[21], According to the 2011 Armenian Census there are 900 Greeks in Armenia. 33,509 of Armenia's citizens speak Kurdish as a first language (31,479 reported Yazidi while 2,030 reported Kurdish). Interestingly, the Armenian language has no grammatical gender. [20], Armenian joined the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 2001, which protects the languages of the minorities: Assyrian, Greek, Russian and Northern Kurdish. Although its level of competence has significantly decreased since Armenia's independence in 1991,[3] in 2010, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs have reported that about 70% of Armenia's population has the ability to speak Russian. Armenian exhibits more satemization than centumization, although it is not classified as belonging to either of these subgroups. Although Western and Eastern Armenian are often described as different dialects of the same language, many subdialects are not readily mutually intelligible. The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. This time Eastern Armenia was conquered from Qajar Iran by the Russian Empire, while Western Armenia, containing two thirds of historical Armenia, remained under Ottoman control. This alphabet and associated orthography is used by most Armenian speakers of the Republic of Armenia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Atkinson). It has 6.7 million speakers throughout the world with Cyprus, Poland and Romania also recognizing Armenian as one of their minority languages. [26] It is of interest to linguists for its distinctive phonological developments within that family. Ghazaryan. 50% of Armenians think that English should be taught in public secondary schools compared to 44% preferring Russian. According to the Constitution of Armenia, Armenian is also the official language of Armenia. W. St. Clair Tisdall. Graeco-Aryan has comparatively wide support among Indo-Europeanists who believe the Indo-European homeland to be located in the Armenian Highlands, the "Armenian hypothesis". Neither the alphabet nor the orthography has been adopted by Diaspora Armenians, including Eastern Armenian speakers of Iran and all Western Armenian speakers, who keep using the traditional alphabet and spelling. The Journal of Indo-European Studies, Volume 39, Number 1&2. Greek influence on the syntax of the Armenian Bible translation is limited, but later translations show the adaptation of Greek syntactic features. Gradually, the interests of the population at large were reflected in other literary works as well. [6], Evaluation of the hypothesis is tied up with the analysis of Indo-European languages, such as Phrygian and languages within the Anatolian subgroup (such as Hittite), many of which are poorly attested, but which were geographically located between the Greek and Armenian-speaking areas, and which would therefore be expected to have traits intermediate between the two. For example, ուսուցիչ (usuts'ich, "teacher") becomes ուսուցչուհի (usuts'chuhi, female teacher). [10], Hypothetical common ancestor of Greek and Armenian languages, "Language-tree Divergence Times Support the Anatolian Theory of Indo-European Origin", "A Comparison of Phylogenetic Reconstruction Methods on an Indo-European Dataset", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Graeco-Armenian&oldid=981846180, Short description with empty Wikidata description, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 4 October 2020, at 19:10. Even when speaking in pronouns, there is no way to distinguish between masculine and feminine. "Speakers of Armenian appear to have replaced an earlier population of Urartian speakers (see Ch. By the 1980s over 90% of Armenia's administrative paperwork was conducted in Russian. [5] A 1999 study showed that about 40% of the population is fluent in Russian. Journal of Language Relationship • Вопросы языкового родства • 10 (2013) • Pp. Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics. Google's free service instantly translates words, phrases, and web pages between English and over 100 other languages. Armenian is written in its own writing system, the Armenian alphabet, introduced in 405 AD by the priest Mesrop Mashtots. Given that these borrowings do not undergo sound changes characteristic of the development of Armenian from Proto-Indo-European, he dates their borrowing to a time before the written record but after the Proto-Armenian language stage. (ed.) This project began with the simple idea of commemorating the centennial of the Armenian Genocide in a unique and interesting way, by leveraging social media and the internet. Negative verbs are conjugated differently from positive ones (as in English "he goes" and "he does not go") in many tenses, otherwise adding only the negative չ to the positive conjugation. Third periodic reports of states parties due in 2003: Lebanon", "Armenians and the 2000 Parliamentary Elections in Lebanon", "New Glendale traffic safety warnings in English, Armenian, Spanish", "Intersections: Bad driving signals a need for reflection", "Greco-Armenian: The persistence of a myth", "Notes on Anatolian loanwords in Armenian", "Hurro-Urartian Borrowings in Old Armenian", "ARMENIA AND IRAN iv. The hypothesis that Greek is Armenian's closest living relative originates with Holger Pedersen (1924), who noted that the number of Greek-Armenian lexical cognates is greater than that of agreements between Armenian and any other Indo-European language. Sinai in Egypt today. Graeco-Aryan unity would have become divided into Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian by the mid-third millennium BC. The Armenian language (classical: հայերէն; reformed: հայերեն [hɑjɛˈɾɛn] hayeren) is an Indo-European language that is the only language in the Armenian branch. Apart from several morphological, phonetic, and grammatical differences, the largely common vocabulary and generally analogous rules of grammatical fundamentals allows users of one variant to understand the other as long as they are fluent in one of the literary standards.[60]. Tocharian There is evidence of both Syriac and Greek influence in the translation of the Bible completed by 436 AD into what we now call Classical Armenian, Grabar (or Krapar). Some linguists tentatively conclude that Armenian, Greek (and Phrygian) and Indo-Iranian were dialectally close to each other;[27][28][29][30] within this hypothetical dialect group, Proto-Armenian was situated between Proto-Greek (centum subgroup) and Proto-Indo-Iranian (satem subgroup). [3], Because of political and historical reasons, Russian is the most common foreign language spoken by the majority of Armenians. According to the 2011 Armenian Census there are 900 Greeks in Armenia. Also, although Armenian and Attic (Ancient) Greek share a voiceless aspirate series, they originate from different PIE series (in Armenian from voiceless consonants and in Greek from the voiced aspirates). Antoine Meillet (1925, 1927) further investigated morphological and phonological agreement, postulating that the parent languages of Greek and Armenian were dialects in immediate geographical proximity in the Proto-Indo-European period. [2] Meillet's hypothesis became popular in the wake of his Esquisse d'une grammaire comparée de l'arménien classique. Clicking Export to Refworks will open a new window, or an existing window if Refworks is open already. [12], The 2001 census revealed 29,563 people with Russian as their native language, from which 14,728 were ethnic Armenians. [15], The popularity of English has been growing since Armenia's independence in 1991. Its long history makes Greek one of the oldest among the languages spoken in Europe. Speakers of Armenian are recorded as being in what now constitutes eastern Turkey and Armenia as early as the 6th century bce, but the oldest Armenian texts date from the 5th century ce. Wikipedia: “Bible translations” Sources differ on the place of articulation of these consonants. Loan words from Iranian languages, along with the other ancient accounts such as that of Xenophon above, initially led linguists to erroneously classify Armenian as an Iranian language. The Graeco-Armenian hypothesis originated in 1924 with Holger Pedersen, who noted that agreements between Armenian and Greek lexical cognates are more common than between Armenian and any other Indo-European language.