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Diocese of the Armenian Church of America (Eastern)
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Contact: Jake Goshert, Coordinator of Information Services
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March 13, 2005
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DIOCESAN ZOHRAB CENTER PRESENTS ILLUMINATING PANEL OF ALPHABET EXPERTS
By Florence Avakian
It was a monumental turning point 1,600 years ago when the Armenian alphabet
was created. We feel its repercussions still today, as Armenians continue
to build on its legacy in great and small ways.
On Thursday February 16, 2006, a panel of experts discussed this legacy of
the Armenian alphabet. Hosted by the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information
Center of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church, the discussion was
held before an audience of 200 at the Diocesan Center in New York City.
In introducing the speakers, Aram Arkun, coordinator of the Zohrab Center,
expressed hopes that the global commemorations marking the 1600th
anniversary of the creation of the alphabet would the way for new “major
milestones” in Armenian literature and culture.
A VEHICLE OF ARMENIAN LITERARY CULTURE
Dr. Seta Dadoyan, author of five books and currently the Nikit and Eleanora
Ordjanian visiting professor at Columbia University, focused her remarks on
the Armenian alphabet’s political dimensions, saying the alphabet served as
a nexus for Armenian national pride, religious faith, and cultural
exertions.
In a carefully researched lecture, Dr. Dadoyan called the alphabet’s
inventor, St. Mesrob Mashdots, “an icon symbolizing the alphabet,” stressing
that his work must be understood in “historic context.”
She proposed that the invention of the script was “directly related” to the
circumstances of Armenians between the 4th and 7th centuries, and important
to a later phase when Armenia was under direct Arab rule. She referred to
this period as the “vital phase” of the Armenian people’s formation in
cultural-political terms.
“The alphabet was a vehicle and provided a platform for Armenian literary
culture. More importantly, it was instrumental in generating the ideologies
of the church and the state,” she said.
Following the adoption of Christianity, the Armenian people faced “massive
pressures towards total assimilation,” from both the West (the Roman and
Byzantine empires) and the East (Iran and later Islam). The conversion of
the Armenians to Christianity was “a very lengthy process that had already
started during the first century AD, and continued through the Middle Ages.
With the conversion of the Armenian and Georgian kings, Christianity
immediately gained great political significance regionally. Eventually, the
social-political power of Christianity was to be deployed not only against
Iran, but also against Rome itself. From the beginning, Armenian
Christianity was a Westernizing factor against the East, which was Syriac
and Persian, then Muslim,” she said.
Following the two “universal” councils which defined Christianity — Nicea
in 325, and Constantinople in 381 — the invention of the script became a
“political measure, a force to be deployed wherever necessary,” she
explained. With Eastern Armenia in danger of slipping into paganism and
Zoroastrianism, “Sahak and Mesrop had to find solutions,” she said.
The invention of the Armenian script and the deepening of Armenian
literature and faith “were interlocked,” she noted. “The immediate
objective of the script was the creation of a Christian literature, to
assist and consolidate the missionary work of the church.” The Bible was
the first full text to be translated, followed by the first phase of
translating religious texts. The 5th century became the “Golden Age of
Armenian Literature.”
The 45 years between the invention of the alphabet and the Battle of Avarayr
in 451 were marked by the removal of the Armenian Arsacid/Arshakuni dynasty
by Iran in 428 at the request of the Armenian feudal lords (or nakharars),
as well as the initial development of Armenian literature.
This period ended with the Council of Chalcedon in 451 — which the
Armenians eventually rejected, resulting in a separation between the Western
and Armenian churches — and the Battle of Avarayr in 451, which produced
Armenian martyrs and saints. Because of this battle, the Armenian Church
“seemed to adopt a favorable attitude to war as a struggle against evil,”
she stated.
“Avarayr was a conscious choice of death as the way to immortality. Avarayr
was loyalty to the ancestral values of the Armenian people,” Dr. Dadoyan
said, noting that it completed a 150-year process of defining the people.
“The alphabet had Armenized Christianity, the church, and cultural politics.
The legacy of this process was a fundamental formula of loyalties to faith,
language, and ancestral values. Herein lay the political dimensions of the
invention of the alphabet.”
THE ALPHABET’S MAGICAL MYSTERY
Dr. Roberta Ervine, associate professor of Armenian studies at St. Nersess
Armenian Seminary, used her extensive knowledge of the Armenian language, to
focus on how “Mesrob’s Magical Mystery Alphabet” was perceived by Armenians
in the Middle Ages.
