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When foreigners learn Armenian. Interview with a specialist

January 6, 2018 By administrator

Teacher of  EduLab educational center, Theresa Hovhannisyan told Armenian News-NEWS.am about peculiarities of teaching Armenian as a foreign language, as well as motivation and difficulties of foreigners, learning Armenian.

Teresa Hovhannisyan noted that there is a legend spread among Armenians that Armenian is one of the most difficult languages ​​in the world. Often, students coming  EduLab center think that  learning Armenian is like an  adventure but  weeks later, they understand that it is not very hard.

According to her, Armenian is easy or difficult as much as other languages. As every language, Armenian also has its own easy and difficult sides. You wouldn’t believe it but foreigners overcome pronunciation difficulties easily.

In her opinion, there are really some complicated components in our language. The most complicated is the word order. Foreigners can easily learn writing and reading after learning Armenian letters.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Armenian, language

Armenian language is integral part of Cypriot history: officials

September 26, 2017 By administrator

Council of Europe experts on national minorities recently visited Cyprus where they met representatives of the ministry of education and culture.

During the meetings, the ministry representatives said that the Armenian and Cypriot-Arabic languages are an integral part of the history and culture of Cyprus.

Experts of the Council of Europe also held meetings with the lawmakers of the Cypriot parliament, who represent the interests of the Armenian community of the country, Rusarminfo reports citing Greek newspaper Alithia.

Also, the publication notes that the Armenian language, along with the Cyprian-Arabic one, is recognized as the official language of national minorities.

According to a 2011 census, about 4,000 Armenians live in Cyprus.

Related links:

Rusarminfo. Армянский язык является неотъемлемой частью истории Кипра

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Armenian, Cypriot history, language

Armenian girls team stuns Google experts with sign language app (video)

August 12, 2017 By administrator

Armenian girls team stuns Google experts with sign language appAn Armenian team of young women was selected among the finalists and won the People’s Choice Award in a months-long app-building competition, The Technovation Challenge, organized by Google at the company’s campus.

More than 11,000 girls from 103 countries formed teams to address issues in several categories: peace, poverty, environment, equality, education, and health. This week, the finalists traveled to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to pitch their ideas to a panel of tech leaders and other experts.

The Armenian team was comprised of Aghavni Hakobyan, Sona Avetisyan, Svetlana Davtyan, Violeta Mkrtchyan, Vardanush Nazaretyan, Google said in a blog post.

When a deaf classmate visited their school, the team of five girls from the village of Karbi, Aragatsotn village, came up with the idea for an app — aptly called Armenian Sign Language — to help people learn Armenian sign language using videos of sign gestures. Armenian Sign Language was developed to help connect those with poor hearing and those with good hearing. The app is suitable for English and Armenian speakers of all ages.

Four girls from Kazakhstan behind a safety app called QamCare were crowned the winner of the Senior Division and will receive $15,000.

Armenia, other finalists Kenya and India will receive $10,000 each.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: app, Armenian, girls, language, sign

The Armenian Who Helped Create Today’s Turkish Language

July 16, 2017 By administrator

Armenian created Turkish Language

Hagop Martayan, or Agop Dilaçar, was the first Secretary General and head specialist of the state-funded Turkish Language Institution (Türk Dil Kurumu, TDK) founded in 1932 in Ankara. (Photos: Ara Güler)

By Uzay Bulut,

“Turkey’s president wants to purge Western words from its language,” reported The Economist on June 15.

[Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s] latest purge has a more abstract target. Mr. Erdoğan wants to rid Turkish of unsightly Western loan-words. Turkey faces a mortal threat from foreign “affectations”, Mr. Erdoğan declared on May 23rd. “Where do attacks against cultures and civilisations begin? With language.” Mr. Erdoğan started by ordering the word “arena”, which reminded him of ancient Roman depravity, removed from sports venues across the country.

In 2014, Erdoğan had proposed introducing mandatory high school classes in Ottoman Turkish.

During the six centuries of the Ottoman Empire, the language in which laws, religious texts, and literature were written was called the Ottoman language. It was written in Arabic script and extensively used Arabic and Persian words.

The Turkish Republic, founded in 1923, took on a challenging task: creating a new language to be written in Latin script. Doing so would require a lot of work and imagination. Researchers developed new grammar rules, invented new Turkish words, and borrowed words from Western as well as other languages. And that language became the Turkish language the people in Turkey speak today.

