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11 lines
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11 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
Armenian is a Unicode block containing characters for writing [b]the Armenian language[/b], both the traditional Western Armenian and reformed Eastern Armenian orthographies. Five Armenian ligatures are encoded in the [BLOCK:alphabetic-presentation-forms Alphabetic Presentation Forms block].
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The Armenian language (classical: հայերէն; reformed: հայերեն [hɑjɛˈɾɛn] hayeren) is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenians. It is the official language of the [b]Republic of Armenia[/b] and the self-proclaimed [b]Nagorno-Karabakh Republic[/b]. It has historically been spoken throughout the Armenian Highlands and today is widely spoken in the Armenian diaspora.
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Armenian has its own unique script, the Armenian alphabet, invented in 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots.
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Scholars classify Armenian as [b][i]an independent branch of the Indo-European language family[/i][/b]. The area that linguists are especially interested in is the distinctive [b]phonological developments within the Indo-European languages[/b]. Armenian shares a number of major innovations with [BLOCK:greek-coptic Greek], and some linguists group these two languages with Phrygian and the Indo-Iranian family into a higher-level subgroup of Indo-European, which is defined by such shared changes as the augment. Recently other scholars have proposed a Balkan grouping including Greek, Phrygian, [BLOCK:armenian Armenian], and [BLOCK:caucasian-albanian Albanian].
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Armenia was a monolingual country till the second century BC. Its language has long literary history, with a [i]fifth-century Bible translation as its oldest surviving text[/i].
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There are two standardized modern literary forms, Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian, with which most contemporary dialects are mutually intelligible. |