Fourteenth-Century Developments in Armenian Grammatical Theory through Borrowing and Translation: Contexts and Models of Yovhannes K‘r.nets‘i’s1 Grammar Book

Muradyan, Gohar (2025) Fourteenth-Century Developments in Armenian Grammatical Theory through Borrowing and Translation: Contexts and Models of Yovhannes K‘r.nets‘i’s1 Grammar Book. THE HUNGARIAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, 14 (2). pp. 214-246. ISSN 2063-8647 (print); 2063-9961 (online)

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Abstract

The description of Armenian grammar has a long history. Several decades after the invention of the alphabet by Mesrop Mashtots, probably in the second half of the fifthcentury, Dionysius Thrax’ Ars grammatica was translated from Greek. Until the fourteenth century, eleven commentaries were composed on Thrax’s work. The Ars createdthe bulk of the Armenian grammatical terminology and artificially ascribed somepeculiarities of the Greek language to Armenian. In the 1340s Yovhannēs K‘r.nets‘iwrote a work entitled On Grammar. He was the head of the Catholic K‘r.na monasteryin Nakhijewan which was founded by Catholic missionaries sent to Eastern Armeniaand by their Armenian collaborators, the fratres unitores. K‘r.nets‘i’s grammar survived ina single manuscript copied in 1350.InK‘r.nets‘i’s work, the section on phonetics, the names of the parts of speechand many grammatical categories follow Dionysius’ Ars grammatica. K‘r.nets‘i alsoused Latin sources, introducing two sections on syntax, mentioning Priscian,and borrowing definitions from Petrus Helias’ Summa super Priscianum and othercommentaries. This resulted in distinguishing substantive and adjective in thesection on nouns, in a more realistic characterization of Armenian verbal tensesand voices and the introduction of notions and terms for sentences, their kinds,case government and agreement.

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