“Who helped redesign the way an entire nation would write and express itself?” asks The 100 Years, 100 Facts Project. “None other than one Hagop Martayan.”

Hagop Martayan, or Agop Dilaçar, was the first Secretary General and head specialist of the state-funded Turkish Language Institution (Türk Dil Kurumu, TDK) founded in 1932 in Ankara. He worked as a professor of Turkish at Ankara University between 1936 and 1951. He also was the head adviser of the Turkish Encyclopedia between 1942 and 1960. He wrote books and articles on the Turkish language. Beside his mother tongue, Armenian, he knew English, Ottoman, Azeri, Uighur, Latin, Greek, German, Russian, and Bulgarian.

He devoted most of his life and his entire career to developing Turkish and uplifting Kemalist ideals—including the irrational and unscientific “Sun Language Theory,” which claimed that Turkish was the language from which all civilized languages derived. According to this theory, all human languages could essentially be traced back to Turkic roots.

In an article about Martayan’s life (“The Good Child of the Republic: Hagop Martayan or A. Dilaçar”), Levent Özata, a journalist with the newspaper Agos, writes that Martayan was sent to the Caucasian front to fight as an Ottoman soldier during WWI. After the war, Martayan held various positions, including principal of an Armenian school in Beirut, Lebanon, and then a lecturer of Turkish and Uighur in Sofia, Bulgaria. But when the newly formed Turkish state decided to invent a new language in the 1930s, Martayan’s life changed course.

With his articles on the Turkish language, Martayan had attracted the attention of the authorities. But he had been denationalized, stripped of citizenship; he was wandering around with a certificate documenting his statelessness. He was allowed to enter Turkey as “a special guest of Mustafa Kemal, the first president of Turkey, to develop the Turkish language.

With the founding of the new republic, the political leaders of Turkey accelerated the process of forced Turkification through several policies that targeted the non-Muslim and non-Turkish citizens of the country.” The historian Rıfat Bali writes:

Another indication of being Turkified was to Turkify names and surnames. The Law of Family Names accepted in 1934 made mandatory for everybody to take a family name. However, the law prevented the adoption of names of tribes, foreign races and nations as family names. The Greeks of Turkey would Turkify their names by dropping the “-dis” and “-poulos” suffixes. Most of the Jews would Turkify their names and surnames by finding a Turkish equivalent for each Jewish name.

And it was Mustafa Kemal who suggested Martayan’s surname, Dilaçar [literally, “one who opens up the tongue (or language)”; perhaps better translated as “language-giver”] because of his contributions to Turkish after the promulgation of the Law of Family Names.

Yalçın Yusufoğlu, a journalist, politician, and author, wrote that his mother, who worked as a primary school teacher between 1926 and 1970, said “Professor Agop was one of those who taught us Turkish. He was the professor of professors.”

Martayan held his position and continued his linguistics research at the Turkish Language Institution until his death on Sept. 12, 1979, in Istanbul. Yet, despite his contributions, Martayan’s death once again showed the insane levels of Armenophobia in Turkey. His hard work, his loyalty to the Turkish government, and even his turning a blind eye to the persecution of his own people did not pay off, for he was still an Armenian—the identity that Turkey tried to annihilate in 1915.

Upon his death, he was treated like a second-class citizen without a name. The TDK, for which he had toiled for decades, published a note of condolence on newspapers in which his full name was censored, written as “A. Dilaçar.”

Even when government authorities attempted to “award” him, they hid his Armenian name. “There is a street named after him in the Şişli town of Istanbul: ‘A. Dilaçar Street’ (‘A. Dilaçar Sokağı’),” Özata reported.

Turkish journalists also joined the chorus and concealed his name. Yusufoğlu wrote an article describing how all Turkish newspapers—other than Gerçek (The Truth), the daily that Yusufoğlu worked for at the time—censored the name Agop:

It was September of 1979. That evening, those watching the main news bulletin of the TRT [state-funded Turkish Radio and Television Corporation] learnt that ‘Adil Açar’ was dead. No one listening to the news report had heard that name. They learnt from the TRT that the said person had contributed to the Turkish language, was one of the former officials of the Turkish Language Institution and would be laid to rest on the scheduled day.

