Re: Armenian (was: Re: ISO 639-3 changes, part 3)
Caoimhin O Donnaile <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.ietf.languages |
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| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
I know this is peripheral to Doug’s need to know whether one, both, or neither of the variant subtags for Armenian are to be deprecated, but just out of interest I forwarded the discussion on the linguistic distance between Eastern and Western Armenian to a linguist friend who spoke Armenian with her family when young, although she says she is now a bit rusty. Enclosed below is her reply. Caoimhín ----------------- That was an interesting discussion! I have some experience with Eastern/Western Armenian - though both are badly deteriorated - and it sounds about right. My cousin, a fluent speaker of Western Armenian from Istanbul said she struggled quite a bit in Armenia, and was surprised by it. In my little experience, there are some different ways of using verbs - the normal present tense in Western Armenian is a future aorist in Eastern, etc and definitely lexicon - in Western Armenian the word I know for hungry is "anoti", while in Eastern it is "sovadz". This is a really important word to know! The thing that I have the hardest time with, though, is that Eastern Armenian distinguishes between aspirated and unaspirated stops, while Western Armenian, which I heard as a child, does not. I think Eastern Armenian has more cases as well (a functional locative! Though I think it shows up in crystallized forms in Western). And I suppose with any language that has a widely-spread diaspora, there are pretty significant dialect differences under these two umbrella terms. There's also Hemşin,which has an interesting history. I know Bert Vaux has done quite a bit of work on Armenian dialects , including Hemşin, for the interested. _______________________________________________ Ietf-languages mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages