Language/Armenian/Grammar/Prepositions-and-Postpositions

Prepositions and Postpositions in Armenian

In the Armenian language there are both prepositions and postpositions.

Most common used Prepositions

The chart below lists most commonly used prepositions, their translations and sentences using the prepositions are presented. The list also suggests a strategy to build grammatically correct sentences with these prepositions.

Postpositions taking objects which have the form of the genitive case

The objects of above prepositions that require objects in dative case, do not get the definite article ը or ն: As examples above suggest չնայած and հակառակ are exceptions. All of the below postpositions take objects which have the form of the genitive case. Some of these postpositions actually take objects in dative but these objects never take the definite article. See the remark below the chart.

Postpositions requiring Ablatives

Not all postpositions require objects in genitive case.

Some postpositions require ablatives. For instance:

* If the prepositions ըստ, առանց and postpositions հետ, մոտ and համար refer to pronouns ես, դու, մենք, and դուք, these pronouns stand in dative. Thus, “about me” translates as ինձ համար, (and not իմ համար), “near you” translates as քեզ մոտ, “without us” translates as առանց մեզ, “in you” translates as “քեզ մեջ”, “ձեզ մեջ” etc.

Some commonly used prepositions in English are rendered by case endings or a combination of case endings and postpositions in Armenian. We have already learned about many of these instances when we learned the cases of the Armenian language.

Sources

https://slaviccenters.duke.edu/sites/slaviccenters.duke.edu/files/handbook_of_armenian.pdf

Other Lessons

• Participles
• Past Progressive Tense
• Questions
• There Is and There Are
• The Dative and Accusative Cases
• Simple Past
• Causative Verbs
• The Present Simple
• Nouns
• Word Order