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Residents of Hamshen - HyeForum

Hemshinli: The Forgotten Black Sea Armenians Bert Vaux Harvard University 1.

Introduction to the history, language, and culture of the Hemshinli If asked to identify the inheritors of the Black Sea coast region once inhabited by the Pontic Greeks and the Trabzon and Artvin Armenians, many would correctly identify the Laz in Turkey and the Abkhaz and other Caucasian tribes in Georgia and southern Russia.

However, few know of the existence of one of the most widespread and populous groups in this area, which has a population of as many as several hundred thousand worldwide.

This group, the hemshinli or residents of Hamshen, occupies a continuous area stretching from the Black Sea province of Trabzon, Rize, anSamsun in north-central Turkey to southern Russia in the north.

There are also significant Hemshinli communities in the northwestern provinces of western Turkey, in various cities in Central Asia, and amongst the guest workers in Germany. One is immediately struck by two facts about the Hemshinli: they are originally Armenian, and the Hemshinli in Turkey are Muslim. The presence of these enigmatic Armenians in the Black Sea area raises many interesting and difficult questions: • Who exactly are the Hemshinli? • When did they come into the area? • Where did they come from? • Why are they generally unknown to the outside world? • What effect has Islamicization had on their language and culture? In this paper I develop the beginnings of an answer to these questions, based on my fieldwork with a number of young Hemshinli as well as some of their Christian counterparts in Abkhazia. My primary Hemshinli informant is a young man in his twenties named "Cengiz", who was born and raised in the village of Köprücü, located 5 kilometers from the Georgian border and from the Black Sea coast in the Artvin province.

On the other side of the border my main source of information is a man of the same age named Avik Topchyan, whose family comes from the town of Novyj Afon in Abkhazia. 1.1.

Who are the Hemshinli? There are three basic subgroups of Hemshinli: • Western Hemshinli, who live in the Turkish province of Rize and dispersed elsewhere in Turkey, speak Turkish, and are Sunni Muslim.

(This group, which refers to itself as hemshinli, is well-described in two books by Uwe Bläsing (1992, 1995) and in Benninghaus 1989.) • Eastern Hemshinli, who live in the province of Artvin (with smaller numbers dispersed elsewhere in Turkey, Central Asia, and Europe), speak a language called Homshetsma, and are also Sunni.

(This group, which refers to itself as either hemshinli or homshetsi, has been studied by myself (1996, 2001), Marr (1925), Dumézil (1963, 1965, 1967, 1986), Benninghaus (1989), and Vardanyan (1993).) • Northern Hemshinli, the descendants of non-Islamicized Hemshinli formerly of the provinces of Samsun, Ordu, Giresun, and Trabzon, who live in Georgia and Russia, speak Homshetsma, and are Christian.

(This is the group studied by Aça®yan 1947, Torlakyan 1986, Vardanyan 1993, and Kuznetsov 1995, 2001.

They refer to themselves as homshentsi.) The primary traditional occupations of the Turkish (i.e.

Western and eastern) Hemshinli are cultivating tea and corn, animal husbandry, and beekeeping.

The Homshetsma lexicon includes a special term for ‘honey sickness’, a peculiar condition that afflicts unfortunates who have consumed a special type of honey foudn in the eastern Black Sea region.

Their folklore reflects the daily concerns of the Hemshinli as well as the mountainous coastal milieu in which they exist: it is replete with tales of protecting their fields from bears, wolves, wild men, ghosts, and their Laz neighbors.

According to Cengiz, until recent times traveling bards would congregate in the village square to compete in composing songs dealing with local trees, mountains, and foods, as well as more familiar topics such as wooing and lost love. Their riddles encapsulate the world of life in a Black Sea village, as one can see in the following examples elicited from Cengiz’s mother: (1) Q: galat me kak bade tevi ‘I threw a basket of dung against the wall’ A: onguç ‘ear’ (2) Q: ma@ me hagvit caxke tei ‘I put a sieve full of egg on the roof’ A: asda@ ‘star’ (3) Q: gerta gerta iz çuni, yed ku ka açvi çuni ‘it goes and goes and has no footprint;

It returns and has no eye’ A: ked ‘river’ (4) Q: Àompu vaan haßnaj senduk ‘a locked lockbox on the road’ A: mazarlux ‘cemetery’ The first riddle, for example, reflects the Hemshinli tradition of using cow dung (kak or axp) to fill in the cracks between stones in the temporary homes they erect during their summer stays in summer camps (yayla) several days to the south.

