Decline and fall: the end of Parthian at the ‘tongues’ of the Armenians

Speaker: Robin Meyer, Université de Lausanne

Four almost four centuries, the Parthians served as the rulers of the Armenian kingdom, even after their own kingdom had fallen at the hand of the Sasanians in 223 CE. Yet, as far as the documents from this period attest, it was not Parthian, the language of the ruling class, but Armenian that served as the main language of the kingdom. Parthian, shortly after the fall of the Arsacid Parthian Empire, effectively ceases to exist, it would appear.

It does, however, not disappear without trace: the Armenian language, in its late antique form, is replete with Parthian loans, far exceeding the learned borrowings one might find, e.g., from Greek or Syriac, both in kind and number. In this lecture, we will take a close look at the kinds of Parthian loanwords, calques, and other influences on the Armenian language, and what they can tell us about the likely relationship between speakers of Parthian and Armenian, and the fate of the Parthian language as a whole. 

The linguistic data, as it turns out, suggests that the Parthian ruling class of Armenia effectively chose Armenian as ‘their’ language and over the course of the centuries became cultural Armenians, more or less abandoning their ancestral mother tongue. The reasons for this shift are difficult to determine for certain, but are likely related to the adoption of Christianity, intermarriage and the exchange of wards, as well as a common enmity with the Sasanians.

Robin Meyer has been Assistant Professor in Historical Linguistics at the University of Lausanne since 2020. After a BA in Classics and Oriental Studies and an MPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology, he completed his doctorate on language contact between West Middle Iranian and Classical Armenian at Oxford in 2017. He then held the positions of Diebold Research Associate in Comparative Philology, Lecturer in Ancient Greek and Latin languages at Oxford, and Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College. Since 2016 he has been a member of the Council of the Philological Society, and since 2022 an elected member of the Steering Committee of the Association internationale des études arméniennes. Author and editor of a number of volumes on historical linguistics and Armenian Studies, his latest book – Iranian Syntax in Classical Armenian – is due to appear with Oxford University Press in December 2023.

Co-sponsors: Mashtots Chair in Armenian Studies and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations