[Travels & Voyages] Bellaud M.D. [&] Jacques Chahan de Cirbied. Essai sur la Langue Armenienne.
Paris: De l'Imprimerie Impériale, 1812.
First edition, octavo, half-title/privilege leaf present before general title page; title in Armenian above the French; a large copy with deckle edges, untrimmed throughout; text in Armenian and French throughout; some toning to contents, bound in modern half parchment and marbled paper boards, 8 1/2 x 5 1/4 in.
Bellaud published this preliminary work at the behest of Empress Josephine. In his preface, he notes that he had no Armenian-French or even Armenian-Latin dictionary of any worth to rely upon for this work, mentioning the limited usefulness of the Jesuit Rivola's Dictionarium Armeno-Latinum of 1632. According to Bellaud, the very first Armenian word in the title of the Rivola dictionary is incorrect. Bellaud also refers to the help he received from Chahan de Cirbied, a native speaker and professor of the Armenian language at the School of Living Oriental Languages in Paris. Chahan de Cirbied also published several other books on the subject. Bellaud's goals are modest, he hopes to provide the curious student the first building blocks required to learn the language easily, and not an exhaustive grammar with rules of syntax. This task he leaves to his collaborator, who he says will publish a complete Armenian grammar elsewhere, "où il exposera, avec tous les détails nécessaires, les règles de sa langue maternelle."
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