Classical Armenian

The literary language of ancient and medieval Armenia, called Grabar, “the written tongue,” attested from the early fifth century CE, when Mesrop Maštocʿ devised the Armenian alphabet to render it. Classical Armenian forms its own independent branch of Indo-European, a single-member subfamily, heavily overlaid with Iranian loanwords after centuries under Persian rule. It is the language of the Armenian Bible, of the historians Agatʿangelos and Movsēs Xorenacʿi, and of a large patristic and historiographic literature, and it remained the written standard for well over a thousand years.

The Armenian alphabet, created around 405 CE, is a fully phonemic script of thirty-six original letters, written left to right and unrelated in letterforms to the Greek and Syriac scripts that guided its design. The Armenians call themselves Hay and their land Haykʿ, later Hayastan, after the legendary patriarch Hayk; “Armenia,” the name outsiders have always used, is Persian in origin and was never one of their own words for themselves.

@misc{onomastikon-classical-armenian,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Classical Armenian},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/classical-armenian}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}