The other riddles display features that I will touch on below. Interestingly, the ethnicity of the Hemshinli is no longer easily determined by consulting the Turkish Hemshinli.

The Hemshinli in Turkey are Muslim, and are considered by many Turks to be a variety of Laz (Benninghaus 1989:497).

Younger Turkish Hemshinli apparently consider themselves to be a Turkic tribe, an opinion shared in print in various Turkish publications by older members of their community (Benninghaus 1989:486-7).

Their personal names are generally of Turkish origin, but many have nicknames of South Caucasian origin;

Some typical Hemshinli nicknames and their Georgian counterparts are given in (5). (5) Hemshinli names Homshetsma - Çita - Boko - Çute - Xavula - Mapu - Dukßi - Gunti Georgian - çita - boko - çute - ƒavila - mabu - tukhsi - gundia The Hemshinli also share with the Laz their preference for the tulum, a sort of bagpipe, the horon, a particular style of dance, and a certain amount of vocabulary, such as lazut ‘corn’, digina ‘a device that children use to carry tea on their backs’, and so on. However, though the Turkish Hemshinli often present themselves as Laz for convenience, it is important to notice that they do not intermarry with the Laz (Benninghaus 1989:491;

Confirmed by Cengiz).

Furthermore, they rarely know more than a few words of the Laz language (Benninghaus 1989:491), and they do not refer to the Laz as Hemshinli, but rather as megreli ‘Mingrelians’ (Benninghaus 1989:491) or Àon ‘Laz’, related to the Georgian name for the Laz, ç’ani (cf.

Also Middle Armenian çen çen, Byzantine Greek tsánoi). The Laz themselves refer to the western Hemshinli as ermeni ‘Armenian’ (Benninghaus 1989:131), suggesting their true origins.

Interestingly, though Cengiz reports that the same term ermeni is used by some of the young eastern Hemshinli to refer to drunkards, elder members of this community in fact seem to be aware of their Armenian origins, but discourage discussion of them. The Armenian origin of the Hemshinli becomes clear when one examines Homshetsma, the language spoken by the eastern and northern Hemshinli.

As we will see later, though Homshetsma contains many Turkish and Laz lexical items, genetically it is in fact closely related to the western dialects of modern Armenian. The Armenian heritage of the Hemshinli becomes even clearer when one considers the northern Hemshinli, who acknowledge their Armenian roots, have Armenian names, belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church, and do not employ Caucasian instruments such as the tulum.

In fact, some of the younger generation of northern Hemshinli are not even aware that they are of Hamshen descent, and know only that they are Armenian and their ancestors came from somewhere in Turkey5. So far, then, we know that the Hemshinli are a western Armenian group, who are in the process of assimilating to their Turkish and Caucasian environment.

Our next question is where they came from, and when. Ashot: Jun 22 2008, 11:27 PM

1.2. Where did the Hemshinli come from, and when? As one can guess from their name, the Hemshinli originally come from the region around the town of Çaml¥hemßin (‘Piny Hamshen’) in the Rize province of northeastern Turkey.

The Armenian name of this area is Hamßên (Hamshen).

In order to refer to a resident of Hamshen in Homshetsma, one adds the Armenian provenance suffix -…i (-tsi).

(The form Hemßinli is the Turkish equivalent;

It means literally '(resident) of Hemßin'.) Homshetsma furthermore changes a to o before nasal consonants (m and n), as we already saw in the derivation of Àon ‘Laz’ from tsan, and then deletes the -n-;

The end result is the form homße…i homße…i mentioned earlier. The name Hamshen itself appears to derive from an earlier form Hamamaßên (Hamamashen), which means roughly ‘Hamam’s hamlet’.

We have reason then to believe that the Hemshinli moved to their current location under the guidance of a certain man by the name of Hamam.

