Armeno-Kipchak language

Armeno-Kipchak
Xıpçaχ tili, bizim til, Tatarça
17th century manuscript of a prayer in Armeno-Kipchak.
Native to	Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Region	Crimea
Ethnicity	Armenians (Armeno–Kipchaks)
Extinct	17th century[1]
Language family	Turkic Common Turkic Kipchak Kipchak–Cuman Armeno-Kipchak
Writing system	Armenian script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)
Glottolog	None

Armeno-Kipchak (Xıpçaχ tili, Tatarça)^[2] was a Turkic language belonging to the Kipchak branch of the family that was spoken in Crimea during the 14–15th centuries. The language has been documented from the literary monuments of 16–17th centuries written in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (modern day Ukraine) in the Armenian script. Armeno-Kipchak resembles the language of Codex Cumanicus, which was compiled in the 13th century.^[3]

Speakers of the Armeno-Kipchak are considered to be linguistically assimilated Armenians.^[4][5] Armeno-Kipchak-speakers generally identified as Armenian.^[4]

History

Armenians began settling in Crimea in the 11th century and underwent linguistic assimilation in the 14th and 15th centuries.

From Crimea, mainly the city of Feodosia, they resettled to parts of modern-day Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and Moldova. Written monuments from Armenian Apostolic Church centres located in these regions are the reason the Armeno-Kipchak language is known.

In these monuments, the language refers to itself in three ways: with the older term хыпчах тили (en: Kipchak language), the possessive construction бизим тил (en: our language), and the later comparative terminological combination татарча (en: in Tatar), which became widespread thanks to translators familiar with Crimean Tatar.

Linguistic Features

Armeno-Kipchak has 9 vowels: а, ӓ, е, ы, и, о, ӧ, у, ӱ.

It contained many loanwords from Ukrainian, Polish and Latin, especially in translated texts, as well as Iranian and Arabic influences.

The grammatical system was greatly affected by in the influence of Slavonic languages.

Literature

The monuments were written in the period 1521 to 1669 in Armenian script. They consist of tens of thousands of pages. In total there are 112 surviving monuments. These include:

• 28 registry books for the Voytov Armenian law court of Kamentsa-Podol'skovo (1572-1663)
• Financial and metrical books for the Lviv Armenian clerical courts (1572-1663)
• The Kamianets Chronicle which describes the Battle of Cecora and the Battle of Khotyn
• The Venetian Chronicle
• The Polish Chronicle
• A translation of The Lawcode (Datastanagirk') of Mkhitar Gosh which had been approved by the polish king Sigismund I the Old in 1519 and contains a large amount of additional files and commentaries
• 5 Armenian-Kipchak dictionaries and a few glossaries
• 'Secrets of the Philosopher's Stone' by Andrei Torosovich (1626)

See also

• Crimean Tatar language
• Karaim language
• Krymchak language
• Urum language
• Armenians in Ukraine
• Armenians in Poland

References

1. Abdurrazak Peler, Gökçe Yükselen (2015). "Tarihte Türk – Ermeni Temasları Sonucunda Ortaya Çıkmış Bir Halk: Ermeni Kıpçakları veya Gregoryan K" [A People Emerged as A Result of Historical Turkic – Armenian Contact: The Armeno-Kipchaks or Gregorian Kipchaks]. Journal of Turkish Studies (in Turkish). 10 (8): 253. doi:10.7827/turkishstudies.8215.
2. Kasapoğlu Çengel, Hülya (2013). "Comparative Phonology of Historical Kipchak Turkish and Urum Language". Gazi Türkiyat. 13: 29–43. Archived from the original on 2021-07-25. Retrieved 2021-07-25.
3. Abdurrazak Peler, Gökçe Yükselen (2015). "Tarihte Türk – Ermeni Temasları Sonucunda Ortaya Çıkmış Bir Halk: Ermeni Kıpçakları veya Gregoryan K" [A People Emerged as A Result of Historical Turkic – Armenian Contact: The Armeno-Kipchaks or Gregorian Kipchaks]. Journal of Turkish Studies (in Turkish). 10 (8): 253. doi:10.7827/turkishstudies.8215.
4. Curtin, Philip D. (1984). Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 186. ISBN 0-521-26931-8. The Armenian trade northwest around the Black Sea was harder to maintain over long periods of time. In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, for example, it was very active. Armenians who settled at Crimean ports like Kaffa carried the overland trade to feed the Genoese seaborne trade diaspora to the Black Sea. These Crimean Armenians not only carried goods back toward their homeland; they also ran caravans still farther west through present-day Rumania and Poland and beyond to Nuremberg in Germany and Bruges in the Low Countries. Their colonies in Crimea were so large that the Genoese sometimes called it Armenia maritima. In that news base, Armenians also began to take on elements of the local, Tatar culture. They kept their Armenian identity, and loyalty to the Armenian church, but they began to speak Tatar as home language and even to write in with Armenian script.
5. "Armeno-Kipchak". Encyclopaedia of Islam. Vol. X. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers. 2000. pp. 708–709. The Armenians of south-western Ukraine (originating from the Crimean community) were in permanent contact with Kipcak Turks through their trading activities. As a result, they accepted this linguistic idiom as their administrative and religious language. Of this we possess many 16th-17th century records (official documents, language manuals, religious texts, etc.) which reflect a specific dialect of the Kipcak languages.