The next day we learnt from newspapers that the name of the scholar was not ‘Adil Açar’. The announcement that the TDK got published on newspapers referred to the deceased as ‘A. Dilaçar’. it did not mention at what mosque the funeral would be held and at what cemetery he would be buried. Moreover, all newspaper reports covered it saying ‘A. Dilaçar has died’. The [state-funded] Anadolu Ajansı (Anatolian Agency/AA) also covered it in the same fashion. And none of the newspapers later made a correction, either out of ignorance or to follow the official jargon. In brief, the deceased had no name or last name.

Agop’s full name is not written even on the cover of his biography, published by the Turkish Language Institution, to which he dedicated his entire career. Instead, it is written as “A. Dilaçar.”

Martayan was not the only Armenian linguist who researched and developed Ottoman and/or modern Turkish. The researcher Yaşar Şimşek listed some of them, as follows: Edvard Vladimiroviç Sevortyan, Pars Tuğlacı (Parseh Tuğlaciyan), Kevork Pamukciyan, Lazar Zaharoviç Budagov, Artin Hindoghlou (Hintliyan), Bedros Keresteciyan, Karekin Deveciyan, Anton Tıngır, Krikor Sinapyan, Armenak Bedevyan, Bedros Zeki Garabedyan, Cosimo Comidas de Carbognano (Kömürciyan).

Another Armenian linguist from Turkey, Sevan Nişanyan, who is one of the leading intellectuals and authors in the country, has been jailed since 2014 on trumped-up charges against him.

Turkish curricula at schools does not mention even the name of Martayan or any other Armenian intellectual. For teaching Turkish children about Armenians who made massive cultural and intellectual contributions to their homeland could lead to some “unwanted” consequences for the Turkish government.

Children have curious minds. A Turkish child who has not been brainwashed by official Turkish propaganda could well ask “dangerous” questions even if taught a little bit about the Armenians: Since when have Armenians been living in Asia Minor? Was there a time when they were the majority? Or have they always been a tiny minority as they are today? How many Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire? Besides Martayan, who were the other famous Armenians? And what has happened to all those hundreds of thousands of Armenians? Where have they disappeared?

Teaching Turkish children about real Armenians with real stories—not lies about Armenians as “treacherous enemies” who tried to destroy Ottoman Turkey and who thus deserved to get “neutralized”—could help Turkish children develop humane bonds with and fraternal feelings for the Armenian people.

Of course, such questions would greatly challenge the status quo for the Turkish government. And intellectual dissent—no matter where it comes from—is what the Turkish government detests and punishes most severely.

Moreover, recognizing and respecting Armenian people are not what the founding fathers of the Turkish Republic have taught their Turkish citizens. Ataturk, who gave Martayan his Turkish last name, is quoted as having said on March 16, 1923, in a speech to the Adana Turkish Merchant Society: “The Armenians have no right whatsoever in this beautiful country. Your country is yours, it belongs to Turks. This country was Turkish in history; therefore it is Turkish and it shall live on as Turkish to eternity…. Armenians and so forth have no rights whatsoever here. These bountiful lands are deeply and genuinely the homeland of the Turk.”

The etymology of Turkish words is not what matters in a country that still has much bigger, more serious moral and ethical issues to tackle. The words that Turks use might well be rooted in Arabic, Persian, French, English, or—God forbid—Armenian, Greek, or Kurdish. What matters is the need to face the pathological racism and bigotry in Turkey that have concealed the Armenian name of the linguist who helped create the modern Turkish language.

Filed Under: Genocide, News Tagged With: Armenian, created, language, Turkish

ANI launches Turkish-language site on Armenian Genocide

February 28, 2017 By administrator

On Monday, February 27, the Armenian National Institute (ANI) launched a Turkish-language version of its popular website documenting the facts and acknowledgments of the Armenian Genocide available at www.turkish.armenian-genocide.org.

The ANI site is visited over four million times a year and the number of people accessing from Turkey is substantial. As Turkey regularly censors foreign and domestic websites and the ANI English site has been hacked by denialists, the new ANI Turkish site was designed to give access to broader Turkish-language audiences, both in the Republic of Turkey and outside. The Turkish-language site will parallel many of the most commonly used features of the ANI site. For its first phase, the Turkish site features translations of official documents from countries around the world that formally recognize the Armenian Genocide.

The resolutions, laws, and declarations from countries that have historically recognized the Armenian Genocide can now be read in Turkish. They range from the May 24, 1915 Joint Allied Declaration that invoked crimes against humanity at the time the genocide was being committed to more recent parliamentary resolutions, including the 2016 German Parliament resolution that recognized the historic events and admitted German responsibility in the matter. Earlier this month the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany upheld the validity of the resolution.

