AI Series with Dr. Hrach Martirosyan Celebrating 20 Years of Linguistic & Literary Heritage at the Armenian Institute.
Please email nik@armenianinstitute.org.uk if you are planning to attend in person.
Attendance of each ‘AI Studio’ seminar is £10 (£6 for concessions), or £25 (£15 for concessions) to book on all three.
Join Us Here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84114800985
***
At present, Armenian is spoken in the Republic of Armenia (ca. 3 million people) and the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh Republic / Mountainous Gharabagh), as well as in Russia, USA, France, Italy, Georgia, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Argentina, Turkey, Ukraine, and many other countries. The total number of Armenians in the world is roughly estimated as 7-11 million. Historically, Armenian was spoken on a vast territory that basically included the Armenian Highlands (the Armenian plateau) and some adjacent areas of it. Historical Armenia (known as Hayk‘ and Hayastan, based on hay ‘Armenian’) was centred around Mount Ararat (Masis), Lake Van and the Araxes (Erasx) Valley.
The Armenian language is known to us from the fifth century CE onwards thanks to an unbroken literary tradition comprising three periods: Classical (5th to 11th centuries), Middle (12th to 16th), and Modern (17th to present).
Furthermore, one usually distinguishes around fifty or sixty modern Armenian dialects, a number of which have died out. Classical Armenian is named Grabar, literally: ‘written (language), book (language) / Schriftsprache’. The fifth century is regarded as the golden age of Armenian literature. The Armenian alphabet was invented by Mesrop Maštocʻ and consists of 36 original letters.
The aim of this series is to elucidate the highlights of the history of the Armenian language and culture from Indo-European up to the modern period, and the significance of literary and dialectal linguistic data for the reconstruction of Old Armenian culture.
There are three seminars in this AI Studio series:
• AI Studio, Seminar 1: ‘The Historical Development of the Armenian Language’. This seminar includes: the relationship with Indo-European languages of the Near East: Anatolian (Hittito-Luwian) and Iranian. & the relationship with non-Indo-European languages of the Near East: Hattic, Caucasian, Semitic, Hurrian, and Urartian. The seminar will last 2hrs, Saturday 23rd October, 11am UK time.
• AI Studio, Seminar 2: ‘Classical & Middle Armenian’. This seminar will discuss the beginnings of written Armenian, or Grabar, and the development of the language across antiquity and the Middle Ages. The seminar will last 2hrs, Saturday 23rd October, 2pm UK time.
• AI Studio, Seminar 3: ‘Armenian Dialects’. This seminar will explore the various dialects of the Armenian language and their value for the reconstruction of Old Armenian language and culture, with particular emphasis on the dialects of Hamshen and Artsakh. The seminar will last 2hrs, Sunday 24th October, 6pm UK time.
***
Hrach Martirosyan is currently Lecturer in Eastern Armenian in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. After receiving his MA in Philology from Vanadzor Pedagogical Institute, he pursued graduate studies under the supervision of Prof. Sargis Harutyunyan at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Armenian Academy of Sciences in Yerevan. His dissertation “Etymological Dictionary of the Armenian Inherited Lexicon” forthcoming from Brill (c. 1000 pp.) forms part of the larger project to compile an Indo-European Etymological Dictionary. Thereafter, he moved to Leiden University as a Guest Lecturer in the field of Classical Armenian from an Indo-European perspective (2011-2015). Subsequently, he held a postdoc at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna (2015- 2017), investigating Armenian personal names of Iranian origin under the supervision of Velizar Sadovski in the framework of an Iranian Prosopographical Dictionary. Most recently, he returned to his position at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics to continue etymological research on native Armenian vocabulary.
Dr. Martirosyan carries out an online course on the History of the Armenian language at his website “Hayerenagitut‘yan akademia (Հայերենագիտության ակադեմիա).” More information about his work is also up on his Facebook page. Since 2008 he has also been working on a project “HayaSSA: Hiking Summer School of Armenology.”