Armeno-Kipchak language

Extinct Turkic language of Crimea From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Armeno-Kipchak (Xıpçaχ tili, Tatarça)^[2] was a Turkic language belonging to the Kipchak branch of the family that was spoken among Armenians in Crimea during the 14th–15th centuries and later in Armenian communities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The language is documented in a number of texts dating to the 16th–17th centuries, written in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Armenian script. Armeno-Kipchak resembles the language of Codex Cumanicus, which was compiled in the 13th century.^[1]

NativetoPolish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

RegionCrimea

EthnicityArmenians (Armeno–Kipchaks)

Extinct17th century^[1]

Quick facts Native to, Region ...

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

Speakers of the Armeno-Kipchak were Armenians who adopted the Kipchak language considered to be linguistically assimilated Armenians.^[3]^[4] Armeno-Kipchak-speakers generally identified as Armenian.^[3]

History

Armenians began settling in Crimea in the 11th century and adopted the Kipchak language in the 14th and 15th centuries.^{[citation needed]}

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.

The Armenians of Crimea maintained Armenian as their liturgical language only. In Galicia and Podolia, Armenians wrote their legal documents in Armeno-Kipchak, using the Armenian script. These Armenians continued to use Armeno-Kipchak when writing letters until the end of the 17th century, when they adopted Polish.^[5]

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 surviving Armeno-Kipchak texts (112 texts in total) were written in the Armenian script between 1521 and 1669. They consist of tens of thousands of pages. These texts 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)

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]
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.
[4]
Golden, Peter B.; et al. (2000). "Turks". Encyclopaedia of Islam. Vol. X (2nd ed.). Leiden: Brill. pp. 708–709. The Armenians of south-western Ukraine (originating from the Crimean community) were in permanent contact with Ḳi̊pčaḳ 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 Ḳi̊pčaḳ languages.
[5]
Nadel-Golobič, Eleonora (1979). "Armenians and Jews in Medieval Lvov: Their Role in Oriental Trade, 1400–1600". Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique. 20 (3): 361. doi:10.3406/cmr.1979.1366. ISSN 0008-0160.

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