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Hemsince is a Turkish word used to describe a language spoken by the Hemshinli, an ethnic group living in northeastern Turkey. Its native speakers also use the word Homshetsma to refer to their language.
Hemsince is a spoken language amongst the Eastern Hemshinli, also known as the Hopa Hemshinli, who live in a small number of villages in Turkey's Artvin province. The Western Hemshinli, a related but geographically separate group living in Rize province, also spoke it until sometime in the 19th century. They now speak only Turkish but preserve within it many Hemsince loanwords. [1] A third group, the northern Homshentsik, who live in Abkhazia and Russia, also speak a variety of Homshetsma.
The language existed only in spoken form until 1995, when the linguist Bert Vaux designed an orthographic system for it based on the Turkish alphabet.
Hemsince/Homshetsma has linguistic features that indicate it belongs to the western Armenian dialect group; however, the two are generally not mutually intelligible. [2] Hemsince has close ties to the Armenian dialects formerly found in north-eastern Turkey, in particular in Hodorchur and, to a lesser extent, in Trebizond. Because of its extended isolation Hemsince also contains many archaisms that set it apart from all other Armenian dialects. The language preserves forms found only in Classical and Middle Armenian, and at the same time preserves foreign (especially Arab and Turkish) grammatical and lexical components that were stripped from modern Armenian during the nineteenth century. "Homshetsma therefore gives us one of our only glimpses of Armenian in its 'pure' form", writes Bert Vaux.
References
- ^ Uwe Blaesing, "Armenian in the vocabulary and culture of the Turkish Hemshinli", in "The Hemshin" 2007 edited by H. Simonian
- ^ Bert Vaux, "Homshetsma,The language of the Armenians of Hamshen", in "The Hemshin" 2007 edited by H. Simonian
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