Birth of Serovpe Dervishian  (January 10, 1846)

Very Rev. Fr. Serovpe Dervishian, a forgotten name today, was a pioneer of Armenian linguistics in the nineteenth century, at a time when Armenian had barely found its place as a branch of the Indo-European languages and professional linguists were pretty scarce in Armenian scholarship.

There is not much information about Dervishian’s life. He was born in Constantinople on January 10, 1846, and sent to the Mekhitarist monastery in Vienna, where he received his education and joined the order in 1864 as he took his vows of celibacy. Two years later, he was anointed vartabed.

He first published several books on moral and religious issues, such as The Life of the Saints (1870) in Armeno-Turkish and the translation into Classical Armenian of the Apologies of Justin Martyr (1872). Meanwhile, he also tried his hand at a dramatic piece in Modern Armenian, The Widow Mother and the Only Son (1871).

 

However, Dervishian soon left his literary endeavors to turn to his actual love: languages. At the monastery, he was an avid student of Armenian, classic (Greek and Latin), and modern (German and French) languages. Afterwards, he continued his education at the University of Vienna, where he studied the old languages of Iran (Pahlavi) and India (Sanskrit). Besides them, he was familiar with Ottoman Turkish and Old Persian.

He published his first linguistic work in German, The Old Armenian Ք, in 1877. This book, which was the first in a series of linguistic studies entitled Armeniaca, included an examination of the Armenian letter ք (an aspirated k, as in Քրիստոս/Krisdos “Christ”), the etymology of all words containing this letter, and the transformation this letter underwent in those words in comparison with other languages.

In the 1880s Dervishian moved to Constantinople, where in 1883 he published a series of articles on the Armenian numerals in the journal Yergrakunt, published by writer Yeghia Demirjibashian, examining in detail the origin of Armenian numerical nouns, from “one” to “ten thousand.” Two years later, he published his masterpiece in Armenian, The Indo-European Protolanguage. Here he summarized the most important achievements of Indo-European studies, explained away the issues related to the Indo-European mother language, and referred to the ancient Indo-European civilization and the issue of the localization of its homeland, as well as the history of Indo-European linguistics. In 1887 Dervishian founded the first Armenian linguistics journal, appropriately called Lezoo (“Language”), which he filled from cover to cover, publishing fifteen articles with his signature, and lasted a year. He contributed to the newly founded journal of the Viennese Mekhitarists, Handes Amsorya, where he published a lengthy study on the cuneiforms inscriptions of Persepolis (Iran) in 1888-1889. He still published a few more articles in Armenian newspapers of Constantinople and in Handes Amsorya before his untimely death on January 1, 1892, at the age of forty-six.



Dervishian did not produce a fundamental study that explained a scholarly problem, but mostly minor articles. However, he provided the accurate etymology for a number of Armenian words, and he practically introduced Indo-European studies to the Armenian public. The great linguist Hrachia Ajarian wrote in 1913 that “a concise, portable, accessible, and simple book such as The Indo-European Protolanguage, which summarizes the whole erudition of Indo-European linguistics within it, did not exist then not only in our, but even in all of European literature.” He added that, in his own case, “Dervishian’s book has made a great impression on me; there I took my first steps, there I received my first knowledge of linguistics. Therefore, I do not hesitate to call Dervishian my first teacher.”

Death of Gevork Jahukian (July 6, 2005)

Gevork Jahukian, together with others of his generation, continued the tradition of Armenian linguistics started by Hrachia Ajarian and made important contributions to many aspects of the study of the Armenian language.
He was born on April 1, 1920 in the village of Shahnazar, district of Kalinino (nowadays it is the village of Metzavan in the district of Tashir). After finishing high school in Yerevan in 1937, he entered Yerevan State University and graduated in 1941. Then, like many young people in Armenia, he was drafted into the Soviet army and served in World War II from 1942-1943.

After returning from the war, he entered his alma mater and taught at the Faculty of Romano-Germanic Philology for sixty years. He was a senior lecturer from 1945-1949, head of the chair of Foreign Languages (1948-1957) and of Romano-Germanic philology (1957-1970), and professor of the chair of General Linguistics (1970 onwards). From 1948-1957 he also taught at the Institute of Russian and Foreign Languages (today renamed Yerevan State Linguistic University) “Valery Briusov.” He taught Classical and Modern Armenian, Latin, history of linguistics, comparative grammar, general linguistics, and other subjects.

He defended his first doctorate in 1947 and his second doctorate in 1955. In 1958 he received the title of professor. Shortly after earning his first doctorate, he entered the Institute of Linguistics “Hrachia Ajarian” of the Academy of Sciences. He was a senior researcher from 1949-1950 and 1959-1962, and in 1962 he became director of the institute until his death. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in 1968 and full member in 1974. He received the title of emeritus worker in 1965.

Jahukian was the author of more than twenty books and close to a hundred scholarly articles. He became the most well-known authority in Armenian linguistics, particularly in the field of comparative grammar and history of the Armenian language, from the late 1950s onwards. He authored many articles and a series of remarkable monographs, such as The System of Declension in Old Armenian and Its Origin (in Armenian, 1959), Essays on the History of the Pre-Literal Period of the Armenian Language (in Russian, 1967), Comparative Grammar of the Armenian Language (in Russian, 1982), and his most important work, History of the Armenian Language: Pre-Literal Period (in Armenian, 1987), for which he earned the State Prize of Armenia in 1988. He researched the relations of the Armenian language with many old and early Indo-European and non-Indo-European language, and made important contributions to the etymology of many Armenian words. His Armenian Etymological Dictionary, posthumously published in 2010, became a continuation and an update of the classical multi-volume work of Ajarian.

He also dealt with issues of Armenian dialects and Modern Armenian, and of general linguistics. Some of his most important works are History of Linguistics (1960-1962), History of Linguistics (1960-1962), Introduction to Armenian Dialectology (1972), Principles of the Theory of Contemporary Armenian (1974), among others. His works in general linguistics led him to formulate the idea of an universal theory of language, first published in Russian (1999) and then in English (Universal Theory of Language, 2003). 

Jahukian passed away on July 6, 2005, in Yerevan. 

Death of Rafael Ishkhanyan (February 6, 1995)

Rafael Ishkhanyan was a prominent expert of Armenian language and book history, and also an engaged intellectual in Soviet times and the first years of the second independence.

He was born on March 9, 1922, in Yerevan. His parents, Avetis Kirakosian and Haykanush Ishkhanyan, who had become Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1919, then divorced. Rafael lost his mother at the age of eight, and grew up with his maternal uncle and grandmother, adopting their last name. In 1937 he lost his father, who was shot during the Stalin purges. (He would later marry Burakn Cheraz-Andreasyan, whose parents, Vahan Cheraz, a founder of the Armenian scout movement, and Vartanush were also shot by the Soviet regime in 1928 and 1937.)

 

In 1939 Rafael Ishkhanyan entered the Faculty of Philology in Yerevan State University. However, he interrupted his studies in 1940 when he was drafted by the Soviet army. He was wounded in World War II, fell prisoner to the German army, and after being released, he returned to the battle front. After the end of the war, he was discharged and returned to his studies. After finishing university in 1949, he left for Moscow, where he also graduated from the Institute of Library Studies in 1954.

From 1955-1963, Ishkhanyan worked in the field of library studies. He entered the Public (now National) Library where he worked as a senior librarian, head of subdivision, and head of division, and also worked at the Matenadaran as director of the scientific library. He also taught at the distance course of the Pedagogical Institute of Armenia. In 1962 he defended his first Ph.D. dissertation about Axel Bakunts (1899-1937), one of the prominent writers killed during the purges. The following year, he entered his alma mater, where he would spend the next thirty years (1963-1992) teaching at the chairs of Armenian language and history of the Armenian language. His main subjects were Armenian contemporary language, dialectology, and history of the language of Armenian literature. He would defend his second Ph.D., “History of the language of modern Armenian literature,” in 1973, and earn the title of professor in 1978. In the late 1970s, Ishkhanyan published some of his major works, Bakunts’ Life and Art (1974), History of the Armenian book (vol. 1) (1977), History of the language of Eastern Armenian poetry (1978), and The New Literary Armenian in the Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries (1979).

