Medz Yeghern, the Silenced Name: Language, Politics, and the Armenian Genocide

Matiossian, Vartan · 2022

Matiossian traces the genealogy of the word yeghern and the shift of its primary meaning from 'evil' to 'crime,' 'massacre' and 'genocide' over the past century and a half. He shows that a nineteenth-century learned conflation of the Classical Armenian homophones yeghern (crime) and yegher (lamentation) produced the secondary sense 'tragedy, calamity,' collapsing cause and consequence into one word. Because yeghern is used only with active verbs, he argues, it indicates cause and points to the perpetrator. That ambiguity was then exploited in Turkey and the United States, with interpretive denial adopting 'Medz Yeghern' precisely to avoid the word 'genocide' by rendering it 'Great Catastrophe.' He proposes the correct literal translation is 'Great Crime.'

Citation checked against the publisher's record on 2026-07-13.