Subject: Re: [Ietf-languages] Armenian (was: Re: ISO 639-3 changes, part 3)

From: Michael Everson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2018 09:20:43 +0000

We made that registration assuming that hy covered both and that they were mutually intelligible dialects. They are not mutually intelligible without a great deal of work. It is not like Danish and Swedish. It is more like Italian and Romanian.

There will be older data using “hy” for both, of course. This is a disunification.

> On 28 Feb 2018, at 09:14, Arthur Reutenauer <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
>> This is true.  I believe, however, that this has always meant Standard
>> (i.e. Eastern) Armenian, the national language of Armenia.
> 
>  That seems to be contradicted by the fact that we registered a subtag
> for Western Armenian, with [hy] as a prefix.
> 
>>                                                         The request at <
>> http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/cr_files/2017-023.pdf> says "The code
>> elements "hy". "hye", and "arm" function primarily to identify the national
>> language of the Republic of Armenia, and for stability we do not request
>> that these codes be changed."
> 
>  The quote does say “primarily”; I don’t interpret this as
> a statement by the requesters that [hy] only is used with the stricter
> meaning of Standard Armenian.

Primarily also refers to the number of (for instance) books catalogued using tags.

Michael

---

From: Kent Karlsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2018 11:21:03 +0100

http://www.elinguistics.net gives:

"The genetic proximity between Danish and Norwegian(bokmal) is:  3,7".
"The genetic proximity between Danish and Swedish is:  15,7".
"The genetic proximity between Spanish and Portuguese is:  19,4".
"The genetic proximity between Danish and Norwegian(nynorsk) is:  23,1".
"The genetic proximity between Italian and Romanian is:  29,4".
"The genetic proximity between Spanish and French is:  37,1".

"The genetic proximity between Armenian and Armenian_(Eastern) is:  5,0".
"The genetic proximity between Armenian and Armenian_(Classical) is:  35,4".

I have no idea how accurate that is (nor how to exactly interpret the
numbers, and even less how they were derived). Just wanted to get some
comparison. But I take it that Michael means that the distance between
Armenian and Armenian_(Eastern) should be around 20-30 on that scale.

There is also: 
https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17400/worldwide-map-or-data-
for-linguistic-distance (a bit down on the page there is a table with
numbers; slightly different from the above ones). Neither the maps nor the
table cover Armenian, though.

/Kent K

Den 2018-03-01 10:20, skrev "Michael Everson" <[email-masked]>:

> We made that registration assuming that hy covered both and that they were
> mutually intelligible dialects. They are not mutually intelligible without a
> great deal of work. It is not like Danish and Swedish. It is more like Italian
> and Romanian.

There will be older data using ³hy² for both, of course. This
> is a disunification.

---

From: Mark Davis ☕️ <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2018 17:03:12 +0100

Just spoke to a colleague who is a native Western Armenian. She said that
while it sounds strange at first, she adjusted to it in a few days.
Afterwards there were occasional loan-words from Russian that she didn't
understand, but those with her always knew the western equivalent, and just
rephrased.

That really sounds like the proximity is in the realm of separate dialect
rather than separate language.

Mark

Mark

On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 11:21 AM, Kent Karlsson <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> _______________________________________________
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>

---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2018 12:10:28 -0500

Yes, people are amazingly good at adjusting to weird phonologies, even with
many mergers and shifts.  The two main obstacles to mutual intelligibility
are vocabulary (interlocution is one thing, but you don't want to have to
read Eastern Armenian with a dictionary in hand to deal with the loanwords)
and orthography (EA has a Soviet orthography; WA and the Iranian variety of
EA continue to use the classical orthography, which dates from the 5C and
is less phonetic).

On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 11:03 AM, Mark Davis ☕️ <[email-masked]> wrote:

>> for-linguistic-distance
>> <https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17400/worldwide-map-or-data-for-linguistic-distance>
>> (a bit down on the page there is a table with

---

From: Michael Everson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2018 21:51:28 +0000

Such an anecdote isn’t sufficient, which is why I was asked by the Western Armenians to help get an ISO 639 language code so that Western Armenians could actually USE a Wikipedia in a language they understood.

I attach here the proposal, which demonstrates quite clearly that in all respects the two Armenians are not one.

> On 1 Mar 2018, at 16:03, Mark Davis ☕️ <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Just spoke to a colleague who is a native Western Armenian. She said that while it sounds strange at first, she adjusted to it in a few days. Afterwards there were occasional loan-words from Russian that she didn't understand, but those with her always knew the western equivalent, and just rephrased.
> 
> That really sounds like the proximity is in the realm of separate dialect rather than separate language.
> 
> Mark

---

From: Caoimhin O Donnaile <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2018 11:37:59 +0000 (GMT)

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.