But where did these original settlers come from?

There is a tradition in Cengiz’s village that the Hemshinli are the descendants of the offspring of a Turkish general and his Armenian wife, who originally lived in the Van area and eventually migrated to Hamshen via Kars and Ardahan.

Various other local traditions are surveyed in Benninghaus’ excellent 1989 article on the Hemshinli: for example, certain Turkish nationalists have suggested that the Hemshinli are the descendants of a Turkic tribe from Central Asia, or even neo-Akkadians. In reality, it seems that the original inhabitants of Hamamashen migrated to the area together with a certain prince Hamam Amatuni in the second half of the eighth century (Edwards 1988:404).

Xachikyan (1969:118) suggests that these migrants came from Kotayk and Aragatsotn in the province of Ayrarat, which accords well with the linguistic facts, as we will see later.

This initial migration may have been augmented by an influx of refugees from the fallen kingdom of Ani in the second half of the eleventh century (Benninghaus 1989:482). We can also get an idea of the historical movements of the Hemshinli from their language.

For example, the fact that all Hemshinli (both Christian and Muslim) have substantial Turkish and Laz components in their lexicon, whereas only the northern Hemshinli have Russian loans, suggests that the original Hemshinli lived in a Turkish-Laz milieu, and the northern group later split off from this original homeland and established itself in an area of Russian dominance. Similarly, the Homshetsma consonant system suggests that the community originally had close ties with the Armenians who ended up in the area around the city of Akn on the Euphrates river, and that both of these communities migrated from somewhere in the Ayrarat region.

I’ll return to this topic below. 1.3.

The conversion To summarize thus far, we know that we are dealing with a single original Christian community centered around the city of Hamshen, which subsequently split into the three modern Hemshinli communities: two Muslim and one Christian;

Two Turkish and one (ex-)Soviet.

These facts raise three interesting problems: (i) How did the Hemshinli come to be distributed over such a large area after beginning with such a restricted distribution? (ii) Secondly, we know that it is highly unusual to come across Armenian-speaking Muslims. Many Armenians over the centuries have converted to Islam, but this conversion generally entails loss of the language and of Armenian identity within two generations.

Conversely, some members of neighboring ethnic groups have acquired the Armenian language, but these minorities are typically Christian, such as the Assyrians, and they do not necessarily assimilate into the larger Armenian polity.

The question then is: what conditions have enabled the Hemshinli to preserve their Armenian language and culture after converting to Islam, and how have they been affected by this conversion? (iii) Finally, how did the division between the Muslim and the Christian Hemshinli develop? The answers to all three of these questions revolve around a single important event in the history of the Hemshinli community, which has had profound and lasting effects on their culture, identity, and language. Beginning in about the sixteenth century, a large portion of the Hemshinli converted to Islam.

This trend assumed a significantly larger scale in the eighteenth century, and continued to a lesser degree up to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Those Hemshinli who converted to Islam were allowed to remain in situ, and have essentially been left undisturbed since that time. Those who refused to convert had in effect the choice of fleeing or taking their chances where they were.

The first wave of refugees fled westwards to Trabzon, Giresun, Samsun, and so on. Their descendants successfully established new communities along the Black Sea coasts of Georgia, Abkhazia, and Russia, and in the western Turkish provinces of Bolu and Sakarya in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Some of the Hemshinli in western Turkey relocated to Armenia after the First World War. Throughout this sequence of conversions and emigration small pockets of Christian Hemshinli survived in Turkey, until 1915.

We have reason to believe that the eastern Hemshinli in Cengiz’s area, isolated in the mountain fastnesses of northern Hopa subprovince, were among the last to convert en masse, in the late seventeenth century.

To the best of our knowledge, though, there are currently no Christian Hemshinli left in Turkey. We do not know when the eastern Hemshinli, the least studied of the various Hemshinli subgroups, extended into the Hopa region and southern Georgia (Benninghaus 1989:482). We do know, however, that the Hemshinli who had converted and then established themselves along the Georgian coast fell victim to Stalin’s deportation of some 200,000 residents of Georgia’s southern border to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in 1944.

