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Caucasian Albanian alphabet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Caucasian Albanian alphabet is the alphabet of the Caucasian Albanians, one of the Ibero-Caucasian peoples, ancient and indigenous population of modern Azerbaijan and Daghestan. It was rediscovered by a Georgian scholar, Professor Ilia Abuladze, in 1937.[1] The alphabet was found in Matenadaran MS No. 7117, an Armenian language manual of the 15th century. This manual presents different alphabets for comparison: Armenian, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Georgian, Coptic, and Albanian among them. The Albanian alphabet was titled: "Aluanic girn e" (Albanic letters). Abuladze made an assumption that this alphabet was based on Georgian letters.
The Udi language, spoken by 8000 people mostly in Azerbaijan, and also Georgia, is thought to be the last remnant of the language once spoken in Caucasian Albania.[2]
Armenian historian, Koriun, in his book The Life of Mashtots, wrote:
| “ | Then there came and visited them an elderly man, an Albanian named Benjamin. And he Mesrob Mashdots inquired and examined the barbaric diction of the Albanian language, and then through his usual God-given keenness of mind invented an alphabet, which he, through the grace of Christ, successfully organized and put in order. [3] | ” |
According to Moses Kalankaytuk, the Albanian alphabet was created by Mesrob Mashdots, an Armenian monk, theologian and translator.[4] Mesrob Mashdots is also credited for creating the Armenian alphabet.
The first reasonably long work in Albanian was discovered on a palimpsest in St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in 2003 by Dr. Zaza Alexidze; it was an lectionary dating to the late 4th or early 5th century AD, with a Georgian Patericon written over it. It finally confirmed that Albanian was ancestral to modern Udi.
- ^ Ilia Abuladze. "About the discovery of the alphabet of the Caucasian Aghbanians". In the Bulletin of the Institute of Language, History and Material Culture (ENIMK), Vol. 4, Ch. I, Tbilisi, 1938.
- ^ "Caucasian Albanian Script. The Significance of Decipherment" (2003) by Dr. Zaza Alexidze.
- ^ Koriun, The life of Mashtots, Ch. 16.
- ^ Moses Kalankaytuk, The History of Aluank, I, 27 and III, 24.
- Armazi project:
- For a specimen of the 'Caucasian Albanian Palimpsest', see : Wolfgang Schulze “The Language of the ‘Caucasian Albanian’ (Aluan) Palimpsest from Mt. Sinai and of the ‘Caucasian Albanian’ inscriptions”