Talk:Eastern Armenian

Untitled
Are պ տ and կ really ejective?? My source says they're plain voiceless. If they are ejective, then the appropriate links are to ejective bilabial plosive etc. Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 07:41, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, definitely, and is the key difference between Eastern and Western phonology (along with some letter swaps). I am surprised that much of the literature doesn't mention this correctly.  Being in the Trans-Caucasus (a hotbed of languages with ejectives), in hindsight it's no surprise  that Eastern Armenian has this... (You can also take a look at Talk:Armenian_language/Archive_1.)
 * I hadn't realized the specific article. Will make the link. Thanks! Best regards. Serouj 07:48, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Declension table
Would be cool to get the Eastern Armenian orthography along with the IPA in the table. - Francis Tyers · 12:52, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Russian Armenian
An anonymous editor removed the reference to "Ռուսահայերեն", "Russian Armenian" in the lead sentence, but left the reference to Melkonian's book. Two questions: (i) Is "Ռուսահայերեն" a legitimate name for the language? (only 8 Goolgle hits unrelated to Wikipedia) (ii) Was the book menat to justify "Ռուսահայերեն"? If yes, then the reference should be removed as well. Andreas (T) 14:29, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I reverted those edits, including the changes to the book title and orthography. The book is written in traditional orthography, as is its title. Serouj (talk) 16:52, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I previously edited the orthography of the words at the beginning of this entry to match current Armenian, not traditional. I think an article teaching about Eastern Armenian should at least be written in actual Eastern Armenian orthography. I didn't, however, remove the aforementioned title (unless it was by accident, in which case I appologize). I'm okay with the title of the book being in whatever orthography that it is found in originally, but the other words keep getting changed back to "Western" orthography. This will confuse someone trying to learn Eastern Armenian, as it would have confused me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sbbullock (talk • contribs) 04:42, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Ejectives?
The issue of ejectives in Armenian came up recently when Mahtrqerin edited a few articles to say that what we've deemed plain voiceless stops are actually ejective in Standard Eastern Armenian (bilabial ejective, alveolar ejective, etc). These edits were undone, primarily by JorisvS and myself, partly on the grounds that this article and Armenian language say otherwise. The relevant footnote in this article says that ejectives are dialectal and non-standard. I've verified that this is correct for the source given for this claim (Dum-Tragut 2009), but I'm not sure if citing normative grammars is necessarily appropriate if linguistic literature otherwise contradicts it. The issue was brought up about four years ago at Talk:Armenian language, but it doesn't look like anything came of it (or, if it did, this has since been undone).

We should have a discussion about this to determine whether we should consider these sounds ejective, which would affect not only the articles on individual ejective consonants, but also WP:IPA for Armenian, which provides a guideline for IPA transcriptions of Armenian in Wikipedia articles. I'm not an expert in this subject, though I did find a relevant examination of the literature in Narineh Hacopian's 2003 (Journal of the IPA) article "A three-way VOT contrast in final position: data from Armenian." Here's the quote: "'Previous studies have classified the unaspirated voiceless stops of Eastern Armenian in various categories. Allen's (1950) account of the Eastern Armenian dialect of New Julfa identifies the voiceless unaspirated stops as ejectives. According to Fairbanks (1975) the Eastern Armenian voiceless unaspirated stops are glottalized stops because 'there is no release of breath, or aspiration' and because 'during the production of these consonants the vocal cords are closed and then released' (p. xvi). Fairbanks does not provide any acoustic data to verify his description. Fairbanks's sources include a speaker of Eastern Armenian from the (then) Armenian S.S.R. and a speaker from Tabriz, Iran. However, most other accounts of Eastern Armenian (Khachaturian 1988, Vaux 1998) do not classify the voiceless series as ejectives. According to her experimental data, Khachaturian (1996) says that while 'ejective articulation does exist in Armenian, it is not the norm' (p. 187). Along the same lines, Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996: 67) mention that several of their speakers probably had a 'glottal closure accompanying final unaspirated stops, and in some cases these sounds are weakly ejective'. However, Henton, Ladefoged & Maddieson (1992) classify these stops as voiceless unaspirated. The author, a native speaker of the SEA dialect spoken in Tehran and a trained phonetician, views these stops by Tehran SEA speakers to be simply voiceless unaspirated.' (Hacopian 2003:54-55)"

Thoughts? — Æµ§œš¹  [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 21:26, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

[ɹ] in Armenian dialects
Actually [ɹ] is present not only in Iranian Armenians' speech, but also in two more dialects of nowadays, both Western - I've heard this sound myself and this is a well-known fact. First, the Karin dialect's subdialects of Javakhk (most but not all villages) and Akhaltsikhe has this sound, then the Muslim Hamshentsi's dialect / ethnolect does. And, what is quite interesting, this [ɹ] is closer to the American English retroflex [ɻ] in Akhaltsikhe. So, when I'm listening to Javakhetsi speaking, I always think, for fun, they must have had English substratum. --Mahtrqerin (talk) 20:50, 2 August 2012 (UTC)


 * , {{ping|Aeusoes1} hello editors of this page. I'm a linguist and I work on Armenian. For Iranian Armenian, some attested transcriptions are [ɹ] (Vaux's earlier work)and [ɻ] (a current grammar in-review here). Though it's unclear to me what's the source for the footnote that says that [ɹ] is in Classical. To my knowledge, there's no reliable acoustic/phonetic data on Classical for a person to be exactly sure if Classical indeed use a [ɹ] instead of a generic [ɾ] Hovsepig (talk) 15:02, 22 June 2022 (UTC)