Re: Armenian (was: Re: ISO 639-3 changes, part 3)
"Pyatt, Elizabeth J" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.ietf.languages |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
I was able to reach out to Bert Vaux for his take on Western vs. Eastern Armenian would be. He did favor treating them as separate languages, but added some notes on intelligibility and community history. The best person to talk with is Luc Baronian, a phonologist in Canada who has been active in the western armenian lg code movement (and similar movements, e.g. to add certain characters to unicode). ... I am in favor of having two separate codes, if that's what you mean? Or are you asking if SWA and SEA are separate languages? Until 1991 there was asymmetric intelligibility: Easterners could generally understand Western Armenian because there are many western refugee communities in the Republic of Armenia from the genocide period, but westerners had extremely limited contact to eastern speakers. Since 1991 the picture has changed somewhat, especially in areas like Los Angeles where western and eastern speakers now co-exist in large numbers. In terms of phonological, morphological, and syntactic differences, the distance between SWA and SEA is comparable to that between e.g. Spanish and Italian. In sociopolitical terms, most (or perhaps even all) Armenians would say that the two varieties are dialects of the same language. B Hope some of this is useful. Elizabeth =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D. Accessibility IT Consultant Teaching and Learning with Technology Penn State University [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>, (814) 865-0805 or (814) 865-2030 (Main Office) The 300 Building, 112 304 West College Avenue University Park, PA 16802 http://accessibility.psu.edu _______________________________________________ Ietf-languages mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages