It's a LIP that won't cost you an arm[enia] and a leg!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/12/09 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/12/09/10102465.aspx

Click here to download the Armenian Windows 7 LIP via the Microsoft.com Download Center.

Please note that the Armenian Windows 7 LIP can only be installed on a system that runs a English client version of Windows 7. It is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems on the Download Center.

The Armenian Windows 7 LIP is produced as part of the Local Language Program sponsored by Public Sector.

Armenian is spoken by approximately six million speakers worldwide. While 3.5 million speakers live in the language's historic homeland, Armenia, nearly as many speakers live in the so-called Armenian Diaspora. There are two major dialects. Eastern Armenian is the official language of the Republic of Armenia but is also spoken by the many Armenians in Iran (370,000 speakers) and by Armenian speakers in Georgia and Azerbaijan. Western Armenian was originally spoken in the large Armenian communities in Anatolia before the massive atrocities in the last years of the Ottoman Empire in which nine tenths of the Armenian population were killed and hundreds of thousands uprooted. Western Armenian is now spoken especially in Syria (300,000) and Lebanon (235,000), but also in the United States (175,000) and many other countries. The two standards evolved when one part of Armenia was under Russian, the other one under Ottoman rule in the 19th century. During the Soviet rule of Armenia the two standards diverged further so that today they are not readily mutually intelligible.

Old Armenian (also called Grabar) for which documents from the fifth century exist, was used as a literary language until the 19th century and is still used by the Armenian church.

• The sound system of the Armenian language has some distinctive features: It is rich in combinations of consonants, especially in affricative sounds such as j, ch and ts. It also has ejective sounds. These are made by using the vocal chords instead of the lungs for pushing out air and were probably borrowed from surrounding Caucasus languages.

• Armenian has a rich case system for nouns (7 cases) but no grammatical gender. Most old synthetic verb forms have been replaced by analytical constructions (i.e. forms that utilize an auxiliary verb).

Click here for more information about the Armenian language.

CLASSIFICATION:

Armenian is an Indo-European language, forming its own independent branch in this vast family. Because of the huge percentage of loan words from Iranian languages it was mistakenly classified until the end of the 19th century.

Armenian is written in the Armenian alphabet which was created by Mesrop Mashtots in 5th century AD and consists of 39 (originally 36 letters).

Why is U+0580 ARMENIAN SMALL LETTER REH in Verdana and the rest of the characters are in Sylfaen? It seems that Verdana contains exactly two Armenian letters [the other being U+0564 DA]; that's very odd.

It looks like the currency symbol for Armenian (Armenia) is U+0564 U+0580 U+002E, which may explain it, but it still seems like a bizarre decision to support only part of a script.

Random832: The only specifically named font in the page is the Comic Sans used in the header. The rest is all up to your browser and available fonts.

If I'd thought the page specified those fonts (and I did check) my post would only have been one sentence. The weirdness in Verdana is much more interesting.

Actually, I was thinking I would write up the Verdana issue as its own blog, soon. :-)

I read 'arm(y) and navy' first... no wonder with that 20th century history in mind.

"affricative sounds such as j, ch and ts." – Wait, that's a semivowel, a fricative and the phonetics of <z> ;-)

Once again, German, Italian and good old Standard Average European aren't 'normal'. at all.

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