Counting to ten in Armenian

  If I have this right -- and maybe I don't -- National Blog Posting Month is November.  So, I post something on November 1, then again on November 2, and so forth.  On Armenian time, obviously.

This brings us to a topic I find absolutely fascinating: counting in Armenian.

Here are the numbers from one to ten in Armenian:

1  mek

2  yerku

3  yerek

4  chors

5  hing

6  vets

7  yot

8  ut

9  inn

10 tas

Take a moment and read through them.  Say them out loud.  No, really -- try it.  What's your first reaction?

I can tell you what my first reaction was:  what the hell.  Yot?  Yerek?  Ut?  Who ordered this?

But if you stare at the list for a while, some things start to look familiar.  Ut is not so different from the English eight, and even closer to the French huit or Italian otto.  Chors may not sound like "four" to us, but it's within a long reach of Spanish cuatro or Russian chetyre.  Inn is cousin to the English nine and brother to the Greek ennea.  If you're a linguist, you can link pretty much all of the list to cognates in other Indo-European languages.

That said, it's a weird-sounding list.  It clunks.  It clangs.  It has a strange barbaric grandeur.  In this respect, it's a very good introduction to Armenian.

The first numbers I learned in Armenian?  Our address: Arabkir, Street 41, House #7.  Arabkir pohots karasun mek, dom yot.  Necessary for taxi drivers and ordering pizza.  (Yes, we live on Street 41.  Soviet urban planning.)  Hmm, pizza in Armenia... that probably deserves a post of its own.

"Hundred" in Armenian is horyut, by the way, and "thousand" is hazar.  (So we are living in the year yerku hazar yot.  And how cool is that?)  If you can link those to other languages, you are good.

Comments

[Jussi Jalonen]

The word "tas" for the 10-numeral is interesting. The Udmurtian and the Komi languages use the equivalent word "das" for the same number, from which the Hungarians have derived their "tíz". The origins of that one are quite clear: it's Iranian.

"Haraz" for 1000 isn't that far away from the Hanti and Mansi words "śarɘs" and "sõtɘr", or the Hungarian "ezer". This word is supposed to be an Indo-Aryan loan, by the way.

Cheers,

J. J.

[Michael']

Makes you think of the original title of Arabian Nights: hazar-o yek shab. It seems somehow appropriate that the word for house should weather the vicissitudes of dialect so well. Latin domus, Greek domos, Sanskrit damah, Old Slavonic dom, PIE root dom-.

[Michael]

Damn, now I sound like a me-too for mentioning Hungarian. I hate that.

[Doug (not Muir)]

Don't ever feel bad for mentioning Hungarian!

Egy, ketto, harom, negy, ot, hat, het, nyolc, kilenc, tiz. (Plus the diacritical marks, of course.)

[Ikram]

Hazaar is thousand in Farsi, Hindi, and Urdu.

Armenian seems to follow Indo-Iranic (especially Farsi) languages just less than half the time (for 1, 4,8, and 10). Which makes sense.

[Christian]

To confuse people even more "hazar" is also the word for lettuce. But most of the produce vendors don't refer to it as that for some reason, they call it "marol" usually.

[claudia]

Well, that's because marol is marol. ;-) It's a kind of Romaine lettuce, not what we would call lettuce usually (which is butter lettuce, IIRC) - maybe that's why? The Turks, btw, use the same word, almost: Marul. One of the things I love, love, love about Armenia is the food, and maru/ol tops the list.