Mashdots invented the script for Armenians in order “to give them the
ability to embody their thoughts, to incarnate meaning, to preserve, to pass
down the invisible in visible form, to have meaning in and of itself,” she
stated in her inspiring talk. “Mesrob consciously set out to create an
alphabet far superior to that of Hebrew or Greek. He created a totally
Christian alphabet.”
There had to be 36 letters, she continued, because “letters in antiquity
were also used as numbers for arithmetical computation. The numbers were so
important. They are the invisible mystery that allows us to express the
invisible realities of the universe. Also every letter had assigned to it
the number that corresponded to its place in the alphabet,” she explained,
demonstrating these ideas with slides.
“Mesrob Mashdots’ alphabet had meaning, mystery, power, and a connection to
the divine. It is an alphabet that lives. Every time you use those
letters, you affirm whom you are, who God is. You make yourself a vehicle
for the embodiment of the divine in a visible way, a line of unbroken
communication from God’s eternal finger to the pen of every Armenian writer
who has or will ever use those immortal letters,” Dr. Ervine poetically
concluded.
RADICAL CHANGES IN ARMENIAN LANGUAGE
Dr. Marc Nichanian a visiting professor of Armenian studies at Columbia
University, centered his address on the question, What is a literary
language? He also tackled the provocative issue of whether spoken Armenian
had Eastern and Western dialects at the time of the alphabet’s invention.
The language became “literary” at least twice in Armenian history, first in
the 5th century and later in the middle of the 19th century. He first
tackled the era of the 19th century when “Western Armenian was fully formed,
approximately the way we are using it today, not entirely uniform, full of
Turkish idioms, but nevertheless in use.
He pointed out that between 1792 and 1843, hundreds of books were published
in Venice and Constantinople in this fully-formed Western Armenian, “but
this does not mean that it was already a literary language. It was
precisely what the contemporaries called a civil language: the language of
communication in schools, the language of teaching and learning, the
language of an elite of merchants and city dwellers, the language of
courts.”
It was in 1843 that the Mekhitarist fathers recognized that their dream of
reviving Classical Armenian (krapar) as a common language of Armenians would
not become a reality. The difference between a “civil” and literary
language, Dr. Nichanian continued, is that the civil language (ashkharapar),
in this case Western Armenian, had become the common language of all
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, spread through journals, schools, theater,
and preaching. It had become a common language, “the language of reference
for everybody,” supplanting krapar.
The literary language of the 19th century developed as a reaction to the
spread of a civil language, and to fill the void left by the submergence of
krapar.
Linguists have argued that, unlike the situation in the 19th century, there
could not have existed dialects in the language spoken by Armenians in the
5th century. The problem is that there is no evidence as to when the shift
in pronunciation of consonants that differentiates Western and Eastern
Armenian today actually took place. All we know is that it already existed
by the 12th century in Cilicia. However, some argue that dialectological
work shows that this distinction existed already in the 5th century.
Some experts believe that Mesrob Mashdots’ true genius was not to create an
alphabet in which each letter represented a separate sound or phoneme, but
to create an alphabet in which each letter could represent a different sound
in a different dialect. The same word would have been pronounced
differently in different regions, but would maintain a uniform spelling for
all Armenian speakers. However, Nichanian pointed out that this is only a
hypothesis, and most people still believe that Mashdots analyzed and
transcribed the language spoken on the plain of Ararat.
Nichanian concluded his talk by noting that in the 5th century, as in the
19th, a group of writers, translators, and preachers convinced the populace
to adopt a language that has gone through “literarization” as its own,
sometimes through teaching, but sometimes necessarily also through the use
of force.
Along with producing such panels, the Diocese’s Zohrab Information Center’s
mission is to help disseminate a greater understanding of the Armenian
people to academics, researchers, the media, and the community at large.
— 3/13/06
E-mail photos available on request. Photos also viewable in the News and
Events section of the Eastern Diocese’s website,
PHOTO CAPTION (1): Dr. Roberta Ervine, left, Dr. Seta Dadoyan, and Dr. Marc
Nichanian, were panelists at a lecture on the Armenian alphabet hosted by
the Zohrab Information Center of the Diocese of the Armenian Church of
America (Eastern) on Thursday, February 16, 2006.
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www.armenianchurch.net.