According to Wikipedia, "linguists classify Armenian as an independent branch of the Indo-European language family" and "Armenian has its own unique script, the Armenian alphabet, invented in 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots"[1].
As a Turkish citizen who lived on the other side of the border for 23 years, I was not aware that Armenian had such a unique script and grammar. Is it harder to learn than the Latin alphabet? I'm curious because we apparently switched to Latin script for writing Turkish from Arabic script just because of the steep learning curve (at least that's what they had thought us at school).
That's one reason why I chose Yerevan, actually! Old Armenian (1600 years old) and modern Armenian are fairly similar! Same writing system with only small changes, and modern Armenians (or at least the handful of random Armenians I've asked) can understand old Armenian. It takes a good bit of extra effort, but it's definitely possible.
The Cyrillic script[1] and the Armenian alphabet[2] were also devised in similar fashion, and probably many more. It is not unusual for writing systems or alphabets to find widespread usage in this manner.
At the same time though, the new Turkish state pushed universal literacy as a policy goal and invested enormously in it in a way that the Ottoman empire didn't at all. It's very difficult to extract from data of that period (which may also have been manipulated for political purposes) how much of that change as due to the script vs other factors.
While I don't think it's controversial that phonetically written languages are easier to learn at first, nor that the Turkish Ottoman alphabet based on Arabic was not ideal for writing Turkish, I don't think it was uniquely difficult.
I think it's about as difficult as writing English correctly using our alphabet, which is to say it is harder than Spanish but much easier than writing Chinese languages.
Note that literacy rates in Arabic speaking parts of the Ottoman empire - most of it - where the script and the language matched was also low. You can make the argument that Arabic diglossia was responsible for some of that but still)
We found some old Armenian letters in my family and it was really really hard to find someone who could read and translate. I don’t speak or read it but that was our experience.
Here what they looked like. It’s hard to compare with the low Rez but seems like not a match with this old Armenian..
I definitely was able to use some external clues from the videos even though they try to blur the hints. I would not necessarily guess Armenian from Turkish immediately but I am sure able to differentiate between Latin derived Turkish script on the screen and Armenian script.
I don't really know enough about Turkic languages to say whether Latin is a better fit for them than Arabic, or not. I would expect modern Turkish alphabet to be better at it, if only because it was specifically designed for that purpose, and not just organically adopted the way Arabic was.
But my point wasn't about which one is a better fit, but rather which one was historically used for that particular language first, and for the longest period of time, and used to produce the most past cultural artifacts. And in this case, it would be Arabic.
IIRC, proto-sinaitic gave birth to Phoenician and Arabic (with some lost alphabets like Moabite in there somewhere). Phoenician is the main branch, often called the original alphabet, and its two children are Aramaic and Greek, with alphabets in the "east" being likely descended from Aramaic (Brahmi script, proto-Farsi and Parthian, Syrian) and those in the "west" descendent from Greek (Latin, Armenian, Cyrillic, Coptic). Thus you would in fact expect Mongolian, being in the east, to be an offshoot of Aramaic if you knew it had an alphabet (it could be like Mandarin without an alphabet). That's the real question -- does it have an alphabet or not.
I only say this because a lot of people think that Aramaic script is some exotic thing, but it was the official language of the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire, which was quite large, stretching from India to North Africa, and Aramaic was a lingua franca of that era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire
its an interesting read and I acknowledge the intent to keep the traditional and authentic writing system for Urdu.
I have a few thoughts on this though. One would be the legibility. Of course I cannot judge legibility of writing systems I do not like, but it seems that nastaliq would be hardly readable on a lot of mobile devices and I wonder how difficult learning the ornate script is. I am talking about alphabetization here.
Next thing is: I am learning turkish and turkish is written in the roman alphabet. As far as I know, it was written in a arabic/persian script before which was then reformed to use the latin alphabet. As far as I can tell this is today really uncontroversial and using the latin alphabet is actually the more suitable alphabet for turkish and its rich vowel system that is really important for grammar and meaning. Again I cannot really say anything for Urdu, but knowing it is not arabic but afaik a language of the indo-european family I wonder if there are more reasons to use the lating alphabet than just availability of nataliq fonts and rendering engines.
As a side note I would add a few observations relating to the cultural/heritage aspects. In Germany, the "Fraktur" was used widely even at the beginning of the 20th century (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur ). Some authors, like Hermann Hesse refused that Antiqua fonts would be used for their writings until publishers convinced them that their works could just not be read by young folks. In a way, a lot of people argued against using non-gothic fonts, but in the end antiqua became quite standard. Nowadays we use the lating alphabet (and most people are not concious about that there ever was a switch).
I don't like the title but had to keep it original. Basically, for the names of gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, lead, and mercury in old Armenian, the indexes of the letters sum to the atomic number of the respective element. The creator of the alphabet didn't know this because it was the year 405.
It was the attempt to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs into Phoenician which led to all of today's alphabetic languages. Archaeologists recently found a temple in the Jordan area in which the earliest known attempt at an alphabetic language was written; it was a translation between Egyptian and Phoenician.
Alphabetic, non pictographic languages are an order of magnitude easier to learn and express than pictographic languages, which require rote memorization of hundreds to thousands of pictographs and their modifiers. In contrast, the language you're reading this post in allows you to guess the sound of the words by the spelling, which is simply impossible in, say, Mandarin.
Well, in the case of Turkish, the old works were still in Turkish, except they were written in arabic alphabet. They were just republished in latin alphabet.
It is a writing system found in Eurasia. Hit its wikipedia pages, on the right hand side there'll be a little thingie that lists 'parent systems', you can follow it back to Phoenician which also happens to be an ancestor of the Latin alphabet.
As a Turkish citizen who lived on the other side of the border for 23 years, I was not aware that Armenian had such a unique script and grammar. Is it harder to learn than the Latin alphabet? I'm curious because we apparently switched to Latin script for writing Turkish from Arabic script just because of the steep learning curve (at least that's what they had thought us at school).
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_language
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