The Antiquity of Western Armenian Voicing

Armenian dialects are famously divided between Eastern and Western branches. Adjarian's (1909) classification used the present tense as the defining isogloss, which roughly corresponded to the Russian/Ottoman border. However, Adjarian himself admits that the division is unsatisfactory, with many dialects sharing both Eastern and Western features.

I propose a new definition of the Eastern/Western border that rests on a more ancient phonological isogloss: the voicing of stop consonants, which roughly corresponded to the border between Persian and Byzantine Armenia. I show that, as far as the consonant system is concerned, the Western dialect diversity is local and continuous, showing no features from Central or Eastern Armenian. The presence of lexical items exclusive to this Far Western area, signaled by Martirosyan (2010), also confirms its unity.

By pushing back in time the Western consonantal voicing system, it becomes much more likely that it was inherited directly from Proto-Armenian, as opposed to Classical Armenian. Benveniste (1958) and Garrett (1998) have presented arguments in favor of this or a similar view before. I will present new arguments ranging from phonetic principles to early voicing errors of scribes, voicing discrepancies and dialect borrowings.

Two conclusions may be drawn from the arguments above: 1) Western dialects show at least some pre-Classical features, which change the portrait of Proto-Armenian, and imply that Middle Armenian should be considered a sister language of Classical Armenian, rather than a daughter language; 2) some Central dialects are best described as Eastern dialects that gradually acquired Western morphology to varying degrees.

Adjarian, H. 1909. Classification des dialects arméniens. Paris: Champion. (Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études. Sciences historiques et philologiques, fasc. 173.)

Benveniste, E. 1958. Sur la phonétique et la syntaxe de l’arménien classique. Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris 54, pp. 46-68.

Garrett, A. 1998. Adjarian’s Law, the Glottalic Theory and the Position of Armenian. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society; Special Session on Indo-European Subgrouping and Internal Relations, pp. 12-23.

Martirosyan, H. 2010. Etymological Dictionary of the Armenian Inherited Lexicon. Brill Academic Publishers.