Armenian Is A Dialect

[Arpa]

Armenian is a Dialect.

It is one of the dialects of the IE family of languages. See below. Quote; "Persian, Latin and English are Indo European dialects".

I don't think there is a word in Armenian to mean exactly "dialect". The most common description we use is "gavarabarbar" which by sheer context is incorrect as "gavar" means region, district or province. Therefore the English equivalent of gavarabarbar would be colloquial or provincial. Are our lexicographers and dictionary compilers ignoring the obvious and going beyond the necessary? Would not plain "barbar" be more synonymous to "dialect"? More so when we consider that our entire language/barbar is but a dialect of the greater family.

In one of Bert Veaux's presentations he writes; "As many of you are aware, the Armenian language does not consist simply of the literary dialects(sic).. Classical, Middle, Standard Eastern and Standard Western... but rather includes more than one hundred distinct dialects, many of which are entirely incomprehensible to speakers of Standard Armenian. Sadly most of these dialects became doomed to extinction in 1915".

You can read the whole article here; Caution, it is long and poorly legible.

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~lingpub/misc/bert/vowel.pdf

 

Dictionary

 

di•a•lect

 

Pronunciation: (dI'u-lekt"), [key]

—n.

1. Ling.a variety of a language that is distinguished from other varieties of the same language by features of phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, and by its use by a group of speakers who are set off from others geographically or socially.

2. a provincial, rural, or socially distinct variety of a language that differs from the standard language, esp. when considered as substandard.

3. a special variety of a language: The literary dialect is usually taken as the standard language.

4. a language considered as one of a group that have a common ancestor: Persian, Latin, and English are Indo-European dialects.

5. jargon or cant.

 

Of the 325 dialects of India look which is listed and which not;

http://www.sanyal.com/india/indlang.html

 

An excerpt from the site below;

http://www.biblemysteries.com/library/indoeuropean.htm

 

THE PLACE OF THE ARMENIA AND THE ARMENIAN LANGUAGE

This inference is supported by what is known about the portion of the Indo-European community that remained after the Anatolian family had broken away. From that community came the languages that persisted into written history. The first to branch off was the Greek-Armenian-Indo-lranian language community. It must have begun to do so in the fourth millennium B.C. because by the middle of the third millennium B.C. the community was already dividing into two groups, namely, the Indo-lranian and the Greek-Armenian. Tablets in the Hattusas archives show that by the middle of the second millennium B.C. the Indo-lranian group had given rise to a language spoken in the Mitanni kingdom on the southeast frontier of Anatolia that was already different from ancient Indian (commonly called Sanskrit) and ancient Iranian. Cretan Mycenaean texts from the same eras as Mitanni, deciphered in the early 1950's by the British scholars Michael G. F. Ventris and John Chadwick, fumed out to be in a previously unknown dialect of Greek. All these languages had gone their separate ways from Armenian.

Edited March 28, 2004 by Arpa

[nairi]

Therefore the English equivalent of gavarabarbar would colloquial or provincial.

I think you mean "regional dialect"

 

Are our lexicographers and dictionary compilers ignoring the obvious and going beyond the necessary? Would not plain "barbar" be more synonymous to "dialect"?

 

I think dialect is translated as barbar. Only the other babars (regional, social, gender, jargon, individual, etc.) are specified.

 

Dictionary

 

di•a•lect

 

I may have mentioned elsewhere that dialect is one of those things that linguists are still debating. While some believe the definition given by this lexicographer, many do not.

[Arpa]

Nairi, I can't find where you were referring to the matter of "ku/gu", is this what you were looking for?

The subject of k@/g@/ku/gu is discussed.

Also it affirms my personal observation, even if not in detail that kor/gor is an extension of ku/gu used after the verb. I came upon this by aciident some time ago when I noticed that Sebastiatsis were use using the ku/gu after the verb as in "berem ku" instead of "ku berem". Some of them go step further and use it both before and after the verb as in "ku berem ku". In fact over the Thanksgiving I was talking to my brother in law who was born in Istanbul of Sebastatsi parents, he affirmed it and stated that his father does still use "ku berem ku".

 

http://www.uwm.edu/~vaux/verbmorph.pdf

[nairi]

Nairi, I can't find where you were referring to the matter of "ku/gu", is this what you were looking for?

Not that I remember... But it's an interesting topic and read anyway. Thanks!