Audiences in Turkey are also unaware of the voluminous Turkish records that confirm the facts of the Armenian Genocide. In 2004 the proceedings and legal analysis by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), commissioned by the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission, was published in Turkish and several books have appeared in print since, but there is a massive gap in resources for Turkish speakers.

The ICTJ legal opinion in Turkish is available on the new website, which also includes a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section and a photographic collection. Additionally, a section for entries from the Encyclopedia of Genocide addressing several aspects of the Armenian Genocide is currently under construction.

The site will have new features that will be of particular interest to Turkish readers. The Institute is looking forward to expanding the site in the same systematic manner and by the same objective standards by which the ANI site was created.

The new site also features the ANI map keyed in Turkish, and links to other popular features, such as its digital exhibits and online museum.

Founded in 1997, the Armenian National Institute (ANI) is a 501(c)(3) educational charity based in Washington, D.C., and is dedicated to the study, research, and affirmation of the Armenian Genocide.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Ani, language, Turkish, website

Armenian language to be taught at Beijing Language University

November 15, 2016 By administrator

armenian-languageThe Beijing Language and Culture University will offer Armenian language courses as a separate specialization, Chinese Minister of Education Chen Baosheng told his Armenian counterpart Levon Mkrtchyan at a meeting on Tuesday, November 15.

Also, the Chinese Minister hailed the agreement reached between the parties on implementing joint educational projects and issuing double degree by the Armenian State Pedagogical University and Beijing Pedagogical University.

In addition, the officials discussed a range of issues concerning the construction of a Chinese school currently underway in Yerevan, stressing the regional importance of the project.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Armenian, Beijing, language, taught

Michigan State University to offer Armenian language courses

September 20, 2016 By administrator

michigan-genocideThe Michigan State University (MSU) has been granted $1.2 million to develop new less commonly taught language courses, included one for Armenian, The State News, published by MSU students, reports.

Center for Language Teaching Advancement, or CeLTA, faculty have been awarded funding by the Mellon Foundation for 38 months to create new language programs through a partnership with the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

Though MSU already offers 29 less-commonly taught languages, or LCTLs, and CeLTA faculty hope to add many more, including Armenian, Burmese, Gaelic, Hmong, Serbo-Croatian and Sinhala, according to the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages’ website.

The new LCTL courses will be taught via CourseShare, an online distance-learning program used throughout Big Ten Academic Alliance schools.

Although LCTL learners agree that access to these languages is important, some students think the university could be doing more.

Less-commonly taught languages are often tied to groups of people who have experienced oppression, and making them more accessible can help begin to change that legacy.

Students without ancestral ties to a less-commonly taught language stand to gain a lot from these programs too, Koen Van Gorp, who will help develop the new courses, said.

“I think it’s kind of getting an alternative view of the world,” Van Gorp said. “It opens up new windows, new avenues, new horizons.”

If the new LCTL courses prove successful, the Big Ten Academic Alliance would hope to continue to expand to more languages, executive director Barbara McFadden Allen said.

Related links:

Newsarmenia.am: Армянский язык начнут преподавать в знаменитом Мичиганском университете
The State News. MSU granted $1.2 million to teach less-common languages

Filed Under: Articles, Genocide Tagged With: Armenian, courses, language, Michigan State, offer, university

A Brexit for English as EU language?

June 28, 2016 By administrator

English could vanish as an official EU language if Brexit proceeds. EU Commission head Juncker has avoided using English, and a top EU parliamentary official has warned of language rules contained in EU treaties.

Danuta Hubner, a Polish politician and chair of the European Parliament’s English language affairs committee, has come out with a warning that a British exit from the European Union could also delete English from the EU’s list of 24 official languages. That possibility reverberated Tuesday far beyond the administrative levels of Article 50 – the provision allowing a member state to leave the bloc under EU treaty rules.

Addressing the European Parliament on Tuesday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker spoke only in French and German, clearly avoiding the use of English. During past crises, on the euro zone, for example, he had used English prominently as well.

“We have a regulation … where every EU country has the right to notify one official language,” Hübner had told a press conference late on Monday.

“If we don’t have the UK, we don’t have English (as an official language),” she warned, adding that keeping it would require assent by all remaining member states.

