Armenia's remarkable alphabet

November 03, 2005
Harvard University Gazette
By Ken Gewertz
Harvard News Office

[...]
According to James Russell, the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard, the fifth-century saint gave Armenia much more than an efficient system for rendering its language into written form. By means of his invention, Mashtots gave Armenians a cultural and religious identity as well as the means to survive as a people despite the efforts of larger and more powerful neighbors to subsume or destroy them.
[...]
"Mashtots' principal purpose in inventing the alphabet was to change Armenia's cultural orientation from the Iranian East to the Mediterranean West," Russell said. "He gave Armenia the means and the incentive to remain Christian."
[...]
"Within a century, Armenians had a library of classical and Christian learning and were able to build their own literary tradition. As a result, they became independent and almost self-sufficient, and they became impervious to attempts by Rome to Hellenize them or attempts by the Sassanian empire to re-impose Persian culture on them."

On Oct. 28 and 29, Harvard hosted an international conference to consider the achievement of Mashtots, its historical background, and its wider influence. [...]. It was held under the patronage of His Holiness Aram I, Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia.
[...]
One measure of the alphabet's success is the fact that there have been few changes in the letters or in the spelling of words since Mashtots created it in the fifth century.

"This is a very striking circumstance," Russell said, "especially when you compare it with English where spelling has changed a great deal in just the last 500 years. It shows that the Armenian alphabet was already so perfect that there was little reason for it to change."

Perhaps an even more convincing argument for the importance of Mashtots' achievement is the survival of the Armenian people through a long and often trying history.

"Mashtots' real achievement was to create a culture that became a repository for both Eastern and Western traditions, that was cosmopolitan, but had a strong anchor of its own. He made Armenia a culture of the book, a 'bibliocracy,' and that has been their key to survival, because you can carry a book into exile, but you can't carry mountains and trees."

ken_gewertz@harvard.edu

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.