Armenian is written horizontally from left to right.
There are a few minor
differences in the pronunciation of the letters between two main dialects of
Armenian: Western and Eastern. Eastern Armenian speakers have kept the original
pronunciations of the letters, pronouncing each of the 38 letters quite
distinctively. Western Armenian speakers pronounce a few of the letters in the
same way.
Most of the letters have numerical values.
Classical Armenian distinguishes seven vowels: a, i, schwa,
open e, closed e, o, and u. Armenian is rich in
combinations of consonants, especially in affricative sounds such as j, ch, and
ts.
Eastern Armenian
alphabet
Western Armenian
alphabet
Armenian
punctuation
Grammar
Both classical
Armenian and the modern spoken and literary dialects have a complicated system
of declining nouns, with six or seven noun cases but no gender. In modern
Armenian the use of auxiliary verbs to show tense (comparable to will in
"he will go") has generally supplemented the inflected verbs of
classical Armenian. Negative verbs are conjugated differently from positive
ones (as in English "he goes" and "he does not go").