Manuk Abeghyan
5 March] 1865 in the village of Tazakand (modern-day Babak, Azerbaijan) in the Nakhichevan uezd of the Erivan Governorate of the Russian Empire.
[2] He attended a newly founded local school for about half a year, immediately showing great talent as a student.
That same year, he published a collection of poems titled Nmushner (Samples), which was received poorly and after which Abeghyan decided to abandon writing poetry.
His articles included reviews of books and plays and dealt with the contemporary issues of Armenian language, literature and theater.
Around this time, he translated into Armenian a number of works by European and Russian authors, most notably Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba.
Abeghyan desired to continue his work on Armenian folklore and literature using the most advanced scholarly methods of the time, and for this purpose he sought to acquire a higher education at a European university.
In 1895, Abeghyan left German for Paris and attended courses of the Faculty of Philology of Sorbonne University as an auditor, focusing mainly on literature and literary theory.
In 1898, Abeghyan successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled "Der armenische Volksglaube" (Armenian folk belief) at the University of Jena, examined by classicist and Armenologist Heinrich Gelzer.
In 1913, a critical edition of Khorenatsi's History of Armenia, which Abeghyan and Set Harutyunyan had been preparing since 1901, was published in Tiflis.
Abeghyan was appointed a member of the organizing committee, and the following year he was invited to Yerevan to teach at the newly opened university.
A year later, Abeghyan was invited to work in the Ministry of Justice of Armenia to further develop Armenian legal language.
He outlined his suggestions in a public lecture in Yerevan in 1921, proposing to carry out the spelling reform gradually over the course of several decades.
In 1940, the final round of spelling reform was implemented based on Abeghyan's proposals from 1921, establishing the orthography that is used in Armenia to this day.
In 1921, Abeghyan was elected a member of the Armenian Relief Committee, aimed at improving the humanitarian situation in Armenia.
In 1931, he published a new version of the book Hayots’ lezvi tesut’yun (Theory of the Armenian language) and the monograph Hin gusanakan zhoghovrdakan yerger (Old bardic folk songs).
In 1935, he was awarded with the title of Honored Scientist of the Armenian SSR and received the degree of Doctor of Social Sciences.
In 1933, he published the study Hayots’ lezvi taghach’ap’ut’yun (Metrics of the Armenian language).
He dedicated his efforts to organizing the large collection of Armenian folklore and songs, which he undertook forty years before with Komitas and left half-finished.
