The Armenian Church annually celebrates “Holy Translators’ Day” on the second Saturday of October as the holiday of Armenian literature and culture revived by the first translations of Mesrop Mashtots and his godsons. The opening of the celebration takes place in village Oshakan, near the monument devoted to Armenian alphabet. This year we celebrate the “Translators’ Day” on October 8. The invention of the alphabet in 405 became the token of preservation of Armenian identity as language and literature saved Armenians from estrangement. Here is how the Armenian letters were born. Mesrop Mashtots perceived the danger that thundered over the preservation of state unity. The solution to this problem
became revelation of alphabet. Was it a dream or a phantom, nobody knows; Mashtots saw a hand writing characters while praying. After opening first educational institutes in Armenia, Mashtots began translating the Bible into Armenian to create Armenian Christian literature. He translated it so perfectly that famous French scientist La Croze called Armenian translation of The Bible the ”Queen of Translations”. The first sentence to have been translated into Armenian from the “Proverb Book” of Solomon Wise is “Attend wisdom and discipline; understand words of insight”, which testifies that Armenian alphabet is Our Lord’s grace to Armenians.
Long live our saint translators, who created a unique culture and a perfect language, which give us opportunity easily to pronounce any word in any language due to its sound system which contains 39 sounds, more than any other language in the world. Armenian alphabet is phonemic; its uniqueness is the fact that each letter corresponds to one single phoneme, and each phoneme is always represented by the same letter. Moreover, everyone can notice the unique similarity and difference of Armenian fonts at the same time as our letters differ from each other only by a single particle. Today the only thing Armenians can do is to pray and wish the spirit of Translators and their grace to remain with each Armenian!
