Classical Armenian

Classical Armenian, called Grabar, the written language, entered history fully formed in the early fifth century, when the monk Mesrop Mashtots devised the Armenian alphabet, traditionally in the year 405, with the support of Catholicos Sahak and King Vramshapuh. Armenia had adopted Christianity as a state religion a century earlier, but worship still leaned on Greek and Syriac books that most Armenians could not read. The new alphabet of thirty six letters fitted the language so exactly that it has needed only two additions since. The first sentence translated is remembered as the opening of Proverbs, to know wisdom and instruction.

Mashtots and his pupils, the Holy Translators whom the Armenian Church still commemorates with a feast day, rendered the Bible from Syriac and Greek, and the resulting version was so admired that later scholarship called it the queen of the translations. The same fifth century generation produced original theology and history, including Yeznik of Kolb's refutation of the sects and the histories ascribed to Agathangelos and Movses Khorenatsi, giving Armenian literature a golden age in its very first century and binding the national identity to the church and the script that carried it.

Grabar remained the literary language of Armenians for some fourteen centuries, long after the spoken language had moved on, and it remains the liturgical language of the Armenian Apostolic Church today. The Divine Liturgy, the Badarak, is celebrated in Classical Armenian, and the church's hymnal, the Sharakan, collects more than a thousand hymns in Grabar spanning from the fifth century to the Middle Ages, including works attributed to Mesrop Mashtots himself, to Sahak, and to the tenth century mystic Grigor Narekatsi, whose Book of Lamentations is held so holy that copies were treated as relics with healing power. Classical Armenian also did the ancient world a quiet service as a preserver. Armenian translators worked so early and so literally that their versions transmit Greek works otherwise lost, including writings of Philo of Alexandria and the chronicle of Eusebius, recoverable only through Grabar.

The modern language split into Eastern and Western standards in the nineteenth century, and neither is mutually intelligible with the classical register, so Armenians meet Grabar the way Italians meet Latin, in church. Seminaries in Etchmiadzin, Antelias, Jerusalem and the diaspora continue to teach it, and the liturgy keeps it sounding daily.