These Central Asian Hemshinli communities remain distinct and alive up to the present day, and at least some members retain Homshetsma (Robert Krikorian, personal communication;

Kuznetsov 2001). It is interesting to note that some members of the Central Asian Hemshinli community petitioned to relocate to Armenia near the end of the Soviet period, and were refused on account of their religion (Robert Krikorian, personal communication).

1.3.1. The impact of Islamicization Having accounted for the distribution of the various Hemshinli communities, I would now like to consider the impact that the conversion to Islam had on the Turkish Hemshinli.

In addressing this problem I will draw primarily on my work with Cengiz, who belongs to the eastern Hemshinli community. The overall effect of the conversion among the eastern Hemshinli is quite striking: though they essentially preserve their pre-Islamic language and culture intact--presumably because they live in isolated mountain villages with few Turks around--both the language and the culture have been almost completely stripped of their Christian elements.

For example, weddings are still performed in the traditional Armenian fashion, except that no priest is present. Similarly, the native Armenian words for Christian terms such as ‘priest’, ‘cross’, ‘church’, and so on have disappeared (though see the discussion of xaæuß below). A striking example of this de-Christianization can be seen in a Hemshinli folktale that Cengiz once recited for me, called ‘Temel’s Head’. (8) Temel’s Head Yiyek hadik enger caxutn ive kay¥@ enuß gerton.

Tsaxutin keloxn ive kellin kay¥@e genin.

Šad barak gelli; hemi inçecnuß kuzin.

Andi inçecnele erguse uuß Àompacove Àompan ißno@un meg al na satarin kelxan Àompan inçecno@um gasa.

Da@in onune temel gelli.

Temele çvone Àedin gaba gu, ‘yes hemi asdi inçecenim’ gasa.

Andi engerdake Àompan kiçnun put genin martun vuÀude go keloxe çgo.

‘Yahu,’ gasin, ‘asu keloxe gar ta çgar ta?

Inç enik inç enik oç?’ Yuuc put genin ‘yahu,’ gasin, ‘meg erta gasa genoçe harc enik balki genige kidena gu.’ Genoçe mode gerton, ‘yahu,’ gasin, ‘ku martun keloxe vaan er ta vaan çer ta?’ Genign a gasa, ‘as akvan a,’ gasa, ‘kahvalti haz¥rlamiß i,’ gasa, ‘bat marte giav ta giav oç ta çkidim,’ gasa. Three friends go up a mountain to make a boat.

They climb up to the top of the mountain and make the boat.

[The mountain] is very steep;

Now they want to lower [the boat down the mountain]. Then to lower it, two go down by one path;

The other says, ‘I’ll lower it down the steeper path.’ The lad’s name is Temel.

Temel ties a rope around his neck and says, ‘Now I’ll lower it.’ Then the friends go down the path and see that there’s a man’s body, but there’s no head.

‘Hey,’ they say, ‘did he have his head or not?

What do we do, what don’t we do?’ They look at each other and say, ‘Hey, let’s go ask his wife;

Maybe she knows.’ They go to the wife and say, ‘Hey, does your husband have a head, or not?’ The wife says, ‘this morning he prepared breakfast, but I don’t know if he ate it, or not.’ The story of Temel’s Head is a variant of a popular Christian Armenian folktale, ‘The Priest’s Head’, of which one version from the Mush area in eastern Turkey involves two men taking a priest to a cave to search for the missing day of the week, Friday.

The story concludes as follows: (9) excerpt from ‘The Missing Friday’ (Russell 1987) It was decided the priest should go [into the cave], so they lowered him down into the hole with his feet sticking out the top.

Time passed, and the priest made no sound.

They pulled him out by his feet and saw he had no head: the bear ate it. ‘Hey, son, the priest had his head on when we brought him here, didn’t he?’ ‘Shucks, I didn’t look to see if it was there or not.’ ‘This is pretty bad, son.

We’d better go and ask his wife whether the priest had his head on or not when he left the house this morning.’ So they went to her house. ‘Ma’am, would you tell us, did the Father have his head on or not when he left the house today?’ asked the householder. ‘By my soul, I don’t know,’ replied the priest’s wife.

