LEXICAL FEATURES OF ANCIENT ARMENIAN IN GREGORY OF NYSSA’S TRANSLATION OF “ON THE MAKING OF MAN”

Abstract

St. Gregory of Nyssa, the father, the teacher (doctor ecclesiae) of the Armenian and
general Christian church, wrote this work in 379 in the ancient Greek language, in Ancient
Armenian this work was translated presumably in 719 in Constantinople by Stepanos Syunetsi
and David Hiwpatos. The vocabulary of this work, which was translated at the end of the
Hellenizing School, is very imaginative, rich in synonymous constructions, philosophical and
anatomical terms, many of which belong to the pen of translators. In this study we wrote out 30
new lexical units from the critical original version of the Armenian translation (compiled by
Stella Vardanyan) that are not fixed in the dictionaries of the Ancient Armenian language, as
well as identified 83 neologisms that are witnessed in the New Haykazyan dictionary only with
the note of Gr. of Nyssa. We uncovered the semantic field of newly – discovered words,
studied their construction, proving that the post-classical Grabar had a large word-building
potential. Here are some interesting examples: անբանաւորագոյն – absolutely devoid of
meaning, irrational, անպարագրել – to embrace the infinity, առաջախնամութիւն – fortu-
ne, providence, նախավաստակեալ – given initially, պատճառագիտութիւն – knowledge
of causes, etc.