Since the beginning of its transmission in the 5th century AD, Old Armenian has been documented in the form of Bible translations in an uninterrupted tradition up to the present day and offers a rich corpus of texts consisting of translations, primarily of theological and philosophical works from Greek and Syriac, as well as original Armenian texts. The size of the Armenian text corpus of translated and original texts allows, on the one hand, comparative studies on the use of language in both text types and, on the other hand, specific individual studies, for example on verbal morphosyntax. The aim of the project is to compile a dictionary of the verbs documented in this extensive corpus. The last detailed work on the Old Armenian verb is the work by (Klingenschmitt 1982), which deals with questions of stem formation and etymology of selected Armenian verbs. While (Olsen 1999) has presented a comprehensive study of nouns in the Armenian translation of the Bible, particularly with regard to word formation and etymology, and (Matzinger 2005) deals with the prehistory of noun inflection, there is no comparable work on the Armenian verb: to date there is no comprehensive presentation of the verbs attested in the Old Armenian text corpus with regard to their meaning, construction patterns and etymology. The only synchronic grammar of Old Armenian in German that also deals with verb syntax in more detail is the work by (Jensen 1959):133-224 (‘Lehre vom Satz’). As recently shown by (Ziegler 2014), however, Jensen's information on the construction patterns of individual verbs is incomplete or misleading in some cases, apart from the fact that it is not the aim of his grammar to provide a complete account of all Old Armenian verbs. The lexicographical treatment of Old Armenian as a whole is essentially at the level of the Venetian dictionary by (Awetik'ean, Siwrmêlean, and Awgerean 1836) (repr. 1979), which, insofar as it is written in Armenian and furthermore only provides summary information on meaning in Greek and Latin, is largely inaccessible to Western research outside the narrow circle of Armenologists themselves. The project aims to remedy this situation with regard to the Old Armenian verbum by presenting the Armenian verbs in terms of their use (meaning, constructions) and etymology, whether as an inherited word, a loan word, or a primary or secondary formation, on the basis of a corpus representative of the Old Armenian language of the 5th-7th centuries.
Awetik’ean, G., X. Siwrmêlean, und M. Awgerean. 1836. Nor bargirk’ haykazean lezowi. Venice.
Jensen, Hans. 1959. Altarmenische Grammatik. Heidelberg: Winter.
Klingenschmitt, Gert. 1982. Das altarmenische Verbum. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
Matzinger, Joachim. 2005. Untersuchungen zum altarmenischen Nomen : die Flexion des Substantivs. Dettelbach: Röll.
Olsen, Birgit Anette. 1999. The noun in Biblical Armenian : origin and word formation ; with special emphasis on the Indo-European heritage. Berlin ; New York: De Gruyter.
Ziegler, Sabine. 2014. „Zur Syntax und Semantik von alt- und mittel- armenisch ‚Beten‘ und ‚Glauben‘: Ein Vergleich zwischen eigenständigen und übersetzten Texten“. MSS 68/2:267–85.
