Literary Armenian needs special endearment today - publicist

Today marks the International Mother Language Day, an observance held annually worldwide to promote multilingualism and cultural diversity.

On this occasion, Tert.am talked to Vachagan Sargsyan, an Armenian writer, publicist, translator and editor who shared his ideas and concerns over the general attitude towards the Armenian language today. He noted with regret that the literary language, as a valuable heritage bequeathed by ancestors, does not receive the necessary attention and care nowadays.

Sargsyan said it is surprising to him that the local television channels do not have any special broadcasts devoted to the Armenian language, with no wealthy businessman or benefactor  ever seeming to think about funding such a project.

“What we received from our grandfathers is a wonderful heritage, the literary Armenian, which is a brilliant language arousing the world’s biggest nations' envy. So it is the biggest omission today that there is no state care, no endearment and reverence. Let us not forget that the literary language is the bridge uniting us. Once it is seized from our mouths, we will start quarreling with one another. We do not feel the literary language’s unifying potential which makes everybody an Armenian. It’s a very important thing,” he noted.

Sargsyan, who is the author of an Armenian ABC book for secondary schools, stresses the importance of dedicated efforts to enrich the language every day instead of making allegations that it has detached itself from our lives.

“And it is important to be in contact with, and enrich, the living language instead of reading its obituaries. We have never had compassionateness, never preserved what we have created. We had a motherland but did not manage to preserve it, handing it over to others because of internal wrangles,” the publicist noted.

He further criticized the frequently occurring habit of sharing transliterated messages in Latin letters, considering the practice tantamount to “engraving scripts on a mound”.

In the meantime he noted that foreign nations are often perplexed by the design and graphics of the Armenian letters.

“The Armenian letters live in the God’s heart; they were born from a divine spirit, from the stone and from pomegranate corns,” he said, also highly valuing the Armenian alphabets’ sound perfection.

As for the language in legislative drafting, Sargsyan said he finds it neither good nor bad, with the State Language Inspection never issuing special recommendation to legislators to encourage them to build a linguistically correct language. Sargsyan said he regrets that coarsened language traditions today do not leave room for such recommendations or corrections.