ABSTRACT
The thirty-six letters devised early in the fifth century AD by Bishop Mesrop Mashtots to notate the sounds of Classical Armenian have fitted the language so well that hardly any subsequent modification has proved necessary. As Emile Benveniste wrote: 'un analyste moderne n'aurait presque rien à y changer' (quoted in Minassian, 1976: 31). The letters $ and 0 were added in the twelfth century, 0 representing a shift in the pronunciation of -av to /o/, while $ was introduced to denote /f/, a sound alien to Armenian, found in loan-words.