From the 1960s, two controversial subjects attracted Ishkhanyan’s attention, who published his views whenever possible: the origin of the Armenian people, which he considered autochthonous to the Armenian Plateau, and the restoration of traditional orthography (in replacement of the “reformed” orthography imposed in 1922 and 1940). He would ardently defend his views until the end of his life. Not by chance, his first books published on the subject appeared in the Diaspora, because the views expressed did not make it possible to publish in Soviet Armenia: Our Fundamental Orthographic Question (1983) and The Origin and Earliest History of the Armenians (1984).

When the Karabagh movement started in 1988, Ishkhanyan was also at the forefront of the national issues that were attached to the claims for Karabagh, and particularly the status of the Armenian language in Armenia. He also wrote extensively about political issues, including Armenian-Turkish relations ( The Law of Excluding the Third Force, 1991). He became the editor of “Lousavorich,” a newspaper entirely published in traditional orthography. Two books on his views on Armenian origins were finally published in 1988 ( Questions on the Origin and Earliest History of the Armenian People ) and 1989 ( Armenian Native Words and Earliest Loanwords ). In the 1980s he had serialized a history of the Armenian people for children and teenagers, Armenian Illustrated History, of which the first volume appeared in 1990 (two more volumes would be posthumously published in 1997 and 2004). He published a total of forty books in his life and countless articles.

In 1991 Ishkhanyan was elected a deputy to the Supreme Council (the forerunner to the National Assembly) of Armenia and designated director of the National Library of Armenia. He passed away on February 6, 1995, in Yerevan. The school No. 153 of the Armenian capital now bears his name.

Birth of Stepan Malkhasiants (November 7, 1857)

During the first half of the twentieth century, it might be said that the field of Armenian Studies was built upon a quartet of pillars in the fields of philology and history: Stepan Malkhasiants (1857-1947), Manuk Abeghian (1865-1944), Nicholas Adontz (1871-1942), and Hakob Manandian (1873-1952).

Stepan Malkhasiants was born on November 7, 1857, in Akhaltskha (Javakhk, now in Georgia). After finishing the Armenian parochial school and the Russian provincial school of the town, in 1874 he entered the newly opened Kevorkian Lyceum of Vagharshapat, which depended on the Holy See of Etchmiadzin. Upon graduation in 1878, he pursued higher education at the Faculty of Oriental Studies of the Imperial University of St. Petersburg. He graduated in 1889 with a doctorate in Philology, specialized in Armenian, Sanskrit, and Georgian. In 1885, still a university student, he published a critical edition of tenth century Armenian historian Asoghik’s Universal History. Two years later, he published his translation of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, directly from the English. In 1892 he would publish a translation of Macbeth .

From 1890-1910 Malkhasiants worked as a teacher at the Nersisian School of Tiflis, where he also was principal from 1903-1906. Meantime, he married Satenik Benklian. During those two decades, he published important studies about the Armenian language and orthography, as well as ancient literature, such as The History of Sebeos and Movses Khorenatsi (1893) and Study of the History of Pavstos Buzand (1896). He also published, in collaboration, a critical edition of Ghazar Parpetsi’s History of the Armenians (1904). He was an active contributor to the Armenian press in the Caucasus, particularly the journal Ararat of Holy Etchmiadzin and the daily Mshak of Tiflis.

Malkhasiants continued his educational work in Tiflis during the 1910s, when he was principal of the Hovnanian girls’ school (1910-1914). Then he accepted an offer as principal of the Kevorkian Lyceum in Vagharshapat (1914-1915), but when the lyceum was closed in 1917, he returned to Tiflis and became principal of the Gayanian School.

In 1917 Malkhasiants was one of the founders of the Armenian Popular Party, which in 1921 would become one of the founding parties of the Armenian Democratic Liberal (Ramgavar Azadagan ) Party. He moved to Armenia in 1919, and taught for a year at the primer university opened in Alexandropol (nowadays Gyumri). His report to the National Council (Parliament) of Armenia became the basis for the adoption of the tricolor flag of the Republic of Armenia (1918-1920), which would be re-established after 1991. He had the honor of presenting the opening lecture at Yerevan State University on February 1, 1920.

