Romanization of Armenian

There are various systems of romanization of the Armenian alphabet.

Transliteration systems

Hübschmann-Meillet (1913)

In linguistic literature on Classical Armenian, the commonly used transliteration is that of Hübschmann-Meillet (1913). It uses a combining dot above mark U+0307 to express the aspirates, ṫ, cḣ, č̇, ṗ, k̇. Some documents were also published using a similar Latin dasia diacritic U+0314, a mirrored comma-apostrophe combining above the letter, which is easier to distinguish visually in t̔, ch̔, č̔, p̔, k̔.

However, the correct support of these combining diacritics has been poor for long in the past and was not very common on many usual applications and computer fonts or rendering systems., so some documents have been published using, as possible fallbacks, their spacing variants such as the modifier letter dot above ˙ U+02D9 written after the letter instead of above it, or the mirrored comma-apostrophe ‛ U+201B written after the letter instead of above it — or sometimes the spacing Greek rude spiritus ῾ U+1FFE (only in printed versions to make sure that it will be curly and not shown as a diagonal wedge or stroke similar to an accent, even though it will often been incorrectly positioned with Latin letters for rendering in simple text renderers on screen, even though the Armenian spiritus mark originates semantically from the Greek mark, but is positioned differently above the right side of Armenian letters, instead of above the left side of Greek letters), or the spacing grave accent ˋ U+02CB even if it is too flat, or even the ASCII backquote ` U+0060, or the ASCII apostrophe-quote ' U+0027 when there was no confusion possible).

But the preferred character today is the modifier letter left half-ring ʿ U+02BF (its combining variant above the letter is not used, see below), or the modifier letter ʽ U+02BD, which is the spacing variant of the dasia diacritic (it is also historically a correct adaptation to the Latin script of the Greek spiritus asper, see rough breathing) with the advantage of having excellent support in many Latin fonts because it is also a simple mirrored comma-apostophe, but encoded as U+02BD to enforce the curly shape of the apostrophe and prohibit its possible wedge shape: the modifier letter U+02BD is often mapped in fonts for fine typography with the same glyph as the U+201B mirrored comma-apostrophe, and will often be easier to read typographically than the very thin half-ring that is too frequently rendered as a superscript left parenthese or superscript small letter c, and U+02BD is used in many English documents prepared with enhanced typography as one of the two possible styles for the left single quotation mark U+201B used to replace the ambiguous ASCII apostrophe-quote). U+02BD can also be used within documents prepared for fine Armenian typography because the Armenian orthography should never use any Latin-style apostrophes for quoting Armenian texts.

Also, some ambiguities were not solved to work with modern vernacular Armenian, which has two dialects, both using two possible orthographies (besides, the modern orthography is used for Classical Armenian in modern publications).

BGN/PCGN (1981)

BGN/PCGN romanization (1981) uses a right single quotation mark to express aspirates, t’, ch’, ts’, p’, k’, diverging from the original rough breathing diacritic.

This romanization was taken up by ISO (1996) and is considered obsolete. This system is a loose transcription and is not reversible (without using dictionary lookup), notably for single Armenian letters romanized into digraphs (these non-reversible, or ambiguous romanizations are shown in a red cell in the table below).

Some Armenian letters have several romanizations, depending on their context:

• the Armenian vowel letter Ե/ե should be romanized as ye initially or after the vowel characters Ե/ե, Է/է, Ը/ը, Ի/ի, Ո/ո, ՈՒ/ու and Օ/օ; in all other cases it should be romanized as e;
• the Armenian vowel letter Ո/ո should be romanized as vo initially, except in the word եո where it should be romanized as ov; in all other cases it should be romanized as o;
• the Armenian consonant letter Վ/վ should be romanized yev initially, in isolation or after the vowel characters Ե/ե, Է/է, Ը/ը, Ի/ի, Ո/ո, ՈՒ/ու and Օ/օ; in all other cases it should be romanized as ev.

ISO 9985 (1996)

ISO 9985 (1996) is the international standard for transliteration of the modern Armenian alphabet. Like with the BGN/PCGN romanization, the right single quotation mark is used to denote most of the aspirates.

This system is reversible because it avoids the use of digraphs and returns to the Hübschmann-Meillet (however some diacritics for vowels are also modified).

The aspirate series is not given fully consistent treatment in ISO 9985; while p’, t’, c’, k’ are romanized with a quotation mark, չ č is not, and instead its unaspirated counterpart ճ is notated č̣ with an underdot appearing nowhere else in the system. Note that in this scheme, č (signifying չ) collides with the Hübschmann-Meillet transliteration (where it signifies ճ).

This system is recommended for international bibliographic text interchange (it is also the base of simplified romanizations found to localize the Armenian toponomy of for transliterating human names), where it works very well with the common ISO/IEC 8859-2 Latin encoding used in Central Europe.