‘Now was it, or wasn’t it?

But I do recall, while he was eating yogurt it was dribbling down his beard.’ One can see that the essence of the story (including the nonsensical tone) of the Priest’s Head is preserved in the Hemshinli version.

However, the priest has been replaced with a secular character, Temel, the standard hero of Black Sea tales, and the mildly anticlerical tone of the original is completely absent.

There is also interesting wordplay specific to Homshetsma: the story clearly takes place on a mountain, but it makes no sense to build a boat on a mountain.

It does make sense, on the other hand, to build a boat in a forest, where wood is readily available; this possibility is in fact alluded to in the tale's use of Homshetsma …axut (…axud), which means both 'mountain' and 'forest'. The essential point in the story of Temel's Head, though, is the way in which its Christian elements have been stripped from the Hemshinli version, which is part of the general dechristianization of the Hemshinli culture.

Related to this dechristianization is the Hemshinli's loss of Armenian identity.

For example, the Hemshinli have completely lost the word hay ‘Armenian’ and its derivatives, such as hayerên ‘Armenian language’, using instead the terms homße…i and homße…ma respectively.

Similarly, as I mentioned earlier, the eastern Hemshinli use the Turkish term for Armenians, ermeni, to refer to drunkards.

One also finds amongst the Turkish Hemshinli sentiments such as the following, which was expressed in a 1984 letter from an eastern Hemshinli to Rüdiger Benninghaus: ‘the Armenians are terrorists, and therefore the peaceful Hemshinli cannot be of Armenian descent’ (Benninghaus 1989:486).

However, it should be noted that in 1914 the entire population of Cengiz’s village fled to the mountains, suggesting some awareness of their Armenian past. Despite the general dechristianization of the Turkish Hemshinli language and culture, we should note that there are in fact a few isolated remnants of their Christian past.

For example, the Turkish Hemshinli observe nor dai ‘New Year’ on the day of the Epiphany, in accordance with the Christian Armenian practice.

Bryer (1975:142) reports moreover that baptisms were performed among the western Hemshinli as late as the turn of the twentieth century.

Finally, in late July the western Hemshinli celebrate at their yaylas a three-day festival called vartivor.

This is a survival of the Christian Armenian festival vardava®, the Feast of the Transfiguration, which is generally celebrated August 6th (cf.

Russell 1992). The Hemshinli have also preserved a few isolated Christian items in their lexicon.

For example, unlike the Laz, who have replaced their original Caucasian word for ‘god’ with Turkish tanr¥ (Dumézil 1937), the Hemshinli have preserved the original Armenian word astuac astuac in the form asbac (aspaj), which shows up in expressions such as asbac xenta…na Ïeziki aspaj xendacna kezigi ‘may god make you joyful’.

The form aspaj is only attested elsewhere in the dialect of Akn, which as we have already seen must have once been in closer contact with the Hamshen Armenians.

Xenda…na is the causative subjunctive of the verb xenduß, which preserves the original meaning of the Classical Armenian verb xndal xndal ‘rejoice, be joyful’, unlike standard modern Armenian, wherein this verb now means specifically ‘to laugh’. One can also notice in this blessing the dative suffix -gi, which is only found in Homshetsma. Another interesting remnant of the Hemshinli's Christian past is the verb xaæuß xaçuß, which means ‘to nail an entrance shut with two boards’;

In certain situations it can also have the more generic meaning ‘to close’.

Cengiz describes this verb as being based on the image of the two boards nailed on top of one another in perpendicular fashion.

This suggests that the verb is derived from the Armenian noun xaæ ƒaæ ‘cross’, which has been lost in Cengiz’s dialect as part of the general dechristianization of the lexicon. So far we’ve seen that the conversion to Islam has resulted in a striking dechristianization of the language and culture of the Turkish Hemshinli.

However, as can be seen from the tale of Temel's Head, the assimilation of the Hemshinli to their Turkish neighbors has had a more general impact on their language and culture as well.

