Asyndetic Verbal Pairs in the Classical Armenian Gospels and Their Treatment in the Other Five First Millennium ce Indo-European Versions

The fifth century ce Classical Armenian version of the Gospels contains around 100 instances of asyndetic verbal pairs in which the first verb, usually a verb of motion, occurs adjacent to another verb with a more specific lexical value (cf. Engl. Come join us). This phenomenon differs sharply from what one finds in the five other oldest Indo-European versions of the Gospel text (Greek, Gothic, Latin, Old Church Slavic, and Old English). Two-thirds of the time the Armenian text stands alone in showing these pairs, and the rate of its being matched in the other versions is 28% (Vulgate), 23% (Greek), 15.6% (Old Church Slavic), 10.3% (Gothic), and 4% (Old English). Several subsidiary conclusions emerge from this study. First, the Old English of the Gospels has practically banished asyndeton. This correlates with the highest percentage in our data of verb + conjunction + verb: (61%). Second, the characteristic conjunctive participle + verb construction of Biblical Greek (48% of the passages considered in this study) is on the wane in the Vulgate (15%), and is virtually nonexistent in Old English (1%).