Armenian Alphabet
| Armenian alphabet |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Type | |
| Languages | Armenian |
| Creator | Mesrop Mashtots |
|
Time period
|
405 to present |
|
Parent systems
|
|
|
Child systems
|
Caucasian Albanian |
|
Sister systems
|
Latin Greek Coptic Georgian Cyrillic |
| Direction | Left-to-right |
| ISO 15924 | Armn, 230 |
|
Unicode alias
|
Armenian |
|
|
The Armenian alphabet (Armenian: Հայոց գրեր Hayots grer or Հայոց այբուբեն Hayots aybuben) is an alphabetical writing system used to write Armenian. It was developed around 405 CE by Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader, and originally included 36 letters and now includes 39.
The Armenian word for "alphabet" is aybuben (Armenian pronunciation: [ɑjbubɛn]), named after the first two letters of the Armenian alphabet: ⟨Ա⟩ Armenian: այբ ayb and ⟨Բ⟩ Armenian: բեն ben. Armenian is written horizontally, left-to-right.
Notes:
Ancient Armenian manuscripts used many ligatures. Some of the commonly used ligatures are: ﬓ (մ+ն), ﬔ (մ+ե), ﬕ (մ+ի), ﬖ (վ+ն), ﬗ (մ+խ), և (ե+ւ), etc. Armenian print typefaces also include many ligatures. In the new orthography, the character և is no longer a typographical ligature, but a distinct letter with a place in the new alphabetic sequence, before "o".
Armenian punctuation is often placed above and slightly to the right of the vowel whose tone is modified, in order to reflect intonation. Armenian punctuation marks include:
ISO 9985 (1996) transliterates the Armenian alphabet for modern Armenian as follows:
In the linguistic literature on Classical Armenian, slightly different systems are in use (in particular note that č has a different meaning). Hübschmann-Meillet (1913) have
The Armenian alphabet was introduced by Mesrop Mashtots and Isaac of Armenia (Sahak Partev) in 405 CE. 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:
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