Armenians Learning Greek in Ancient Egypt.

Danny Bate featured here just a couple of weeks ago, but he’s got another post I can’t resist sharing: The Armenian Who Learned Greek in Ancient Egypt. This is another “who knew?” moment for me:

Written in Armenian letters for an unknown individual navigating the Greek-speaking society of Roman Egypt, this document is an absolute goldmine of historical and linguistic information. It’s both a testament to a multicultural Mediterranean world, and a valuable early witness to the Armenian language and its speakers. This is in spite of the fact that it doesn’t contain a single word of Armenian. […]

This document, cautiously dated to around the 5th–7th century AD, is a very early example of the Armenian alphabet, and the only one written with papyrus for its material. Yet it doesn’t come from anywhere near lands ever known as ‘Armenia’, nor does it write down Armenian speech. Its provenance is unclear. The French scholar Auguste Carrière bought the parpyrus from a dealer at the end of the 19th century. Scholars worked off a photograph of just one side until the original was rediscovered in 1993 by historian Dickran Kouymjian at the French Bibliothèque Nationale (designation: BnF Arm 332). Before Carrière, the trail goes cold, but the arid, papyrus-preserving climate of Egypt is the likeliest resting place. As for its language, the document is nothing but words of Greek.

Line after line, the document faithfully renders nouns, adjectives, verbs, phrases and whole sentences of Greek in Armenian letters. […] Now, I see two seams of information to be excavated from the papyrus: one about historical language (quelle surprise), but another about historical society. Let’s dig into the first.

The thing is, the papyrus is an excellent acoustic witness to how Greek sounded back then. The language, caught between its Koine and Medieval forms, is plentifully attested in historical sources from Late Antiquity, but such sources are necessarily silent. We know that Greek speech has undergone many changes down the millennia, but pinpointing when (and where) these changes occurred tends to be imprecise – we say things like ‘Oh, that consonant shifted during the Koine period’, which narrows things down to about nine hundred years. […]

Alternative scripts are therefore of great importance for the historical linguist. Rendering speech in new letters is not bound to any archaic spelling and established standard, but instead is accurate to sound. This Armenian spelling of Late Antique Greek lifts the veil on the spoken language, giving us a precious glimpse of what changes had (or hadn’t) occurred. […]

The active choice of Armenian letters offers us whispers of the accent behind the words. For example, the alphabet has Բ, which stood and still stands for the voiced stop sound /b/. Greek words spelled with B are here mostly Armenian-ised with Բ, rather than another letter that would indicate a thorough shift towards the voiced fricative /v/, such as the W-letter Ւ. There are a couple of spellings that hint at the shift’s onset, though. For instance, “ՍԱՒԱՆ” (‘sawan’) spells σάβανον ‘linen cloth’.

The consonant behind the Greek letter Χ has also changed over the centuries, from an aspirated /kʰ/ to a fricative /x/, as in Scottish loch. The Armenian alphabet could provide suitable letters for both the older and the younger sounds (namely, Ք and Խ). We observe that Χ-words in usual Greek writing are spelled in the papyrus with Ք, indicating the older sound.

Relatedly, Armenian has a letter for the breathy /h/ sound in hat: Հ. The author of the papyrus often uses it at the start of Greek words that have since dropped their Hs. It’s there in “ՀԷՄԱ”. This is the Ancient Greek word for ‘blood’, αἷμα, the origin of English haemo-. It’s pronounced like a breathless ‘ema’ in Modern Greek, but was ‘hema’ still for our author. That said, the Հ is absent from other possible places. The variability gives the impression that H-dropping in Egyptian Greek was common, but not yet ‘good’ Greek.

These features together give the Egyptian accent of Greek behind the papyrus a fairly conservative, quasi-classical feel. Many of the sound changes that are standard and normal in Greek today don’t seem to have been fully present in Late Antique Egypt.

There’s considerably more at the link, including evidence for incipient iotacism and -ίον diminutives, and it ends by trying to answer the questions “What was the purpose of the papyrus? And who was it for?” I hope they turn up more such documents with foreign evidence for the state of ancient languages.