Saturday, July 05, 2025

Armenian Script

Before I research it myself, I wanted to put this out there in case any of you already knew the answers. We were at the cemetery today and because we entered by a different gate, took different routes to get to our 6 sites (13 relatives) to plant flowers. This brought us by headstones we had never seen before.  A large mill-city cemetery is interesting as it exposes you to previous names and burial customs from groups you know little about. 

We saw this and neither of us recognised the script.  At first glance I suspect it is not how it would have been written on paper, but based on letters made more angular for ease of carving. It is not Greek but I wonder if it is related. Latin seems farther away. I know that Cyrillic is related to Greek letters, but this looks farther away.  I know there is a Coptic alphabet, but I can't recall ever seeing it, and this Armenian alphabet does not look Arabic to me. I guess that fits the geography and the trading routes pretty well. 

Take your guesses, and if you actually know something, so much the better.

Best rabbit hole so far: The Zok language. The Caucasus has an unusual concentration of languages, largely because it is mountainous and here are so many adjoining valleys that have little contact across the ridges.  They go downstream to larger communities to trade, and have contact there, but are just as likely to trade with someone from the city, or any of the other valleys that flow into it. Though descended from related languages, they are isolated from each other and do not influence each other much, becoming unintelligible to each other over time. 

The above may be in the Armeno-Turkish script, daughter to Armenian.  The last three letters could be "-yan" and -ian is a common ending for Armenian surnames, so that fits. The letters before that might be the -dz- sound, which would fit with the cymbal makers Zil-djian, who were Armenian. Work in progress.

2 comments:

Thos. said...

looks like Armenian script:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet

Assistant Village Idiot said...

You cheated. We all could do that ourselves. Everyone pretend you didn't see that.