How does the Armenian language sound to you?

[Arsenium DeLight]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xor1y23jzrE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq8CVpaJSdk

[Arsenium DeLight]

What language(s) does Armenian sound like to you?

[Arsenium DeLight]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df831HiLBY8

[Gustave H]

Unique.

[Arsenium DeLight]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWg6MPOjRZQ

[Arsenium DeLight]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9oHc2glw_0

[Arsenium DeLight]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35IYAUmjMXA

[Arsenium DeLight]

How does Armenian sound to you?

What language(s) is it similar to?

[Arsenium DeLight]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kGsyXr6v8A

[Peter Nirsch]

It's sounds a lot like Karakalpak

[Arsenium DeLight]

It's sounds a lot like Karakalpak

Is that a language?

[Peter Nirsch]

Is that a language?

of course

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakalpak_language

[Arsenium DeLight]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-crzGQ1sHHA

[Arsenium DeLight]

Armenian cognates in other languages

otar - other, outer
ays, ayt, ayn - this, that, yon
arch - arch (latin for bear)
sharzhel (to move) - charge

Queen - Gyn
Eat - Utel
Cat - Katu
Cow - Kov
Odor - Hod
Door - Dur
Foot - Votk
Listen - Lsel

Naranja-Narinch
Gato-Gadu
Cinco-Hink

Shabat - Sabbath, Saturday
Kiraki - Sunday

[Arsenium DeLight]

I should have included more options for this poll. Here's a more complete poll on this question.

What language(s) does Armenian sound like to you?

1. Georgian
2. Azeri Turkish
3. Turkish
4. Persian (Farsi)
5. Iranian language
6. North Caucasian language
7. Kurdish
8. Assyrian
9. Hebrew
10. Bulgarian
11. Albanian
12. Serbian
13. Romanian
14. Hungarian
15. Germanic language
16. Turkic language
17. Arabic
18. Greek
19. Slavic language
20. Russian

(Italian and German shouldn't have been on the poll. I think they're much too different.)

[Arsenium DeLight]

I should have added the above options to the poll. but the poll as it is can still be valuable in telling what the language sounds to people, if only they voted ;) and described.

[Arsenium DeLight]

--------------------------------

[Arsenium DeLight]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ito8JKT1Jz8

[DRUM]

Wow sounds cool, I voted Turkish although I don't think it's that much like it, I just hear some stuff that's similar. Some parts also sound Slavic/Baltic to me.

[Arsenium DeLight]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enu4_BuG4V0

[Arsenium DeLight]

Armenian corresponds with other Indo-European languages in its structure, but it shares distinctive sounds and features of its grammar with neighboring languages of the Caucasus region. Armenian is agglutinative, one of only two Indo-European languages with this characteristic, the other one being Persian.

Armenian is rich in combinations of consonants. Both classical Armenian and the modern spoken and literary dialects have a complicated system of declining nouns, with six or seven noun cases but no gender. In modern Armenian the use of auxiliary verbs to show tense (comparable to will in "he will go") has generally supplemented the inflected verbs of Classical Armenian. Negative verbs are conjugated differently from positive ones (as in English "he goes" and "he does not go"). Grammatically, early forms of Armenian had much in common with classical Greek and Latin, but the modern language, like modern Greek, has undergone many transformations. With time the Armenian language made a transition from a synthetic language (Old Armenian or Grabar) to a typical analytic language (Modern Armenian) with Middle Armenian as a midpoint in this transition.

[Plavuša]

I really don't know if you can compare Armenian with any of these languages in the poll, to me it sounds pretty unique. I love the sound of Armenian, it's a beautiful language. :)

[HERK]

It sounds unique, you can see that it is a distinct language and it doesn't descend from another language.

[Arsenium DeLight]

I realize that the options I have given in the poll are not sufficient to properly describe the language, after all Armenian is a separate branch of the Indo-European language family; it is unique. Having said that, I am curious what language you associate with or think of when hearing Armenian.Thanks for your input.

[Arsenium DeLight]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiFZpd3xZsU

[Antimage]

sounds like a mixture of greek, turkish, russian

[Arsen_]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8l386ODwbs

[Pahli]

Sounds mostly like Georgian, with a bit of Greek and Hebrew + the pronouncations reminds me a bit of Turkish

[Sideritis]

I would have also added Hebrew in the list. For a reason or so, it sound a bit Hebrew. No Greek though. Nice language.