Malkhasiants continued his scholarly activities during Soviet times. In the last decade of his life, he published an impressive number of studies: the Russian translation of Sebeos’ History of Heraclius (1939), a critical edition of the medical treatise of Amirdovlat Amasiatsi (1420-1496), the Modern Armenian translation of Movses Khorenatsi’s History of Armenia, and a monograph, On the Enigma of Khorenatsi, all in 1940, and the Modern Armenian translation of Pavstos Buzand’s History of Armenia (1947). In 1940 he received a title of doctor honoris causa, and in 1943 he was elected member of the founding body of the Armenian Academy of Sciences.

Malkhasiants’ name, however, has become synonymous with his monumental Armenian Explanatory Dictionary (1944-1945), a four-volume work of 2380 pages in three columns, which he compiled between 1921 and 1943. This dictionary was unprecedented in the history of Armenian lexicography, as it included the lexicon of Classical, Middle, and Modern Armenian, old and new loanwords, and many dialectal terms, with a total of 120,000 entries. It gave the grammatical definition of each word, synonyms and antonyms, and examples for most terms. The dictionary became a fundamental source for all dictionaries of the Armenian language and bilingual dictionaries published afterwards in Armenian and abroad. It won the State Prize of the Soviet Union (called Stalin Prize at the time) in 1946, and it was reprinted three times (Beirut, 1956; Teheran, 1982; Yerevan, 2008). An interesting feature is that it was printed in classical orthography upon Malkhasiants’ insistence. The prolific scholar passed away on July 21, 1947, at the age of ninety. 

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.

Birth of Hrachia Adjarian - March 8, 1876

In times when “social mobility” was not a fashionable concept yet, the son of a shoemaker could become the foremost expert of the Armenian language as per European standards. Hrachia Adjarian, born in the Samatya neighborhood of Constantinople and blind in his left eye since the age of one, would be a legend in his lifetime and afterwards.

In 1883, Adjarian, then seven, started his primary studies at the grammar school of Samatya, where he studied Armenian, Turkish, and French, and finished the entire school course in two years. He then attended the Sahagian School and graduated with honors in 1890. Three years later, he would graduate from the Getronagan School of Constantinople. He taught for a year in Kadiköy and then for another year at the Sanasarian Lyceum of Karin (Erzerum). After writing the first draft of his future Armenian Etymological Dictionary, in 1895 he went to Europe and studied with two eminent linguists of the time, who were also experts in the Armenian language: Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne of Paris and Heinrich Hubschmann at the University of Strasbourg. He graduated in 1898 from the Sorbonne. A year before, at the age of 21, he was elected member of the prestigious Société de Linguistique de Paris.

Adjarian returned from Europe in 1898 to start his career as a teacher at the Gevorgian Seminary of Etchmiadzin, and then taught in Shushi (Gharabagh), Nor Bayazet (nowadays Gavar), Nakhichevan-on-Don (Nor Nakhichevan), Tehran, and Tabriz until 1923. He met his first wife, Arusiak, in Shushi. Meanwhile, he published studies of various Armenian dialects, catalogs of Armenian manuscripts and many other articles and also books. In the period until 1915, his most important works were Classification of dialectes arméniennes (1909), Armenian Dialectology (1911) and Armenian Provincial Dictionary, published in 1913 with more than 30,000 words. He became the founder of a series of branches of Armenian Studies, such as history of the Armenian language, Armenian dialectology, etcetera.
He survived the turmoil of World War I, the Armenian Genocide, the massacres of Armenians in Azerbaijan, and found refuge in Iran. In 1923 he was invited to settle in Soviet Armenia and join the faculty at Yerevan State University, where he taught for the next thirty years. He lost his wife in 1925, and later, at the insistence of his friends, he remarried one of his students, Sofia, who would be his faithful companion for the rest of his life. They adopted a daughter, Knarik.

In 1926 Adjarian started to publish his magnum opus, the Armenian Etymological Dictionary (1926-1935, seven volumes), which contained 11,000 roots of the Armenian language.

In 1937 he was elected corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of Czechoslovakia. Ironically, in September of the same year, he would be arrested during the Stalinist purges on charges of having been an English spy in Soviet Azerbaijan and a member of a counter-revolutionary group of professors. He was interrogated and beaten on those trumped-up charges. His wife, under great peril, was able to hide his priceless manuscripts. The court condemned him to six years of imprisonment. Adjarian was finally released in December 1939 “for lack of corpus delicti.” He got back his position at the University.

In 1943 he would become a founding member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences. In the remaining years of his life, he started to publish some other fundamental works: History of the Armenian Language (2 vols., 1940-1951), Dictionary of Armenian Names (5 vols., 1942-1962), Complete Grammar of the Armenian Language in Comparison with 562 Languages (7 vols., 1952-1971). At the end of his life, he had accumulated over 200 scholarly publications. He left many unpublished volumes, some of which are still being published.

Adjarian passed away on April 16, 1953. The Institute of Linguistics of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences bears his name.

Birth of Stepan Malkhasiants - November 7, 1857

Modern Armenian did not have a fully comprehensive dictionary of the language until the mid-twentieth century, and such a dictionary was the result of the two-decade efforts of one man, Stepan Malkhasiants.

Stepan (Stepanos) Malkhasiants was born on November 7, 1857 in Akhaltskha, actual Djavakhk, in the Republic of Georgia. He graduated from the Armenian parish school and then continued studies at the Russian district school of his hometown and the Kevorkian Seminary of Vagharshapat (1874-1878). He entered the School of Oriental Studies of the Imperial University of St. Petersburg in 1878 and graduated with a Ph.D. in Armenian, Sanskrit, and Georgian in 1889. By then, he had already published his first scholarly work, the critical edition of tenth-century historian Asoghik’s Universal History (1885).

In 1890 Malkhasiants started his long educational career as teacher at the Nersisian School of Tbilisi, where he worked for twenty years. He was also the principal of the school from 1903-1906, and during these years he married Satenik Benklian. He produced the history of the Nersisian School, as well as several textbooks and many articles in the scientific and popular press. He also wrote two seminal monographs on the grammar of Classical Armenian.

Between 1910 and 1919 he became principal of several schools: Hovnanian Girls’ School of Tbilisi (1910-1914), Kevorkian Seminar of Vagharshapat (1915-1917), Gayanian School of Tbilisi (1915-1919). After 1917 he became one of the leading figures of the newly-founded Armenian Popular Party (one of the ancestors of the current Armenian Democratic Liberal Party). Finally, in 1919 he settled in Armenia and worked for a year at the University of Armenia, which was opened in Alexandropol (now Gumri). His report to the Parliament in 1918 became the grounds for the adoption of the Armenian tricolor flag as the official symbol of the first independent Republic (1918-1920). He gave the first lecture at the recently opened Yerevan State University on February 1, 1920. 

A portrait of Stepan Malkhasiants painted by Martiros Saryan.

Malkhasiants published several important works in the last decades of his life, such as the critical edition of seventh century historian Sebeos (1939), and the Modern Armenian version of Movses Khorenatsi’s (1940) and Pavstos Buzand’s (1947) histories. He received a doctorate honoris causa in 1940 and became a founding member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences in 1943. But his lifetime achievement was the publication of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Armenian Language (Հայերէն բացատրական բառարան), in four volumes and 2,380 pages in three columns, in 1944-1945. 

He had already acquired great experience in the preparation of dictionaries and the publication of the four-volume dictionary was the result of more than two decades of meticulous research. The dictionary, with 120,000 entries, comprised the vocabulary of Classical, Medieval, and Modern Armenian (both Eastern and Western), as well as dialects and even neologisms entering the language until 1940 with examples of usage. The dictionary, published exceptionally in Classical spelling (instead of the spelling currently in use in Armenia), still remains a fundamental source for any student of the Armenian language. It won the State Prize of the Soviet Union and was reprinted three times (Beirut, 1955-1956; Tehran, 1982; Yerevan, 2008). 

Malkhasiants became a member of the Supreme Council of Holy Echmiadzin after 1944 and a member of the editorial board of the journal Echmiadzin. He passed away on July 21, 1947 in Yerevan, shortly before his ninetieth anniversary.