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Romanization of Armenian
There are various systems of romanization of the Armenian alphabet.
In linguistic literature on Classical Armenian, the commonly used transliteration is that of Hübschmann-Meillet (1913). For aspirated consonants, Heinrich Hübschmann used the Greek rough breathing diacritic (U+0314) above the letter, a reversed comma combining above the letter and serves a similar purpose in Greek: t̔, ch̔, č̔, p̔, k̔. Antoine Meillet, after using the letter h in digraphs, used the same diacritic as Hübschmann but on the right of the letter, with fonts displaying either a half ring or a reversed comma. Émile Benveniste and the Revue des Études Arméniennes continued this use of the breathing mark on the side of the letter. Some authors use a combining dot above diacritic (U+0307) to express the aspirates: ṫ, cḣ, č̇, ṗ, k̇.
However, the computer support (fonts, rendering systems, availability on usual applications) of these combining diacritics has been poor for long, so some documents resorted to use, as possible fallbacks, their spacing variants (so-called “modifier letters”) written after the letter instead of above it, such as the spacing dot above ⟨˙⟩ (U+02D9), or the spacing turned comma ⟨‘⟩ (U+02BB) — or sometimes the spacing Greek-script rough breaking ⟨῾⟩ (U+1FFE), or the spacing grave accent ⟨ˋ⟩ or ASCII backquote or ⟨`⟩ (U+02CB or U+0060) even if they are too flat, or even the ASCII apostrophe-quote ⟨'⟩ (U+0027) when there was no confusion possible.
The preferred character today is the spacing left half-ring ⟨ʿ⟩ (U+02BF), or the spacing turned comma ⟨‘⟩ (U+02BB, which has the shape of a single left quotation mark), or the spacing reversed comma ⟨ʽ⟩ (U+02BD, which is the Latin-script equivalent of the Greek-script rough breathing), with the spacing turned comma having the advantage of excellent support in many Latin fonts because it is visually identical to the left single quote ⟨‘⟩.
Also, some ambiguities were not solved to work with modern vernacular Armenian, which has two dialects, both using two possible orthographies (besides, the modern orthography is used for Classical Armenian in modern publications).
BGN/PCGN romanization (1981) uses a right single quotation mark (more accurately, a modifier letter apostrophe) to express aspirates, tʼ, chʼ, tsʼ, pʼ, kʼ, the opposite of the original rough breathing diacritic.
This romanization was taken up by ISO (1996) and is considered obsolete. This system is a loose transcription and is not reversible (without using dictionary lookup), notably for single Armenian letters romanized into digraphs (these non-reversible, or ambiguous romanizations are shown in a red cell in the table below).
Some Armenian letters have several romanizations, depending on their context:
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Romanization of Armenian AI simulator
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Romanization of Armenian
There are various systems of romanization of the Armenian alphabet.
In linguistic literature on Classical Armenian, the commonly used transliteration is that of Hübschmann-Meillet (1913). For aspirated consonants, Heinrich Hübschmann used the Greek rough breathing diacritic (U+0314) above the letter, a reversed comma combining above the letter and serves a similar purpose in Greek: t̔, ch̔, č̔, p̔, k̔. Antoine Meillet, after using the letter h in digraphs, used the same diacritic as Hübschmann but on the right of the letter, with fonts displaying either a half ring or a reversed comma. Émile Benveniste and the Revue des Études Arméniennes continued this use of the breathing mark on the side of the letter. Some authors use a combining dot above diacritic (U+0307) to express the aspirates: ṫ, cḣ, č̇, ṗ, k̇.
However, the computer support (fonts, rendering systems, availability on usual applications) of these combining diacritics has been poor for long, so some documents resorted to use, as possible fallbacks, their spacing variants (so-called “modifier letters”) written after the letter instead of above it, such as the spacing dot above ⟨˙⟩ (U+02D9), or the spacing turned comma ⟨‘⟩ (U+02BB) — or sometimes the spacing Greek-script rough breaking ⟨῾⟩ (U+1FFE), or the spacing grave accent ⟨ˋ⟩ or ASCII backquote or ⟨`⟩ (U+02CB or U+0060) even if they are too flat, or even the ASCII apostrophe-quote ⟨'⟩ (U+0027) when there was no confusion possible.
The preferred character today is the spacing left half-ring ⟨ʿ⟩ (U+02BF), or the spacing turned comma ⟨‘⟩ (U+02BB, which has the shape of a single left quotation mark), or the spacing reversed comma ⟨ʽ⟩ (U+02BD, which is the Latin-script equivalent of the Greek-script rough breathing), with the spacing turned comma having the advantage of excellent support in many Latin fonts because it is visually identical to the left single quote ⟨‘⟩.
Also, some ambiguities were not solved to work with modern vernacular Armenian, which has two dialects, both using two possible orthographies (besides, the modern orthography is used for Classical Armenian in modern publications).
BGN/PCGN romanization (1981) uses a right single quotation mark (more accurately, a modifier letter apostrophe) to express aspirates, tʼ, chʼ, tsʼ, pʼ, kʼ, the opposite of the original rough breathing diacritic.
This romanization was taken up by ISO (1996) and is considered obsolete. This system is a loose transcription and is not reversible (without using dictionary lookup), notably for single Armenian letters romanized into digraphs (these non-reversible, or ambiguous romanizations are shown in a red cell in the table below).
Some Armenian letters have several romanizations, depending on their context: