I was just driving by an Armenian market (Watertown, MA); and I was struck by how strange looking the armenian characters are. This alphabet seems to have no connection to either the Greek or Roman alphabets, nor does it resemble Arabic.
I believe it’s a variation on Cyrillic?
It also (to my American eyes) looks visually a lot like Thai & Cambodian scripts, although those tend to have more flourishes.
My Armenian friends and my one-time roommate never said anything about this. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
The Armenian alphabet was created by Saint Mesrop Mashtots and Isaac of Armenia (Sahak Partev) in AD 405 primarily for a Bible translation into the Armenian language. Medieval Armenian sources also claim that Mashtots invented the Georgian and Caucasian Albanian alphabets around the same time. Traditionally, the following phrase translated from Solomon’s Book of Proverbs is said to be the first sentence to be written down in Armenian by Mashtots:
—Book of Proverbs, 1:2.
Various scripts have been credited with being the prototype for the Armenian alphabet. Pahlavi was the priestly script in Armenia before the introduction of Christianity, and Syriac, along with Greek, was one of the alphabets of Christian scripture. It has also been suggested that the Ge’ez script had an influence on certain letters of the alphabet.[3] Although the Armenian alphabet has similarities to all of these, the general consensus is it was modeled after the Avestan and Greek alphabets, supplemented with letters from a different source or sources for Armenian sounds not found in Greek. The evidence for this is the Greek order of the Armenian alphabet; the ow ligature for the vowel /u/, as in Greek; and the shapes of some letters which “seem derived from a variety of cursive Greek.”[4]
The Armenian alphabet (Armenian: Հայոց գրեր, Hayoc’ grer or Հայոց այբուբեն, Hayoc’ aybuben), or more broadly the Armenian script, is an alphabetic writing system developed for Armenian and occasionally used to write other languages. It was developed around 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader. There are several inscriptions in Armenian lettering from Sinai and Nazareth that date to the beginning of the 5th century. The script originally had 36 letters; even
T...
A single peron being responsible for a cultural alphabet isn’t unbelievable. Sequoyah did it for the Cherokee. And some enthusiasts still use the Shaw alphabet for English.
They don’t all catch on. Look at the Deseret Alphabet Deseret alphabet
Moved MPSIMS --> GQ.
That’s your last move from MPSIMS, Ralph – as of now, I’m joining the GQ mods in their “start it in the right forum or it’s locked” policy with you.
twickster , MPSIMS moderator