The book offers a comprehensive treatment of Classical Armenian nouns as transmitted in the 5th century Bible translation. Beside a synchronic classification and functional investigation of the individual stem classes, suffixes and nominal compounds, the main stress has been laid on the historical evaluation, in particular in connection with the inherited formational types and isolated, lexicalized relics. The historical-comparative approach to the Armenian material has resulted in a number of new suggestions and modifications of earlier theories, summarized in two sections on the general development of Indo-European into Armenian, one on phonology and one on morphology where an occasional tentative glimpse at the pre-history of the proto-language is ventured. The non-indigenous parts of the vocabulary, mostly Iranian loanwords and words of a more or less obscure origin, are listed in appendices.