Death of Fréderic Macler (July 12, 1938)

Armenian Studies flourished in the West long before they did among Armenians. France was one of the main hubs, with the Armenian chair of the École des Langues Orientales (School of Oriental Languages) as the main center of activities. Fréderic Macler was one of the prolific names of French Armenology during the first third of the past century.

Macler was born on May 16, 1869, at Montdoré, in the department of Haut-Saône. He studied with Auguste Carriere, the holder of the chair at the École from 1881-1902, and learned Armenian, Syriac, and Hebrew with him. In 1895 he published his first article of Armenological interest, “Apocryphal Armenian Apocalypses of Daniel.”

This indefatigable scholar would go to write almost a hundred articles in French about issues of Armenian history, geography, folklore, music, architecture, and painting, and a string of books (Armenian Miniatures, 1913; The Music in Armenia, 1917; Oriental Mosaic, 1917; Armenian Secular Decorative Art, 1924; Armenia and Crimea, 1930, among many others). His interest in Armenian issues was not simply attached to the past. He wrote works like Around Cilicia (1916) and The Armenian Nation: Its Past, Its Disgraces (1924), among others, where he expressed his deep sympathy to the Armenian plight and did not hesitate to express his solidarity in many opportunities, condemning the criminal actions of the Ottoman government.

Macler succeeded the great linguist Antoine Meillet at the chair of Armenian in 1911. He was one of the co-founders of the Société des études arméniennes in 1919, together with a group of scholars (Victor Berard, Charles Diehl, André-Ferdinand Herold, H. Lacroix, Meillet, Gabriel Millet, and Gustave Schlumberger). The following year he created one of the most important journals in the Armenian Studies field, the Revue des études arméniennes, which he co-directed with Meillet until its demise in 1933. Three decades later, in 1964, the journal was revived and continues its publication to this day.

As an avid scholar of things Armenian, Macler made many research trips throughout Europe (Holland, Spain, Italy, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Romania, Bulgaria) and the Middle East (Constantinople, Syria), and frequently published the results in books and articles. For instance, he visited Armenia during four months in 1909 and published his findings in the book Report on a Scientific Mission in Russian Armenia and Turkish Armenia (1911). He also compiled catalogs of Armenian manuscripts found in the libraries he had visited, including a catalog of Armenian manuscripts preserved at the National Library of France (1908). He translated the first part—whose author is actually unknown—of the History of Heraclius by Sebeos, an author of the seventh century (1905), and the Universal History of Stepanos Taronatsi (Asoghik), a historian of the tenth century (1917). He translated and compiled collections of Armenian modern literature (1905), popular tales (1915 and 1928), mythological accounts (1929), and a chrestomathy of modern language.

Macler retired from his chair in 1937 and was succeeded by Georges Dumezil, the famous Indo-Europeanist. Macler passed away on July 12, 1938, in Montbeliard (Doubs).

Birth of Antoine Meillet (November 11, 1866)

Antoine Meillet was one of the most influential French linguists of the early twentieth century. He made important contributions to Armenian Studies, particularly in the linguistic field, but also was well acquainted with other areas of Armenian culture.

Meillet was born in Moulins on November 11, 1866. He studied at the Sorbonne from 1885-1889, where he was a disciple of Ferdinand de Saussure, the pioneer of semiotics, and Michel Breal. He was appointed professor of comparative linguistics of Indo-European languages at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes until 1931. One of his students was Hrachia Adjarian, the foremost name of Armenian linguistics in the twentieth century. He completed his doctoral dissertation in 1897. In 1905 he was elected to the Collège de France, where he taught comparative and general linguistics until his death. He was the mentor of a generation of linguists and philologists, among them names related to Armenian Studies like Émile Benveniste and Georges Dumézil.

His approach, quite novel for his time, took into account historical grammar, philological evidence, and facts of cultural history such as language contacts and sociolinguistic influences. He covered nearly all branches of the Indo-European family in his enormous output of about two dozen books, more than 500 articles, and many book reviews. In 1903 he published his most important work, Introduction à l’étude comparative des langues indo-européennes (Introduction to the Comparative Study of the Indo-European Languages), which explained the relationships of Indo-European languages to one another and to the parent Indo-European tongue.

Meillet became engaged in learning the Armenian language and in elucidating its origin from the beginning of his studies. He studied Modern Armenian with Auguste Carrière, then the holder of the Armenian chair at the Ecole des Langues Vivantes (now the Institute Nationale des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, INALCO). He went to Vienna and studied Classical Armenian at the Mekhitarist Congregation from 1890-1891. As member of a research group in the Caucasus, in 1891 he visited Armenia and researched the manuscripts at the library of the monastery of Holy Etchmiadzin. He went back in 1903, while he was the holder of the Armenian chair (1902-1905). He was well acquainted with the ancient literary tradition of Armenian, as well as with its philological aspects. He dealt with textual problems of Armenian manuscripts, not least with the problems of the spelling in several ancient manuscripts of the Armenian Gospels and with the study of particular passages in works of Armenian authors.

In a great number of articles, Meillet treated various problems of Armenian etymology and historical phonology and morphology. The fact that he is still considered one of the founders of comparative studies of the Armenian language is primarily the result of his pioneering work on Armenian syntax, which had been more or less ignored by all Armenian linguists before him. The result of all his studies was distilled in two monographs: his authoritative Esquisse de la grammaire comparée de l’arménien classique (Outline of a Comparative Grammar of Classical Armenian, 1902), a fundamental historical phonology and morphology of the language, and a short introductory description of Armenian in his Altarmenisches Elementarbuch (Elementary Course of Old Armenian, 1913), with some emphasis on syntax. Meillet also devoted several minor studies to the influence of Iranian on Armenian vocabulary.

An engaged scholar and citizen, Meillet raised his voice in 1903-1905 against the confiscation of the properties of the Armenian Church in the Russian Empire and in 1915-1918, in the years of the Armenian Genocide. In 1919 he founded the Society of Armenian Studies with Frederic Macler and others, and was instrumental in the launching of the oldest Armenian Studies journal in Western languages, the Revue des études arméniennes, in 1920. A year later, he founded the Revue des études slaves.

Meillet’s scholarly merits were acknowledged with the French Legion of Honor. He was appointed member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1924 and elected as member of more than a dozen foreign academies of sciences. He received honorary doctorates from the universities of Berlin, Padua, Dublin, Oxford, and Brussels.

The great French linguist passed away on September 21, 1936, in Châteaumeillant, France.