cylaces, which name was a Greco-Latin form of the Syriac-Armenian personal name Glak, but in its Western Armenian pronunciation, Klak. This example not only lowers the timeline of this typical Western Armenian phonetic phenomenon by as much as three centuries, but also supports the existing hypothesis that the devoicing of the explosive consonants in the Armenian language already existed in the preliterate period, that is, before 405 AD.

Translations of English Children’s Literature in the Armenian Periodicals in India

Translations had a significant role both in the popularization of Eastern Armenian and the establishment of literary and cultural ties between the Armenian community and the British. The purpose was to further the international outlook, understanding and emotional experience of foreign environments and cultures, on the one hand, next was to make more literature available to children and to contribute to the development of the readers’ set of values. &#x0D; It should be noted that literary relations first of all contributed to the emergence of bilingual dictionaries. Shmavonian published an English-Armenian dictionary which was intended “for the entertainment of studious children” (Mkhitaryan 2016:81).&#x0D; 19th century was marked by social political changes and created conditions for the development of new Armenian literature which was so important for shaping the mind set and behavior of the Armenian children. Thus, Armenian translators translated literature in connection with social and economic forces.&#x0D; The Armenian printing business in India operated for a century and published almost 200 books, booklets and more than ten periodicals. In this article some translations published in Azdarar (The Intelligencer, 1794, Madras), Azgaser (the Patriot, 1845, Calcutta), Azgaser Araratian (Patriot Araratian, 1848. Calcutta), and Hayeli Kalkatian (Mirror of Calcutta, 1820, Calcutta) are examined.

About /on/ the relationship between the formation of new words in western Armenian

New formations /new words / have a special role in vocabulary enrichment. The study of neologisms has always been the subject of linguists' attention. The material of the study was the words taken out from the Western Armenian press /Hayrenik, Nor Yaraj, Horizon/ published in 2018-2021, which are not fixed in the dictionaries. In the majority of Western Armenian complex (complicated) words, the main semantic center is the last component. The latter expresses such a meaning that is concretized by the first component. Moreover, the superior component can be nominal or verbal. In the case when the root of the verb acts as a root, it is manifested mainly by the root of the verb and the root of the adverbial modifier. It should be noted that in the case of the stem root, it is more rarely compared to being in the compound root, because the verb rarely becomes a compliment to other parts of speech. As we have seen, among the independent verbs of the Western Armenian (including Eastern Armenian) the indefinite, subjective compounds (complex and derivational words) also participate in word formation without change, preserving not only infinitives but also the verbal word-forming suffix-endings (-el, -al, -ogh) , (ing), (to do, doing). The study of the material allows us to conclude that the verb base, as a stemming base, participates less in word formation than as a compound base. Indefinite and subjunctive verb bases are more often found in the role of seed bases, sometimes preserving verb endings as well.

Ալեքսանդրապոլ-Կարս երկաթգծի շինարարության բանվորների սոցիալական վիճակը

The development of capitalist relations in the last quarter of the 19th century introduced significant changes in the social structure of Eastern Armenians. The disintegration and stratification of the peasantry created favorable conditions for the formation of a new productive force - the working class. The construction of the railway, which started in the region in the 90s of the XIX century, also played a big role in it. The so-called "construction of the century" created favorable conditions for the formation of the largest and most influential group of Eastern Armenian workers. Combining the archival documents and periodical press reports of the time allows us to assume that up to 10,000 people worked on the construction of the Tiflis-Alexandrapol-Kars railway. Despite their outnumbering, the railway workers lived and worked in the most challenging social conditions. Absolute disenfranchisement, low pay, the arbitrariness of employers, lack of social guarantees, and safety rules created favorable conditions for the activation of social movements. The mass demonstrations, sometimes spontaneous, yet more often organized, began in December 1896 and continued until World War I, keeping the authorities in a constant state of tension.

Non-syntactic factors and accessibility to relativization: evidence from Armenian

Abstract Data presented by Sakayan (Sakayan, Dora. 1993. On Armenian relative participles and their access to AH (Accessibility Hierarchy). In André Crochetière, Jean-Claude Boulanger and Conrad Ouellon (eds.), Proceedings of the XVth International Congress of Linguists, Université Laval, 1992, vol. 2, 361–364. Sainte-Foy, Québec: Université Laval Press) show that Modern Eastern Armenian appears to violate the Relativization Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan, Edward and Bernard Comrie. 1977. Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8. 63–99), as participial relative clauses may be used to relativize certain oblique and genitive elements, but apparently not indirect objects. Stimuli were constructed to elicit relative clauses on all positions in the hierarchy to investigate whether participial relativization violates the hierarchy and shed light on the factors affecting relativization accessibility phenomena. Two different manifestations of the Accessibility Hierarchy (AH) were investigated: the distribution of participial relative clauses (RCs), and ‘non-target’ responses, in which the relativized element is expressed with a grammatical relation other than that which is targeted by the stimulus. The results show that the hierarchies for these two manifestations are significantly different. If the AH effects were a mechanical reflex of syntactic structure, we would not expect to find these differences. In fact, it appears that different factors are dominant in each case, notably role-reference association for non-target responses, and role prominence in terms of topicality and affectedness for participial relativization. The fact that participles are not normally used for indirect object (IO), while they may be used for some obliques and genitives, makes sense when the AH effects are analyzed as the combined operation of a number of factors, rather than a mechanical reflex of syntactic structure, and indeed, in colloquial language, participles may be used for IO under some circumstances, for example when it is the undisputed primary topic. Thus there is good evidence that non-syntactic factors are key to the operation of the AH in its various manifestations, and can account for this supposed violation.

The Forms of the Indefinite Article in Eastern Armenian Pre-Modern, Early and Colloquial Eastern Armenian Sources

This paper studies the formal distinction of the indefinite article from the quantifier ‘one’ in Early and pre-Modern Armenian texts by three 18‑19th century authors as well as in a colloquial Modern Eastern Armenian dialogue. The key question is whether these sources use the same forms for both functions. The paper gives typological, diachronic, and areal perspectives to the analysis of non-standard data rarely included in discussions of the historical grammar of Armenian. It also touches upon some general issues of grammaticalization of the forms of ‘one’ as an indefinite article and the use of numeral classifiers in colloquial Eastern Armenian.

Հանգիտությունը Գրիգոր Նարեկացու «Մատեան ողբերգութեան» երկի աշխարհաբար թարգմանություններում

The sonority of the Book of Lamentation by Grigor Narekatsi was promoted by the consistent repetition of the same or similar sounds, i.e. consonance. In the Book of Lamentation the author used both forms of consonance: alliteration (repetition of consonants) and assonance (repetition of vowels), as well as their new and more complex forms, as concatenated consonance, alternation of the same or similar sounds of neighboring words. Since sound repetitions played an important role in Narekatsi’s work, it was necessary to represent them in the translations either. The present article studies the phenomena of consonance in the poetic translations of the Book of Lamentation into modern Eastern Armenian by Mkrtich Kheranyan and Vazgen Gevorkyan. In the translation by Mkrtich Kheranyan, the forms of consonance are basically identical, except for those parts where the repetition of letters coincides with the repetition of the endings, or the repeating elements are replaced with close or similar sounds. However, Vazgen Gevorkyan sometimes renounces the original form, since it does not allow to convey poetic sounding to the translation and keep the poetic metre. Hence, constraints of choosing words with different sound combinations.