ALA-LC (1997)

ALA-LC romanization (1997) is largely compatible with BGN/PCGN, but returns to expressing aspirates with a left single quotation mark (in fact the modifier letter left half-ring ʿ U+02BF, US-MARC hexadecimal code B0, that is also used to denote ayin in Arabic, so some documents may contain either the preferred left half-ring, or sometimes the ASCII backquote ` U+0060).

This standard changes the transliteration scheme used between Classical/Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian for the Armenian consonants represented by swapping the pairs b vs. p, g vs. k, d vs. t, dz vs. ts and ch vs. j.

In all cases, and to make this romanization less ambiguous and reversible,

• a soft sign (a prime, US-MARC hexadecimal code A7) is inserted between two separate letters that would otherwise be interpreted as a digraph (in red in the table below); no prime is present in the middle of romanized digraphs zh, kh, ts, dz, gh and ch representing a single Armenian letter;
• with the Classical Armenian orthography only, the vowel represented by e will be represented by y instead, when it is at the initial position in a name and followed by another vowel; this difficulty has disappeared in modern Armenian with the reformed orthography that changed the original Armenian letter in such case;
• with the Classical Armenian orthography only, the vowel represented by y will be represented by h instead, when it is at the initial position of a word or of a radical in a compound word; this difficulty has disappeared in modern Armenian with the reformed orthography that changed the original Armenian letter in such case.

ASCII-only input methods

On various Armenian websites, non-standard transliterators have appeared to allow inputting modern Western or Eastern Armenian text using ASCII only characters. It is not a proper transliterator but can be convenient for users that don't have Armenian keyboards.

Despite these input methods are commonly used, they are not obeying to any approved international or Armenian standard, so they are not recommended for the romanization of Armenian. Note that the input methods recognize the Latin digraphs zh, dz, gh, tw, sh, vo, ch, rr for Classic or Eastern Armenian, and zh, dz, tz, gh, vo, ch, rr for Western Armenian, but offer no way to disambiguate words where the digraphs should not be recognized.

Some Armenian letters are entered as Latin digraphs, and may also be followed by the input of an ASCII single quote (which acts as the only letter modifier recognized) but this quote does not always mean that the intended Armenian letter should be aspirated (this may be the reverse for the input ch'), it is also used as a vowel modifier. Due to ambiguities, texts must be corrected by entering an intermediate dummy character before entering the second Latin letter or quote, then removing the dummy character, so that the automatic input converter keeps the Armenian letters distinct.

Transliteration table

Some Armenian letters have very different phonetic sounds between Classical or Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian, so that the usage of Armenian letters is different between the two sub-branches of the language.

This is made visible in the table below by coloring transliterations specific to Classical or Eastern Armenian on green background, and those for Western Armenian on blue background. Other letters are transliterated independently of the language branch. However, cells with red background contain transliterations that are context dependent (and may in some cases create ambiguities, only the ISO 9985 and Hübschmann-Meillet romanizations do not use any context-dependant ambiguous digraphs for transcribing simple Armenian letters that are not ligatures, but the former is inconsistent with its representation of aspirated consonnants and incompatible with all other systems for a pair of letters).

Note that in the table above, the last two columns refer to digraphs, not isolated letters (however, they are considered letters in the Reformed orthography). However the last column displays the ligature that is used in the Classical orthography only as an isolated symbol for the short Armenian word ew (meaning and) and its derivations in a way similar to the ampersand (&) in the Latin script (in the Reformed orthography, it is also used at the middle and the end of words instead of եվ); the same transliteration to ew (classical Armenian) or ev (reformed orthography) will be used for the letters this ligature represents, when they are used as digraphs: it used to refer to the w consonant, now it refers to the v consonant.

Armenian script also uses some other digraphs that are often written as optional ligatures, in lowercase only (five of them are encoded in Unicode only for full roundtrip compatibility with some legacy encodings); when present, these ligatures (which are purely typographic and carry no semantic distinction in normal Armenian texts) must be romanized by decomposing their component letters.

Versatile^[1] option for the Classical (Eastern-Armenian), including the most popular romanization systems to date: ASCII, Hübschmann-Meillet, ISO 9985, BGN / PCGN, ALA-LC.

See also

• Armenian language
  • Classical Armenian
  • Western Armenian
  • Eastern Armenian
• Armenian alphabet
  • Classical Armenian orthography
  • Armenian orthography reform
• List of ISO romanizations

References

• Antoine Meillet and Heinrich Hübschmann, Altarmenisches Elementarbuch, Heidelberg, 1913 (2nd edition, 1980).

External links

• Armenian Transliteration Converter Supports both Eastern and Western pronunciations of Armenian, includes a spell checker.
• Transliteration of Armenian by Thomas T. Pedersen, in KNAB (Kohanimeandmebaas, Place Names Database) of Eesti Keele Instituut (Institute of the Estonian Language).
• A ready macro for Visual Basic in Microsoft Word text editor, allowing to automatically replace the Armenian letters to Latin script, using the Versatile option above for the Eastern-Armenian language.