Say hello to the The Grabar Cheatsheet, a Classical Armenian study tool. Its a basically a reference tool which sums up commonly used grammatical forms in Grabar (the transliterated Armenian word for Classical Armenian), and should be useful for students, scholars, or clergy who study or use Classical Armenian.

Some Background

Armenian is an ancient language of the Indo-European family of languages. It was first written in the 5^th century when the Armenian Alphabet was developed by St. Mesrob Mashtots. Since then, Classical Armenian or Գրաբար (pronounced “Grabar”) has been the means by which the faith of the Armenian Church and Armenian History has been transmitted through the centuries. Classical Armenian, as with other languages, has since evolved over two periods, the first being Middle Armenian and the later being Modern Armenian.

The liturgical language of today’s Armenian Church is Classical Armenian, and for this reason its important for our clergymen to be very proficient with the language. Also, a rich library of theologically and historically relevant manuscripts exist today only in Classical Armenian, therefore the language is important to scholars of many fields.

As a seminarian still early on my Classical Armenian training its already become clear to me that there are certain aspects of the language that I’m constantly going to be referring to my notes in order to remember. It also became clear that the Internet is lacking in short and concise reference material about Classical Armenian grammar.

So I created The Grabar Cheatsheet as a quick & dirty reference tool for people like me who are studying this rather difficult language. It would also be useful for those who have already passed their studies, but need a refresher from time to time.

It’s Open Source

I’d like to see this website evolve over time and reformat, modify, or add information in order to make it more useful. I’d definitely like to see it translated into Armenian in the very near future. Toward this end the website has been released as open source software, with the source code hosted on GitHub, and the content has been released under the Creative Commons License. This means that people are encouraged to download the source, make any changes they see fit, and submit it for reincorporation back in to the site. They can also non-commercially republish the material as they see fit as long as they include necessary attribution information.

It’s Mobile Friendly

One of my goals with the site was to make sure I could call the page up on my mobile phone whenever the necessity arose. The website should work great on Smartphones and most regular mobile phones won’t have a problem reading the site as well, as long as they have Unicode support.

Have you ever had a late night fight in a bar about the proper first person accusative possessive declension? When that happens again, you can just whip out your phone and all up the Grabar Cheatsheet. There is a bonus! If you save the webpage to your iPhone home screen, you’ll get a nifty little icon (see figure 2).

Enjoy

I mostly wrote this site for myself, but I hope that over time it will be useful for rare persons that find themselves in a situation similar to mine.