It contains numerous loanwords from Parthian, and also from Greek, Syriac, Latin and other languages such as Uratian. Some of the commonly used ligatures are: ﬓ (մ+ն), ﬔ (մ+ե), ﬕ (մ+ի), ﬖ (վ+ն), ﬗ (մ+խ), և (ե+ւ), etc. [citation needed] Metrodorus was a close friend and a court historian of the Armenian emperor Tigranes the Great and also wrote his biography. There are four principal calligraphic hands of the script. - Vonce es? Erkatagir, or "ironclad letters", seen as Mesrop's original, was used in manuscripts from the 5th to 13th century and is still preferred for epigraphic inscriptions. I confess, I still don’t know all the names of all the letters, or the numbers they stand for if you’re using them numerically… I still don’t know the alphabet song. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account.

Then you build from there with “lookalikes” and “soundalikes.” There are still a few oddball letters that you might just have to memorize, but this strategy dramatically reduces that number.

London, 2001: The British Library. The number and order of the letters have changed over time.

[10] Traditionally, the following phrase translated from Solomon's Book of Proverbs is said to be the first sentence to be written down in Armenian by Mashtots: Ճանաչել զիմաստութիւն եւ զխրատ, իմանալ զբանս հանճարոյ:Čanačʿel zimastutʿiun yev zxrat, imanal zbans hančaroy.To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding. By using our site, you agree to our. [8] The alphabet was therefore most probably created between the conversion of Iberia under Mirian III (326 or 337) and the Bir el Qutt inscriptions of 430,[9] contemporaneously with the Armenian alphabet.

1998.

For about 250 years, from the early 18th century until around 1950, more than 2,000 books in the Turkish language were printed using the Armenian alphabet. For instance, the first novel to be written in Turkish in the Ottoman Empire was Vartan Pasha's 1851 Akabi Hikayesi, written in the Armenian script. From 1922 to 1924, Soviet Armenia adopted a reformed spelling of the Armenian language. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. An American correspondent in Marash in 1864 calls the alphabet "Armeno-Turkish", describing it as consisting of 31 Armenian letters and "infinitely superior" to the Arabic or Greek alphabets for rendering Turkish.

"Armenian Art", page584. It’s the “Learn to Read Armenian” course, here: The lessons are structured so that you’re not learning the alphabet in alphabetical order, but from most to least familiar.

I kept wanting to learn things I could put into practice right away, and brute memorization of shapes and letters felt super intimidating. or Eench bes ess/eq? What finally helped was a series of lessons I discovered through St. Nersess’ e-learning module.

To create this article, 34 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. Armenian is written horizontally, left-to-right.[4]. This article has been viewed 45,566 times.

Information on Armenian character set encoding.