For list of authorities on the Armenian church see the works enumerated at the end of [Armenian Language and Literature]. For the relations of the Armenian church to the Persian kings see [Persia]: Ancient History, section viii. §§ 2 and 3.
(F. C. C.)
[1] If a forgery, why should this letter have been assigned to Macarius, a comparatively obscure person whose name is not even found in the menaea of the Eastern church? But convincing proof of its authenticity lies in Macarius’ reference to himself as merely archbishop of Jerusalem, and his avowal that he was unwilling to advise the Armenians, “being oppressed by the weakness of the authority conceded him by the weighty usages of the church.” Jerusalem was only allowed to rank as a patriarchate in 451, and the seventh canon of Nice subordinated the see to that of Caesarea in Palestine. To this decree Macarius somewhat bitterly alludes.
ARMENIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. The Armenian language belongs to the group called Indo-European, of which the Iranic and Indic tongues formed one branch, and Greek, Albanian, Italian, Celtic, Germanic and Baltic-Slavonic dialects the other great branch. Unlike Language. most of these, Armenian lost its genders long before the year A.D. 400, when the existing literature begins. Modern Persian similarly has lost gender; and in both cases the liberation must have been due to attrition of other tongues which had a different system of gender or none at all. So the Armenians were ever in contact on the north with the Iberians of the Caucasus who had none, and with the Semitic races on the south and east which had other ways of forming genders than the Indo-European tongues.
From the original Armenian stock can be readily distinguished a mass of Old and Middle Persian loan-words. These are so numerous that for a time Armenian was classed as an Iranian tongue. For more than a thousand years, say until A.D. 640, Armenia was an appanage of the realm of the Persians and Parthians. Until A.D. 428 the Armenian throne was occupied by a younger branch of the Arsacid dynasty that ruled in Persia until the advent of the Sassanids (c. A.D. 226), and the internal polity and court administration of Armenia were modelled on the Persian or Parthian. Accordingly over 200 proper and personal names in Armenia were Old Persian, as well as 700 names of things. If we count in the derivative forms of these words we get at least 2000 Old Persian words. Often the same Persian word was borrowed twice over in an earlier and later form at an interval of centuries, just as in English we inherit a word direct or have taken it from Latin, and have also assimilated from French a later form of the same. The Persian influence in Armenian was already strong as early as 400 B.C., when Xenophon used a Persian interpreter to converse. In some of the Armenian villages they answered him in Persian. The Persian loan-words already present in Armenian as early as A.D. 400 mirror the earlier political and social life of Armenia. Thus many of their kings and nobles had Persian names; Persian also were most words used in connexion with horses and the chase, with war and army, with dress, trade and coinage, calendar, weights and measures, with court and political institutions, with music, medicine, school, education, literature and the arts. Many everyday words were of the same origin, e.g. the words for village, desert, building and build, need, rich or liberal, arm (of body), rod or goad, face, opposite, wicked, unfriendly, discontented, difficult, daughter, eulogy, a youth, wary, enjoy, unhappy, volition, voluntary, unwilling, blind, cautious, blood-kin, coquet with, slumber, humble, mad, grace or favour, memory or attention, grandfather, old woman, prepared, duty, necessary, end, endless, superior, confident, mistake, warmth, heat, glory. The language of their old religion was mainly Persian, but in the 4th century they derived numerous ecclesiological words from the Syrians, from whom by way of Edessa and Nisibis Christianity penetrated eastern Armenia. The language of the garden and the names of plants were also Persian. They had their own numerals, but the words for one thousand and for ten thousand are Persian.
Yet more indicative of the extent of the Persian influence is the adoption of the adjectival ending -akan and -zan, added to purely Armenian words; also of the preposition ham, answering to con in “conjoin,” “conspire,” added to purely Armenian words, as in hambarnam, I take away, and hamboir, a kiss, a word which, strange to say, the Iberians in turn borrowed from the Armenians. From Persia also the Armenians took their names for surrounding races, e.g. Tatshik or Tajik, first for Arab and then for Turk, Ariq for Persians, Kapkoh for Caucasus, Hrazdan, Vaspuragan, &c. The Armenians call themselves Hay, plural Hayq; their country Hayasdan. The Iberians they called Virq or Wirq (where q marks the plural), the Medes Marq, the Cappadocians Gamirq (Cimmerians), the Greeks Yûnes or Ionians; Ararat they call Masis, the Euphrates the Aradsan, the Tigris Teglath, Erzerum is Karin, Edessa Urhha, Nisibis Mdsbin, Ctesiphon Tizbon, &c.
When the Persian and other loan-words are removed, a stock remains of native words and forms governed by other phonetic laws than those which govern the Aryan, i.e. Indian and Iranic, branch of the Indo-European tongues. Armenian appears to be a half-way dialect between the Aryan branch and Slavo-lettic. Much, however, in Armenian philology remains unexplained. For example the plural of nouns, pronouns and the first and second persons plural of verbs are all formed by adding a q or k, which has no parallel in any Indo-Germanic tongue. The genitive plural again is formed by adding a tz or c, and the same consonant characterizes the composite aorist and the conjunctive. In all three cases it is unexplained. In the verbs the termination m for the first singular at once explains itself, and the n of the third plural is the Indo-Germanic nti. But not so the second person singular ending in s, e.g. berem, I bear, beres, thou bearest. This has a superficial likeness to the I.-G. esi in bheresi, “thou bearest.” Yet we should expect the s between vowels to vanish, and give us in Armenian berê. Perhaps, therefore, an old variant of esi, similar to the ἐσσί, lies behind the Armenian es, thou art, and the es in beres, thou bearest. In any case it is clear that many of the oldest forms which Armenian shared with other Indo-Germanic dialects were lost and replaced by forms of which the origin is obscure. Perhaps a closer study of Mingrelian and Georgian will explain some of these peculiarities, for these and their cognate tongues must have had a wider range in the 7th and 8th centuries B.C. than they had later when clear history begins. The attempts made by S. Bugge to assimilate Old Armenian to Etruscan, and by P. Jensen to explain from it the Hittite inscriptions, appear to be fanciful. There is a large Semitic influence traceable in Armenian due to their early contact with the Syriac-speaking peoples to the south and east of them, and later to the Arab conquest. Much remains to be done in the way of collecting Armenian dialects, for which task there are written materials as far back as the 12th century over and above the work to be done by an intelligent traveller armed with a phonograph. Two main dialects of Armenian are distinguishable to-day, that of Ararat and Tiflis, and that of Stambul and the coast cities of Asia Minor. The latter is much overlaid with Tatar or Turkish words, and the Tatar order of words distinguishes the modern Armenian sentence from the ancient.
It remains to say that classical Armenian resembles rather the modern idiom of Van than of western Armenia. It was a plastic and noble language, capable of rendering faithfully, yet not servilely, the Greek Bible and Greek fathers. Often the Armenian translators, and especially after the 5th century, rendered word for word, preserving the order of the Greek. This literalness, though unpleasing from a literary standpoint, gives to many of their ancient versions the value almost of a Greek codex of the age in which the version was made. The same literalness also characterizes their translations from Syriac.