The younger generation has assimilated many of the basic characteristics of Turkish pronunciation, so that the @ ("ghad"), which in most forms of Armenian is pronounced as a voiced uvular fricative @, is pronounced by the younger Hemshinli in the same manner as Turkish @ (yumußak ge "soft g"), that is either as a barely audible uvular approximant, or as nothing at all.

The older Hemshinli, on the other hand, still speak with what we can call an Armenian accent. There has also been a massive influx of Turkish vocabulary, to a much greater extent than we find in other Armenian dialects. Homshetsma has also assimilated Turkish syntax to a degree not normally found in Armenian dialects.

For example, Homshetsma has developed an equivalent of Turkish -mi/ m¥/mu/mü, which serves as an indicator of yes-no questions.

The use in this capacity of ta, which originally meant ‘that, if, or’, corresponding to standard Armenian †ê. This peculiar usage of Armenian †ê as a marker of yes-no questions also occurs in the nearby Xotorjur dialect to the south, but otherwise is unattested in the Armenian-speaking world. Turkish has also found its way into Homshetsma poetics.

For example, the eastern Hemshinli have a saying vur Ïeæi ßepe…u xeæi vur keçi ßebecu xeçi, literally ‘hit, goat, hit, so that it falls down’, used to goad someone into action.

The efficacy of this idiom crucially depends on the linguistic tools available exclusively to the Hemshinli: living in a Turkishspeaking milieu, they can play the Turkish verb vurmak ‘hit’ against its Homshetsma equivalent ßebecnuß (which does not seem to be used in standard Armenian, though it is found in the dialects of Van, Erevan, and Ghazax).

Similarly, the Hemshinli can rhyme the Turkish word keçi ‘goat’ with the Homshetsma verb ƒeçuß ‘fall’, which again is rare in standard Armenian.

Word plays of this type are no longer possible among the northern Hemshinli and other Armenian groups who do not speak Turkish. Another interesting example of wordplay in this mixed Turkish-Armenian context is the counting rhyme in following, which Cengiz’s mother used to teach him the numbers from one to ten: meg, terone peg - one, a hoe outside ergus, terone çapa - two, a hoe outside yiyek, govu tek - three, a cow’s placenta çors, jile nors - four, sparse corn sprouts hink, terone di(n)g - five, a goatskin sack outside vec, kenafin tec - six, smelly air in the outhouse oxte, dolavin tuxte - seven, the sheet of paper in the cupboard ute, terone tute - eight, the mulberry outside ine, valan hine - nine, the old pants dase, tarkin tase - ten, the bowl on the shelf Notice here that whereas the middle word is often of Turkish origin, the rhyming couplet is always drawn from the native Armenian word stock, with two exceptions, çapa and tas.

The former is particularly interesting, as it alone fails to rhyme with the number it accompanies.

This striking asymmetry suggests that the rhyme for ergus ‘2’ was originally some native Armenian lexical item, which was subsequently replaced, perhaps when the meaning of the original Armenian form was forgotten. It is important to notice that the Hemshinli are not simply assimilating features of standard Turkish language and culture, but rather of local Black Sea Turkish.

Thus, for example, the Turkish Hemshinli no longer employ the Christian Armenian month names, but they also do not employ those found in standard Turkish.

Month names such as kuçux guÀux ‘February’ and æurux çurux ‘July’ are clearly related not to the standard Turkish forms ßubat and temmuz, but rather to the forms we find among the Turks of Çaykara to the southwest, küçük and çürük respectively, and to those we find in Kars to the south, g'üÀük 'February' and Àürüg ay¥ 'August'. Other months such as sifte güz ‘September’ and gaakeß ‘December’ are also of Turkish origin-- siftah güz in Turkish means ‘first autumn’ and gaakeß derives from kara k¥ß ‘black winter’ (cf. Kars gara-g¥ß, Erzerum GarG¥ß)--but again do not correspond to the standard Turkish forms eylül and aral¥k.

1.4. Language We’ve seen so far that the language and folklore of the Hemshinli have much to tell us about their identity, their history, and their social and geographical context.

I’d now like to present a case study that demonstrates this point more forcefully, but in order to do so it is first necessary to provide a general overview of the history and structure of the Homshetsma language. A number of conditions have conspired to make Homshetsma one of the most divergent and interesting varieties of Armenian.

