NEOLOGISMS IN THE ANCIENT ARMENIAN ORIGINAL “THE BOOK OF FASTING” BY BASIL THE GREAT AND THEIR PRODUCTIVITY IN THE MODERN ARMENIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The Ancient Armenian translation of the collection of interpretative letters “The Book of
Fasting” by Basil of Caesarea, who is also known in the world as Saint Basil the Great, is one
of the most famous works of medieval Armenian philosophical and theological literature. The
translation of the collection dates back to the 5th - 7 th centuries, some letters were translated
immediately after the creation of the Armenian alphabet, after translating the Bible into
Ancient Armenian. The collection in this form was completed at the beginning of the 7th
century. The language of the translation of “Books of Fasting” is considered to be the
postclassical grabar of the beginning of the Hellenizing school. There are not many lexical
grecizms here yet; newly formed words and terms are composed according to the canons of the
Armenian Language, vocabulary and semantic tracing papers are mostly clear and transparent
for the Armenian reader. In our study, we revealed neologisms and newly formed words in the
translation of Vasily Kessary’s letters. The translators created 82 new lexical units that were
not included in the dictionaries of the Ancient Armenian language, and 152 words in the New
Haykazyan dictionary are cited only with the mark “Book of Fasting”, that is, their authors are
translators of this collection of Vasily the Great. After diachronic and synchronous analysis, it
became clear that more than 40% of these words were preserved in the vocabulary of the
Moderrn East Armenian language, they are productive and are used in different lexical styles
of the Literary Armenian language.