Fourteenth-Century Developments in Armenian Grammatical Theory through Borrowing and Translation: Contexts and Models of Yovhannes K‘r.nets‘i’s1 Grammar Book

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‘r.nets‘i wrote a work entitled On Grammar. He was the head of the Catholic K‘r.na monastery in Nakhijewan which was founded by Catholic missionaries sent to Eastern Armenia and by their Armenian collaborators, the fratres unitores. K‘r.nets‘i’s grammar survived in a single manuscript copied in 1350. InK‘r.nets‘i’s work, the section on phonetics, the names of the parts of speech and many grammatical categories follow Dionysius’ Ars grammatica. K‘r.nets‘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.