Geography of
Our Armenian Homeland
Part 4 - The Armenians &
Armenian Language

Part 4

Index

Part 1 - Introduction

Part 2 - Perri, Charsanjak, Dersim & The Armenian Village

Part 3 - Kharpert Regions & the Cities of Kharpert & Elazig

Part 4 - The Armenians &  Armenian Language

The Armenians

Armenian Language

Part 5 - Historical Armenia and the Plateaus, Mountains
            & Rivers

Part 6 - Wilsonian Armenia, Armenian SSR & the Republic
             of Armenia

Part 7 - The Republic of Turkey

References

Part 4
The Armenians &
Armenian Language

The Armenians

The Armenians are one of the oldest races of history, and are the contemporaries of the Babylonians, the Hittite, the Assyrians and a host of other ancient races.  According to the Armenian Academic Scientific Research Network, "The stellate Babylonian map on a clay tablet is one of the world's oldest maps (5th century B.C.). One of the six countries represented on it is Armenia" (Armenian Academic Research).

Movses of Khoren, 5th century historian, connects the origin of Armenians, according to popular legends, with Haik (Hayk), an epic hero and one of Noah's great grandchildren. (Armenian Academic Research) The Armenians call themselves "Hai "(Hye) and claim decent from Haik, the great grandson of Japeth, son of Noah. Historical Armenia (Hayastan) has always centered around Biblical Mount Ararat in the southern Caucasus Mountains (Mousa Ler Association).

Armenian Language

According to Dennis Papazian, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, "The Armenian language, like Greek and Iranian, is a part of the Indo-European family of languages that is spoken from north India, through Afghanistan, Iran, Armenia, and Greece into Europe and European Russia. The Armenian alphabet, devised early in the fifth century by St. Mesrob (Mashtotz)--who also produced a script for the Christian Georgians and Caucasian Albanians--is unique, although based in part on Greek uncials and the Armazi variety of Aramaic script." (Papazian) 

According to the Armenian Academic Scientific Research Network, the Armenian language, Haieren, is an independent branch of the Indo-European group. (Armenian Academic Research)  Gamkrelidze and Ivanov explain that the Indo-European languages originated in eastern Anatolia.  In their book, The Early History of Indo-European Languages, they say, "Migrations and cultural diffusion carried the Indo-European protolanguage from the homeland, which the authors place in the Transcaucasus (see Historical Armenia maps), and fragmented it into dialects.  Some spread west to Anatolia and Greece, others southwest to Iran and India. Most Western languages stem from an Eastern branch that rounded the Caspian Sea." 

Gamkrelidze and Ivanov continue to say, "The early investigators placed the homeland in Europe and posited migratory paths by which the daughter languages evolved into clearly defined Eastern or Western branches. Our work indicates that the protolanguage originated more than 6,000 years ago in eastern Anatolia and that some daughter languages must have differentiated in the course of migrations that took them first to the East and later to the West." (Gamkrelidze)

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Part 5 - Historical Armenia &
the Plateaus, Mountains & Rivers

Last Updated 07/09/99