[Pahli]

I would have also added Hebrew in the list. For a reason or so, it sound a bit Hebrew. No Greek though. Nice language.

Greek has obtained some words from Hebrew as far as I know, which is why I put it there, but its more or less the same I guess

No doubt its a unique language the Turks failed to eradicate :)

[Sideritis]

Greek has obtained some words from Hebrew as far as I know, which is why I put it there, but its more or less the same I guess

No doubt its a unique language the Turks failed to eradicate :)

Sorry I didn't quite understand. I doubt that the Greeks will concord with your statement about Greek "obtaining" words from Hebrew. Anyways it is obvious that Armenian is a language coming from that region.

[Arsen_]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doWgE4SK6Ls

[Musso]

As a native Armenian speaker, it has always been interesting to me how it sounds to non-natives. What do non-Armenians think when they hear Armenian? Do they think it may be Persian? Turkish? or just something very unique...I have always though that Armenian probably sounds like a mixture between Georgian and Persian.

[Iloko]

Sounds like Russian mixed w/ Hindi.

[gültekin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWg6MPOjRZQ
just like Hindi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxefOhPqW3c

[Musso]

just like Hindi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxefOhPqW3c

Well both are old Indo-European languages, so similarities will exist, but Armenian is closer to Persian language. Like a mix between Greek and Persian.

[gültekin]

Well both are old Indo-European languages, so similarities will exist, but Armenian is closer to Persian language. Like a mix between Greek and Persian.
grammatical of course , but its sounds like Hindi maybe between Greek and Hindi. Persian has softer clinks

[Musso]

grammatical of course , but its sounds like Hindi maybe between Greek and Hindi. Persian has softer clinks

The reason I saw Persian is because Armenian at one point took many Persian loanwords during the Parthinian Empire.


The loans from Iranian languages initially led linguists to erroneously classify Armenian as an Iranian language. The distinctness of Armenian was only recognized when Hübschmann (1875)[32] used the comparative method to distinguish two layers of Iranian loans from the older Armenian vocabulary.

W. M. Austin (1942) concluded[33] that there was an early contact between Armenian and Anatolian languages, based on what he considered common archaisms, such as the lack of a feminine and the absence of inherited long vowels. However, unlike shared innovations (or synapomorphies), the common retention of archaisms (or symplesiomorphy) is not necessarily considered evidence of a period of common isolated development.

Soviet linguist Igor Diakonov (1985)[34] noted the presence in Old Armenian of what he calls a Caucasian substratum, identified by earlier scholars, consisting of loans from the Kartvelian and Northeast Caucasian languages. Noting that the Hurro-Urartian peoples inhabited the Armenian homeland in the second millennium b.c., Diakonov identifies in Armenian a Hurro-Urartian substratum of social, cultural, and animal and plant terms such as ałaxin "slave girl" ( ← Hurr. al(l)a(e)ḫḫenne), cov "sea" ( ← Urart. ṣûǝ "(inland) sea"), ułt "camel" ( ← Hurr. uḷtu), and xnjor "apple(tree)" ( ← Hurr. ḫinzuri). Some of the terms he gives admittedly have an Akkadian or Sumerian provenance, but he suggests they were borrowed through Hurrian or Urartian. Given that these borrowings do not undergo sound changes characteristic of the development of Armenian from Proto-Indo-European, he dates their borrowing to a time before the written record but after the Proto-Armenian language stage.


Classical Armenian, or Grabar, imported numerous words from Middle Iranian languages, primarily Parthian,[35] and contains smaller inventories of borrowings from Greek,[35] Syriac,[35] Latin, and autochthonous languages such as Urartian

[gültekin]

The reason I saw Persian is because Armenian at one point took many Persian loanwords during the Parthinian Empire.
loanword's they will just adopted and doesn't change the phonetic structure of the language. for example German have many Latin origin loanwords,despite this doesn't sounds like Italian

[Musso]

loanword's they will just adopted and doesn't change the phonetic structure of the language. for example German have many Latin origin loanwords,despite this doesn't sounds like Italian

Well that is true, the old phonetic structure of Armenian is old-indo-european just like Indo-Aryan languages (Ancient Greek, Persian, Hindi, etc).