Previously Unattested Lexical Variants in the Documents of Armenian Community of Kamieniec (16th–17th Centuries)

This article examines previously unrecorded lexical variants found within a corpus of documents produced by the Polish-Armenian community. The study focuses on attested variations of indigenous Old and Middle Armenian words, as well as borrowings from Polish and Latin. The primary sources for this research are a chronicle (covering 1430–1652) and the court proceedings of the Armenian law court in Kamieniec. It is argued that Polish Armenians predominantly acquired foreign vocabulary through oral transmission. Consequently, borrowed lexemes often retained phonetic features characteristic of their source language's pronunciation. This mode of lexical acquisition, necessitated by the minority-language environment, facilitated effective communication with native speakers of the donor languages. The novelty of this work lies in its introduction into scholarly discourse of previously undocumented variants of both indigenous and loanwords used by the Polish Armenian diaspora. The analysis concludes that the presence of such lexical variation was largely due to the increasing influence of dialectal elements in the absence of a standardized pan-Armenian literary norm. Furthermore, these lexical variants serve as indirect evidence of the diverse contacts maintained by the Kamieniec community, its successful adaptation to a new linguistic and cultural milieu, and ongoing processes of integration. Ultimately, the examination of phonetically altered forms contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the sound system and lexical inventory of this specific diasporic vernacular.

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