And it won't cost you an arm[enia] or a leg, either!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/03/03 03:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/03/03/1792075.aspx


Language Interface Packs are not something that Microsoft has been charging people money for.

So you can easily get your Mapudungunاردو, Inuktitut, മലയാളം, Qhichwa Simi, فارسی, isiZulu, ಕನ್ನಡ, नेपाली, Afrikaans, कोंकणी, Setswana, বাংলা, తెలుగుਪੰਜਾਬੀ, Lëtzebuergisch, татарча, Nynorsk, and ქართული on top of the Windows XP you have.

And now, your Armenian Language Interface Pack is available to you for the low low price of դր. 0.00 (that is what it will cost you in դրամ, a.k.a. Dram!).

Some background info about Armenian, via Soren:

Number of speakers:  7 million

Name in the language itself:  Հայերեն

Armenian is spoken by approximately six million speakers worldwide. While 3.5 million speakers live in language's historic homeland, in 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 also spoken by the many Armenians in Iran (370,000) or by the speakers in the enclaves in Georgia and Azerbaijan (especially Nagorno Karabakh). Western Armenian was originally spoken in the large Armenian communities in Anatolia before in the last years of the Ottoman Empire nine tenths of the Armenian population were killed. 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, and it 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 Most old synthetic verb forms have been replaced by analytical constructions (i.e. forms that utilize an auxiliary verb).

Fun fact: Lord Byron studied the Armenian language while living in Venice; he created and published an Armenian-English dictionary. His epitaph is calling him a "devout friend of Armenia".

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 as one of those until the end of the 19th century.

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

Enjoy!

This post brouht to you by Հ (U+0540, ARMENIAN CAPITAL LETTER HO)


# Rosyna on 3 Mar 2007 11:23 AM:

How many speakers does Armenian have? 7 million or 6 million?

# Michael S. Kaplan on 3 Mar 2007 11:28 AM:

I think the worldwide total is over 6.6 million, so the answer would depend on whether one rounds by clipping or by rounding up in such a case? :-)


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referenced by

2007/06/15 The last XP LIP? We'll head it off at the Pas[hto]

2007/06/02 Azeri zeriouz LIP releaze

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