What will it take to unify Western and Eastern Armenian spelling and is it really so hard?

What will it take to unify Western and Eastern Armenian spelling and is it really so hard? Salpi Ghazarian asks at Civilitas blog
Narcissistic and short-sighted, too
November 24th, 2010 | Author: Salpi Ghazarian

The argument may seem trivial, it says, but the gulf is deep. They see history differently, and themselves as its principal victims, it says.

“It” is an article in the Economist and the subject is not Armenians. “They” are the Lithuanians and the Poles. “The argument” is about spelling. Yes, there are people other than Armenians who argue about the alphabet. “The two countries need each other on everything from energy security to transport links. Yet their relations are among the iciest in the European Union. Poland’s foreign minister will not visit Lithuania until local Poles are allowed to write their names in official documents using Polish letters.”

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. These two neighbors have fought a common enemy, dodged the Soviet bullet, shared a history and culture, and now they don’t talk to each other because of six letters in the alphabet?

Remind you of anyone you know? The two halves of our people don’t need each other? We don’t see history differently? We aren’t all of us the most wounded of victims – some of us victimized by Stalin, others by Talaat, all of us victimized by separation and longing?



As a result, we hang on, we clutch desperately to the spelling system we’ve been taught, and never mind we neither spell correctly nor write frequently, but hell if anyone’s going to suggest we figure out a way around and out of this abyss that someone dug for us decades ago.

It’s been nearly 100 years People! And we still can’t get a few wise men (humm.. maybe that’s the problem?) in a room, lock the door, and tell them they can’t come out until they’ve decided what the new rules will have to be for a combined spelling that settles the disparities on our own 8 or 10 differences?

Really, too absurd to laugh and too consequential to cry. Is our language not isolated enough, our readership not tiny enough that we need to subdivide some more? And the defenders of letters do so ever so proudly, virtuously, smugly, sanctimoniously.

The title for the Economist’s little gem of a wake-up article that made me so angry? “Narcissistic differences.” Again, about them. But really, about us, too.

A.B.