Hrachia Acharian (, reformed spelling: Հրաչյա Աճառյան ; 8 March 1876 – 16 April 1953) was an Armenian linguist, lexicographer, etymologist, and philologist.
An Istanbul Armenian, Acharian studied at local Armenian schools and at the Sorbonne, under Antoine Meillet, and the University of Strasbourg, under Heinrich Hübschmann. He then taught in various Armenian communities in the Russian Empire and Iran before settling in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1923, working at Yerevan State University until his death.
A polyglot, Acharian compiled several major dictionaries, including the monumental Armenian Etymological Dictionary, extensively studied Armenian dialects, compiled catalogs of Armenian manuscripts, and authored comprehensive studies on the history of Armenian language and alphabet. Acharian is considered the father of Armenian linguistics.
Life
Acharian was born to Armenian parents in Constantinople (Istanbul) on 8 March 1876. He was blinded in one eye at an early age. His father, Hakob, was a shoemaker. He received initial education at the Aramian and Sahagian Schools in Samatya, then at the Getronagan (1889–93), where he learned French, Turkish, and Persian. He spoke the Constantinople (Istanbul) dialect of Armenian natively.
Upon graduation, he began teaching in Kadıköy, Constantinople, but in 1894 he moved to teach at the Sanasarian College in Erzurum. In 1895 he was accepted to the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he studied under, among others, Antoine Meillet. In 1897 he became a member of the Société de Linguistique de Paris (Linguistic Society of Paris), where he presented a study on the Laz language. He then met Heinrich Hübschmann and transferred to the University of Strasbourg in 1898.
Acharian moved to Russian (Eastern) Armenia and began a teaching career at the Gevorgian Seminary in Ejmiatsin (1898–1902). He thereafter taught in Shushi (1902–04), Nor Bayazet (1906–07), Nor Nakhichevan (1907–19), and then to Iran: Tehran (1919–20) and Tabriz (1920–1923). His subjects were Armenian, French, Turkish, Armenian history, literature, and accounting. Besides teaching, he studied Armenian dialects wherever he resided.
In 1923, Acharian became one of the most prominent Armenian scholars who moved to Soviet Armenia from the diaspora. Acharian taught at Yerevan State University (YSU) from 1923 until his death in 1953. He mostly taught Persian and Arabic and in 1940 initiated the establishment of the Department of Oriental Philology/Oriental Languages and Literature at YSU.
Acharian knew numerous languages: Armenian (both modern and classical), French, English, Greek, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, Russian, German, Italian, Latin, Kurdish, Sanskrit, Chaldean Neo-Aramaic, Avestan, Laz, Georgian, Middle Persian (Pahlavi).
He was arrested on 29 September 1937, at the height of the Stalinist purges, on espionage charges. He was accused of being a spy for numerous foreign countries (Britain, Turkey) and being a member of a counter-revolutionary group of professors. He was released on 19 December 1939 due to lack of evidence.
Acharian became a founding member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences when it was established in 1943. He had been a Corresponding Member of the Czechoslovak Oriental Institute since 1937.
He died in Yerevan on 16 April 1953. He is buried at the Tokhmakh cemetery.
Works
On Armenian dialects
In 1909 Acharian's first ever comprehensive study of Armenian dialects—Classification des dialectes arméniens ("Classification of Armenian Dialects")—was published in French in Paris. The publication was praised by Antoine Meillet. The Armenian edition (Հայ Բարբառագիտութիւն, Armenian Dialectal Studies) was published in 1911 with a map of the dialects. Acharian proposed a classification based on the present and imperfect indicative particles: -owm/-um (-ում) dialects, -kə/-gə (-կը) dialects, and -el (-ել) dialects.
In 1913 the Lazarev Institute published his Armenian Dialectal Dictionary (Հայերէն գաւառական բառարան). It includes some 30,000 words used in Armenian dialects. His studies on various Armenian dialects have also been published in separate books. These include publications on the dialects of Nor Nakhichevan (1925), Maragha (1926-30), Agulis (1935), Nor Jugha (1940), Constantinople (1941), Hamshen (1940), Van (1952), and Ardeal/Transylvania (1953).
In 1902 he published the first ever study of Turkish loan words in Armenian.