Fourteenth-Century Developments in Armenian Grammatical Theory through Borrowing and Translation: Contexts and Models of Yovhannes K‘ṛnets‘i’s1 Grammar Book
Gohar Muradyan
Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, Yerevan
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 1 (2025): 214-246 DOI 10.38145/2025.2.214
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 fifth century, Dionysius Thrax’ Ars grammatica was translated from Greek. Until the fourteenth century, eleven commentaries were composed on Thrax’s work. The Ars created the bulk of the Armenian grammatical terminology and artificially ascribed some peculiarities of the Greek language to Armenian. In the 1340s Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i wrote a work entitled On Grammar. He was the head of the Catholic K‘ṛna monastery in Nakhijewan which was founded by Catholic missionaries sent to Eastern Armenia and by their Armenian collaborators, the fratres unitores. K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammar survived in a single manuscript copied in 1350.
In K‘ṛnets‘i’s work, the section on phonetics, the names of the parts of speech and many grammatical categories follow Dionysius’ Ars grammatica. K‘ṛnets‘i also used Latin sources, introducing two sections on syntax, mentioning Priscian, and borrowing definitions from Petrus Helias’ Summa super Priscianum and other commentaries. This resulted in distinguishing substantive and adjective in the section on nouns, in a more realistic characterization of Armenian verbal tenses and voices and the introduction of notions and terms for sentences, their kinds, case government and agreement.
Keywords: Fratres unitores, Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i, Priscianus, Petrus Helias, syntax
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