The chairman of the European Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee (AFCO) was referring to the Treaty on European Union in its consolidated version published in early June that incorporates wordings of the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties of 1992 and 2007 respectively.

Her remarks prompted the Wall Street Journal to observe that the European Commission had begun using French and German more often in its external communications since Britain voted to leave the EU last Thursday.

Main working language

English is the main working language of EU institutions and officials in Brussels and Strasbourg, and – to avoid misunderstandings – at the European Central Bank. It’s also one of three languages used for EU patent applications.

English-speaking Malta on EU entry in 2004 picked Maltese. Ireland chose Irish Gaelic in 1973. French was the EU’s dominant official language until the arrival from the 1990s of Sweden, Finland and Austria, and then eastern European nations.

Article 50 of the consolidated Treaty on European Union allows “any member state” to withdraw from the bloc.

Translations required

Article 55 of the Treaty on European Union – dating back to Maastricht – stipulates that the treaty must be “equally authentic” in each of the EU’s 24 official languages, with English currently included.

That article also states that member states may determine that the treaty “also be translated into any other languages” – one of the many tasks for the European Commission with its permanent staff of 1,750 linguists and 600 assistants.

Article 20 under the headline “Non-Discrimination” says citizens of the Union have the right via the treaty to petition and address the European Parliament, EU institutions and the European Ombudsman “in any of the Treaty languages and to obtain a reply in the same language.”

An add-on treaty protocol states in its Article 4 that any draft legislation originating from a member state or EU council president must be translated into the other “official languages of the Union” within eight weeks.

Another treaty protocol (number 3) on the European Court of Justice states that its “language arrangements shall be laid down” by European Council “acting unanimously,” after consulting the European Parliament and Commission.

Post-Brexit: do-it-yourself translations?

Hübner on Monday said that if Britain quit the EU, Article 55 listing the EU’s treaty languages would have to be expanded unanimously by the remaining member states to retain English as one of the bloc’s official languages.

Otherwise, postulated the news agency Reuters, Britons – and by implication English-speakers outside the EU – “would have to do translations themselves.”

French and German officials have long lobbied for their mother tongues to be more widely used in Brussels. English has been hard to dislodge as Europe’s lingua franca.

ipj/kl (Reuters, AP)

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Brexit, english, EU, language

Turkey slowly but Surely taking over EU, Turkish is an official language of the European institutions in Strasbourg

March 10, 2016 By administrator

arton121561-480x270The Turkish language became an official language of the European institutions in Strasbourg after the promotion of Turkey among the countries most represented in the Council of Europe.

The Council of Europe has adopted Turkish as one of its six official languages ​​with English, French, Russian, German and Italian at its winter session being held in Strasbourg.

The adoption of Turkish as an official language was motivated by the transformation of the Turkish delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), the number rose from 12 to 18. Turkey has become one the most countries represented in PACE with France, Russia, Germany and the United Kingdom and Italy.

The first speech in Turkish PACE was that of deputy Utku Cakirozer (Republican People’s Party – CHP) during Wednesday’s session.

Speaking to the Anadolu Agency on adoption of Turkish as the official language of the Council, Talip Kucukcan, chairman of the Turkish delegation (Party of Justice and Development – AK Party), said he was “proud” of promote Turkish as a working language at international level.

“The influence of a country is measured by its powers of representation,” he added.

Moreover, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), international court established by the Council of Europe, also adopted Turkish as one of its working languages.

The platform of the Reports of Judgments and Decisions of the Court (HUDOC) has become available in Turkish with English, French and Russian.

Thursday, March 10, 2016,
Stéphane © armenews.com

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: EU, language, official, Turkish

Armenian recognized official language in Iraqi Kurdistan

December 15, 2014 By administrator

IRAQ VILLAGE REBIRTHArmenian is also recognized as an official language in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Iraqi Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani has signed the language bill, pursuant to which Armenian, Assyrian, and Turkmen also will become official languages in the Kurdish autonomy, and in addition to Kurdish and Arabic, Rudaw.net reported.

Kurdistan Parliament spokesperson Tariq Jawhar told the website that the parliament had passed this bill on October 29, and on November 20, it was submitted for Barzani’s approval.

Jawhar stressed that, pursuant to the new law, Armenian, Assyrian, and Turkmen will become official languages in the Iraqi Kurdistan regions where Armenians, Assyrians, and Turkmens live.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Armenian, Iraq, Kurdistan, language

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