User talk:Vahagn Petrosyan

Welcome

Barev Vahagn, yes WikiProject Armenia-its em, yete ognutyan kam inch vor harts unes Wikipediai veraberyal, kashxatem ognel. VartanM 06:17, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

re: պ, տ, կ in Armenian

Hello Vahagn, thank you for your message. Actually, պ, տ, կ, ծ, ճ are all ejective sounds in eastern Armenian. Can you show me text that shows otherwise? You can indeed hear the ejective when an eastern Armenian speaks the language (as opposed to Western Armenian which does not contain them). (For example, how else do you think that փ and պ are differentiated in eastern Armenian?) Regards, Serouj (talk) 21:30, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

փ = [pʰ] is the aspirated version of պ = [p]. Like, say, ց = [t͡sʰ] is the aspirated version of ծ = [t͡s], etc. Listen to this newscast, for example. You won't hear ejective sounds like p’. As concerns a text, this one here says (on page 7) "...throughout this study I concentrate on Standard Eastern Armenian ... primarily because it distinguishes in pronunciation the three consonant series (voiced, voiceless and voiceless aspirated)...". Besides, as a native speaker of Eastern Armenian and Russian I can say that the pronunciation of պ, տ, կ and п, т, к does not differ at all. And you can find plenty of sources confirming that in Russian those are voiceless plosives. I think the reason you suppose Eastern Armenian has ejectives is that Western Armenian does not have voiceless plosives at all and when you hear them in our speech you think those are ejectives, perhaps? --Vahagn Petrosyan (talk) 21:58, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I think your assumption regarding my reasoning is correct. It's good that Russian has the same 3 sounds. So I guess you can confirm this is the case for ծ and ճ? In Western Armenian, only voiceless aspirated and voiced exist, you are correct... Serouj (talk) 22:48, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

I can confirm that ծ and ճ are not ejectives but Voiceless alveolar affricate and Voiceless postalveolar affricate respectively. --Vahagn Petrosyan (talk) 23:15, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

re: Pronunciation of ռ in Western Armenian

In practice there is no distinction between ր and ռ in Western Armenian (though an attempt is made by teachers of the language to "roll" the ռ, no one in practice does this). It is only Eastern Armenians from Iran who say ր quite distinctly than ռ (they pronounce ր like "red" is pronounced in American English). I don't think Eastern Armenians from Armenia differentiate it much, if at all, and certainly not to the extent that EA speakers from Iran do. Serouj (talk) 22:51, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for clarification. --Vahagn Petrosyan (talk) 23:15, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Georgian alphabet

Hi Vahagn. Because you are one of the editor of "Georgian alphabet", pleas look Russian topic about alphabet. There is a lot of Reliable sources about Mesrop Mashtots supplied the Georgian alphabet. Divot (talk) 09:13, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't know the issue well enough to weigh in. I don't think I can help.--Vahagn Petrosyan (talk) 10:54, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

New section

Շնորհակալ եմ ջերմ խոսքերի համար, հարգելի Վահագն: Հարգանքներով:--Marshal Bagramyan (talk) 00:43, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Չարժի. Keep up the good work. --Vahagn Petrosyan (talk) 02:57, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Wiktionary

belated thanks for your kind invitation. I will resume using my account when making edits to wikt:, and I'll see where that takes me. Regards, --dab (𒁳) 09:57, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm very glad to hear that. You could warm up by fulfilling requests at wikt:Category:Entries which need Cuneiform script and wikt:Category:Entries which need Old Persian Cuneiform script. Also, given your track record of dealing with nationalism, perhaps you could weigh in in our fierce vote/battle, where we decide whether to treat Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian as separate languages or one Serbo-Croatian (the vote ends August 5). --Vahagn Petrosyan (talk) 17:44, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

I think I will take it slow with joining the fray for now. When I joined Wikipedia back in 2004, I also avoided all conflict at first, trying to get the feel of the place, and made it a habit to only pursue a dispute when I was convinced I was right from the point of view of the project goals, not from my own point of view.

I do not have intimate knowledge of wiktionary's project goals. I feel that the project suffers from lamentable structural defects because there was not enough expertise around when it was shaped, and now it cannot make up its mind what it wants to be. But this isn't my battle. I see the Serbo-Croatian dispute (which I admit was going to come up anyway) as reflecting deeper structural flaws.

briefly, the basic flaw is the underlying idea, born from an undue focus on English in a project that was going to be vastly multilingual, that there should be a page per spelling (i.e., Unicode strings), as opposed to a page per lexeme. This is absurd, of course, and you end up with very large pages combining completely unrelated items, while you have a single item scattered over numerous stub pages. You also end up with a virtual duplication of entire languages that are written in more than one alphabet, as in the case of Serbian. Not to mention the huge mess you will have with any historical language that doesn't have fixed orthography. Sumero-Akkadian is extreme in this respect, but you don't need to look as far. Already compiling a dictionary of Middle French or Middle English based on a "one page per spelling" basis is a nighmare to build, and will also be a nightmare to peruse.

From where the project is now, this is going to be a extremely difficult to fix even if it is ever decided it should be fixed.

if I was paid a month's salary and asked to "please fix it", I would probably opt for something like ISO-639 namespaces. Say, wikt:be would be the main page about the English verb (or alternatively point to wikt:en:be, depending on how much wikt: wants to be an English dictionary "primarily"), a very large page discussing all aspects of this English lexeme and its history, with the Swedish verb at wikt:se:be. wikt:are otoh would itself be a disambiguation page and not contain any discussion of the English word "to be" but point to wikt:en:be directly, besides pointing to other pages on other lexemes. This is just off the top of my head, but it points to what I consider the inescapable conclusion that wiktionary needs to move from being spelling based (Unicode string based) to being lexeme based like any reasonable dictionary.

Incidentially, relying on ISO-639 would result in treating sr (Serbian) and hr (Croatian) as separate by default, simply because endorsing ISO seems to be the most neutral approach. But merging entries on sr and hr lexemes would impose itself on a case-by-case basis, just like most enm (Middle English) entries could reasonably be merged into the main en entries. I base this on my experience at Wikipedia in dealing with very large amounts of of information very heteregenous in scope and detail. Say, as long as we merely mention that been is the Middle English predecessor of to be, wikt:enm:been can simply redirect to wikt:en:be. But if a Middle English scholar should begin to introduce an extensive treatment of the verb in Middle English, the wikt:enm:been article could then be {{split}} off as a standalone entry. The Germanic etymology would be at wikt:gem:bēō to be discussed centrally, so it can be linked from all entries on Germanic cognates. A full dictionary of Indo-European etymology could be placed under the wikt:ine: namespace without interfering in any way with the main namespace, and without the need to resort to awkward "Appendix:" solutions. --dab (𒁳) 11:16, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Duduk page changes

Certain people have changed [1] the duduk page and put Turkish origins, and even removed other visual examples of Gasparyan's links above. Also, the right side where it said "Traditional Armenian Instrument" is removed and added Turkish info. Is there anyway you can help out? They have locked the page.

Can you help out on the Duduk page? They keep reverting Eupator and my edits back to what it was before. They remove the Armenian info and put Turkish. Please help out here. Everybody knows, even non-Armenians that Duduk is Armenian. Specially from the 2000 movie Gladiator by Gasparyan. Monlonet (talk) 18:26, 19 August 2009 (UTC)