The Hemshinli moved from the original Armenian homeland to an area of isolated mountain villages at a time when the Armenian language was still relatively homogenous, and had not yet developed the incredible diversity that characterizes the hundreds of modern Armenian dialects (Weitenberg 1983).

Consequently, Homshetsma preserves a number of important archaisms that were levelled elsewhere, and has also developed a host of peculiar innovations not found in other varieties of Armenian.

The fact that the language is not written has entailed that Homshetsma has not undergone any influence from the classical or literary dialects, which to the best of my knowledge makes it unique among the Armenian dialects.

Homshetsma therefore gives us our only glimpse of what Armenian in its socalled ‘pure’ form would look like, untainted by loanwords from Classical Armenian and not stripped of the Turkish component of its lexicon. A number of features distinguish Homshetsma from all other dialects of Armenian. Whereas all other varieties of Armenian form the infinitive by adding to the verb stem the suffixes -el, -il, -al, and so on, Homshetsma adds only the suffix -uß.

Our tale for example contains two infinitives, enuß ‘do’ and inçecnuß ‘lower’, corresponding to standard Western Armenian ånel and iÀe…nel respectively.

Homshetsma, like many western dialects, actually has four classes of verbs according to the vowel they take in conjugation, but all of these select the -uß infinitive. Adjarian (1911:189) plausibly relates the -uß suffix to the Turkish participial suffix -iß, as in al¥ßveriß ‘trade’, whereas Dumézil 1963 prefers to derive it from Persian. Homshetsma is also unique in using the verb unnuß ‘have’ as an auxiliary: in northern Homshetsma it is used to form the progressive tense, and in eastern Homshetsma it is used to form the perfect tense, in a manner similar to Germanic and Romance languages. Homshetsma is also unusual relative to other Armenian dialects in using the Middle Armenian plural suffix -vi- as a singulative marker for paired body parts (the one possible parallel is Zeytun).

Other dialects use forms such as aævi and unÏvi, but these forms are always plural in meaning -- ‘eyes’, ‘eyebrows’ -- whereas in Homshetsma they are singular, the plural being formed by adding the regular plural suffix -niye. Though the use of this particular suffix is unprecedented, the semantic development it reflects is paralleled in standard Armenian, where the Classical Armenian plural suffix -Ï (-k) is employed to mark the same paired body parts as well as certain other singular nouns. Like most western Armenian dialects, Homshetsma employs the affix gu to mark the present and imperfect tenses.

The distribution of this affix is peculiar in Homshetsma, though: it appears after polysyllabic consonant-initial verbs, and before vowel-initial and monosyllabic verbs. In terms of lexical material, Homshetsma possesses a host of words unparalleled elsewhere in Armenian, such as the form hohol or xorxol, which means ‘owl’;

The standard Armenian form bu/pu is unknown to Hemshinli.

Another isolated form of unknown origin is galaß ‘wind’;

Again, Hemshinli have not heard the standard Armenian forms hov hov and Ïami Ïami. On a lighter note, Homshetsma seems to be unique amongst the Armenian dialects in having a voiceless coarticulated dental and bilabial trill, which we find for example in the expression used to call baby chickens, tBi ÀiÀi.

This sound occurs as a regular phoneme in the nearby Caucasian languages Ubykh and Kabardian, but does not appear to be phonemic in Homshetsma.

Homshetsma also differs from standard Armenian in pronouncing r as a retroflex alveolar approximant, in the same fashion as speakers of standard American English.

One also hears this pronunciation among elderly Armenians born in Turkey. Two other linguistic features that distinguish Homshetsma from all but one or two other Armenian dialects are the change of a to o before nasals that I mentioned earlier, and the use of the -o@ participle to form the future tense.

The change of a to o before nasals is only paralleled in the dialect of Akn, which as we have already seen is closely related to Homshetsma, and in the dialect of Aslanbek in western Turkey.

However, we happen to know that the Aslanbek community was formed by immigrants from Akn and Hamshen.

