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Ruskivyetr’s One Month Armenian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ruskivyetr Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5484 days ago 769 posts - 962 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Hebrew | Message 25 of 25 25 April 2010 at 12:57am | IP Logged | ||
Western Armenian dialects that were existent in the Caucasus were almost wiped out due to the Armenian genocide, as well as many other Western dialects in the diaspora that were contained within the Ottoman empire (those such as in Turkey and Lebanon). The Western Armenian standard is based on the dialect of Istanbul. Almost all Armenians in the diaspora speak Western, although some immigrant communities where Armenians from modern Armenia come are Eastern speaking. About 6.7 million people speak Armenian (both dialects). About 880,000 speak Western (both according to Wikipedia). So Eastern Armenian by far is the greater dialect in terms of numbers, although it has adopted a few spelling reforms (and that is only the Eastern Armenian spoken in Armenia, and other ex Soviet republics, the communities that speak Eastern in Iran and other places in the Caucasus that were not under Soviet control use the traditional orthography). There are some real basic differences that you can figure out by just looking at the first few lessons in Eastern and Western learning materials. First of all, many consonants that are voiced in Eastern are unvoiced in Western, such as the letters բ,տ, գ and more. The differences in orthography are mainly the disappearance of certain letters to make it easier to spell. The reason I am learning Eastern now (the Beginner's Armenian book was in Western), is that 1. All the Armenian on the internet is pretty much Eastern (wikipedia, news, etc.) 2. I would really like to go to Armenia someday and use it. 3. There are just more speakers of it. Plus, if I learned Eastern, the difficulty of speaking in Armenia would be minimized, as speaking to Eastern speakers as a Western speaker is difficult for someone who is not COMPLETELY fluent. Granted the grammatical differences are not extremely great, and there are just a few things that I would have to get used to, but I'd rather not have to do that with transitioning from Western to Eastern. I wouldn't have an opportunity to use Western anyway as I do not live near an Armenian community nor would I really have the opportunity to make a special trip somewhere where there is one. It would be unnecessary to learn Western for my purposes. However, those who have Armenian family would benefit from learning Western, as they could become fluent relatively fast, and they would be able to skip the difficulty of transitioning relatively quicker than someone who did not have any Armenian family members and got no active exposure to the language before going to Armenia. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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