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.”
