Neologisms in Khachatur Abovyan’s Travel Writings

Abstract

Khachatur Abovyan, bearing the honorary epithet “Great Enlightener,” entered literature not only with works written in Ashkharhabar and the Kanaker dialect, but also in Old Armenian (Grabar). A notable part of his Old Armenian (Grabar) heritage consists of two key works belonging to the genre of travel writing, the first of which describes the history of the ascent to the sacred mountain Masis by the expedition led by Friedrich Parrot, while the second comprises travel notes addressed to his students from Tiflis to Armenia together with Privy Councillor Senator Baron Gan and his wife-from Shulaveri to Lori, Alexandropol, Ani, then to Sardarapat, Armavir, and Ejmiatsin. In these relatively small literary works containing highly important topographical and demographic information, Abovyan employs more than one hundred newly created words by the author, a considerable part of which are neologisms, that is, designations of new concepts—sciences, offices, and realities of state and social life, most of which have become commonly used in modern Eastern Armenian; he introduces into circulation the forgotten native Armenian forms of toponyms renamed by foreign conquerors and provides their etymological explanation. The examined newly created words were formed in accordance with the word-formation and semantic regularities of Grabar. By employing the great potential of word formation in Old Armenian, the writer proves that an important bulwark of preserving linguistic identity is not only the grammatical system but above all the vocabulary, which is capable of reflecting all the changes of the time.