Paris Herouni – Armenian Language Analysis

Armenian language at first stage of development, Le, during many thousand years, was the only one. There were not other languages around to adopt from them foreign words. So new words were formed on the basis of available words with more simple phonetic sounds, being already in use and signifying simpler notions. So the development of language was going on according to definite laws ”from simple to the complex”.

The process of consecutive development was going on. lf all these are right, we can (going back in time) find out the etymological sense of parts of many present words and even of each letter, l.e. the sense of the first simple sounds come from old time. I attempted to do this and the results were excellent.

The main Method of determination of Armenian letters’ sense (meaning) is to choose some quantity of mainly short (i.e. old) words with given letter and find out the main similarity between these words, i.e. the meaning of the given letter. Let me show here an example of this Method for the letter d (dz). We can take a group of words with this letter:

What common, general quality or’meaning have these words, these subjects? What is their main similarity? You can see that the main meaning is “երկար, երկարուկ”, i.e. long, oblong, long-kind, long-shaped. Indeed, the horse, for example, is long-kind animal, it has long face, long neck, long body, long tail, long legs, etc. So the meaning of letter cl (dz) is ”long, long kind”. Then we can understand that giraffe in Armenian means “long camel” because “ուղտ” in Armenian is camel.

We can do so and find out the meaning of each letter. The fact that all letters have meanings, tells us that Armenian language is very old and developed consecutively from the simple elements (sounds) to more and more rich words. Combination of some two or three letters also gives a new meaning, which is possible to find out using the same Method.

For example, the meaning of ”ակ” (ak) is “source, eye, circle, ring, hole”; the meaning of “ատ” (at) is “cut”, the meaning of “ամ” (am) is “eat” or “baby”, so the word “ատամ” (attam, tooth) means “to cut to eat”; the meaning of “լիզ” (liz) is “pure water, source”.

An extract from the book “Armenians and Ancient Armenia” by Paris Heoruni.