Interestingly, this particular change is also attested in our earliest known Armenian manuscript, the Moscow gospel, which was written by a scribe from Kars, just to the south of Hamshen, in 887, not long after Hemshinli arrived in the area. The basic verb is inçuß ‘descend’, from which we form a causative inçecnuß ‘cause to descend, lower’.

To make the future tense of this causative verb, one removes the infinitive suffix and adds the participial suffix -o@, followed by forms of the auxiliary verb ‘be’.

We know from other forms of Armenian that -o@ was originally a present participle suffix, so that the entire form originally meant something like ‘I am lowering’.

The development of present progressive formations of this type into future formations is amply attested in the world’s languages, including English, which has forms such as ‘I’m going to the store tomorrow.’ Homshetsma also preserves a number of archaic features that have been lost in standard Armenian.

I have already mentioned the verb xenduß;

Another striking example involves the formation of the past tense.

Indo-European, the ancestor of Armenian, formed the imperfect tense by prefixing an e- to the verb root;

So, for example, the word for ‘he carried’ was *ebheret. The expected outcome of this form in Armenian is eber, which is in fact what we find in the Classical Armenian aorist.

Standard Modern Armenian has entirely lost this e- augment, though, so we now have forms like Standard Western bere… §ere….

Homshetsma, however, preserves the augment;

Their form for 's/he brought' is êbi epi. The relation in which Homshetsma stands to other Armenian dialects is somewhat complex. Nevertheless, we can say that Homshetsma is clearly a Western Armenian dialect.

For example, it shows the voicing of original Armenian voiceless unaspirated stops that characterizes almost all western dialects. We also know that the original form of Homshetsma, before it split into the three modern groups, contained a set of sounds known as voiced aspirates: {ph th kh ch çh} (bh dh gh jh Àh).

These sounds are preserved in the Christian dialect of Mala (in Trabzon), but have merged with the original voiceless aspirates in Cengiz’s dialect (since voiceless stops are predictably aspirated in Cengiz’s dialect, as in English, we do not write the aspiration). These two properties of the Homshetsma consonant system, namely the voicing of original voiceless unaspirated stops and the aspiration of original voiced stops, are consistent with the historical evidence that the Hemshinli came from the Ayrarat region, since the local dialects of Ayrarat share these properties (Markosyan 1989). The variety of Homshetsma spoken by eastern Hemshinli has a number of interesting innovations.

The epenthetic vowel, which normally surfaces as schwa in other varieties of Armenian, surfaces as e in eastern Homshetsma and as a before the sounds x and @. The only other dialect of Armenian in which this change occurs is Tigranakert. Eastern Homshetsma also shows a predilection for metathesizing stop + sonorant clusters, particularly at the end of a word;

So, for example, original taygr ‘husband’s brother’ becomes dark;

Original …amaÏ ‘dry’ gives the verb cokmecnuß ‘dry out’;

Original ßitak ‘straight’ gives the verb ßigduß ‘heal’;

Hawki† ‘egg’ becomes hagvit;

Nósr ‘sparse’ becomes nors, which we saw in the counting rhyme;

Ak®ay ‘tooth’ becomes arga;

And so on (26a). This metathesis also applies to some loanwords: Turkish haber ‘news, narrative’ (originally from Arabic) gives xarbuß ‘speak’;

Küfür ‘cursing’, also from Arabic, gives kerfuß ‘to curse’;

And so on. In the domain of vocabulary, Homshetsma has undergone a variety of interesting semantic changes.

The word canr, which originally meant ‘heavy’, has become in Homshetsma the word jond, which means only ‘pregnant’.

PêtÏ, which in standard Armenian means ‘need’, in Homshetsma means only ‘well, good’, as in inçbes es?

Bedk im ‘how are you?

I’m good.’ The original Armenian root ƒel-, which survives in the standard Armenian forms ƒelÏ ‘brains’ and ƒelóÏ ‘clever(ly)’, is preserved in Homshetsma only in the form xelok, which means ‘quickly’. With this linguistic background in hand, I’ll now present a case study demonstrating that careful examination of a people’s language and folklore can reveal important facts about their past.

Discussion Title: Residents of Hamshen
Title Keywords: Residents  Hamshen  HyeForum 



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