Armenian: the verb of being

We did the numbers last week, and we found they were a mixture of familiar, sort-of familiar, and what the hell.  What about the verb of being?  Let's give it a whirl.

Armenian is an Indo-European language, so it has a standard structure for the verb of being: three persons, me you him, times two numbers, singular or plural, equals six verbs.  Just like French or Spanish, right?

First person singular "I am": yes em.  Okay, that's not so bad.  Obviously related to the Latin ego sum, the Italian io sono, and -- most closely -- the Russian ya sam.  No problem there.

Second person singular, "you are": du es.  Ho!  How easy is that?  The pronoun is German, the verb is French!  Yeah!

Third person singular, "he/she/it is": na/na/sa eh.  Okay, little trickier here.  Unlike most Indo-European languages, Armenian is not gendered.  English isn't gendered much, but we at least keep gender for pronouns: he him his, she her hers.  Not Armenian.  "He"?  Sa.  "She"?  Also sa.  But sa is always a person, so "it" is na. 

Eh is obviously in the same family as the Latin and French est and the Slavic je... in fact, if you say sa eh, "it is", it sounds a lot like the French c'est.

Well, that wasn't so bad!  Let's just do the plurals and go home.

First person plural "we are": menk enk.

And suddenly we're back in 'what the hell' land.

Now, there is a faint echo of other languages here.  But it's faint; menk enk is just not that close to nous sommes, never mind wir sind.  Philologists have reconstructed how Armenian took a funny turn and picked up all those "enk" and "unk" phonemes, so it is possible to trace a direct line from menk enk back to Proto-Indo-European.  But still: it just sounds weird.

Second person plural "you are": duk ek.  Pronounced more like "dook" than "duck".  Armenian does the common European thing of making the second person plural the 'respectful' form, just like Spanish tu/usted or German du/sie.  But while duk ek isn't as duckbll platypus strange as menk enk, it doesn't exactly fall gracefully on the ear.  Well, the ear of a native English speaker, anyway.

BTW, Basque has a plural suffix -ek.  This has nothing to do with anything in Armenia, it's pure coincidence, but it's caused more than one philologist to go insane trying to find a connection.

Third person plural "they are": nrank en.

"nrank"?

I mean... come on.  I'm trying, here.  I'm not going to sing at the opera, but I'd like to have a basic, order-in-a-restaurant, don't-be-cheated-by-the-taxi-driver, five hundred word simple working vocabulary.  And that means learning the verb of being, right?  So I'm playing along, good sport, I'm all ready to learn... and Armenian hits me with nrank en.

Haaaah.  Okay, couple of quick points about Armenian verbs and then we're done.

One, verb order is often subject-object-verb.  So, "I am an American"?  Yes Amerikantsi em.  Other times it's subject-verb-object.  I'm not sure why.

Two, verbs in the present tense.  Check this out: in English, and most other Indo-European languages, the verb has a stem and tense is formed with suffixes.  English uses only one suffix (you go, he goes); other languages use as many as six.  Still, the pattern is simple enough, right?

Well, Armenian doesn't do that.  Armenian conjugates verbs by using a single present tense verb form, and then adding the verb of being afterwards.  So, instead of saying "I love, you love, he loves", Armenian says sirum em, sirum es, sirum eh -- love am, love are, love is.  To the ear of a native English speaker, this is wonderfully confusing.  Combine it with the word order thing, above, and it sounds like Bizarro talking.  "I want potatoes" comes out as "want potatoes am".

Okay, just thinking about this is making my head hurt.  Ek duk tired of Armenian linguistics yet?

Comments

[Michael]

This is coooooooool.

[King-Walters]

Seconded.

[Carlos]

There's only one verb of being in Armenian?

Also, I think that's a Serbian form. In Russian, it would be ya yesm', except that the present tense for 'to be' isn't used like that. They just omit it.

And just to be ridiculously pedantic, the English paradigm for 'to be' is a mash-up of two unrelated verbs and several variant forms, and the present tense is completely unrelated to the stem of the infinitive.

[Michael']

The crazy kids now use yest' for an emphatic version of Russian 'to be' with all persons. However, yesm' was de rigueur back when ya was az. To make a pompous philosophical assertion in third-person plural some people will also use the Church Slavonic sut'. I was a tall lad before I realized that it wasn't the same word as sut' meaning "gist", so you can imagine how many pompous philosophical solecisms I had under my belt by then.

[Jussi Jalonen]

The translation of Russian "я caм" (ya sam) would be roughly, "I myself" or "I alone". I don't know whether Douglas picked that up accidentally from Serbo-Croatian or from somewhere else, since I'm not fluent in South Slavic languages.

In Polish, the "to be"-verb is absolutely, positively never omitted, but the personal pronouns are very often left out. Obviously, because the conjugation reveals the person already; and in the past tense, it reveals also the gender of the person.

The Armenian 3rd person seems to be similar to the Finnish.

By the way, Douglas, I'm sure that your wife already pointed out that one mistake. The German polite 2nd person ("Sie") is _not_ the same as the 2nd person plural ("ihr"). Apparently there's a stack of books written of how the polite "Sie" emerged, but I'm not sure if there's any consensus on the topic.

Cheers,

J. J.

[Michael]

Ha! I didn't even notice that point, about the second-person plural being the polite form. That's incorrect for both German *and* Spanish; second person plural being "ihr" and "vosotros" in those languages respectively. "Sie" and "Usted" are both grammatically third person, with Spanish using "Usted/Ustedes" in both singular and plural third person for polite language.

Fascinatingly, German *did* once use "Ihr" (second person plural) as the polite form for singular people, and ... I'm thinking Uruguayans (or somebody down there) does the same in modern-day Spanish, but I'm not sure about that last point.

And finally, the other language-geek point I wanted to make was that not only Basque uses a "k" for plural; Hungarian does, too, and "menk enk" sounds just a teeny bit like "mi vagyunk". OK, I did say "teeny."

I agree, however, that "nrank" is just downright eerie in its weirdness.

[Michael]

A Puerto Rican note on "vosotros" -- they don't use it here. I mean they really, really don't use it here; we were asking one friend of ours about how to conjugate and she literally had never even heard of second person plural or the word "vosotros".

[Dennis Brennan]

I can has string-cheese?

[Michael']

Don't some Swiss still use ihr for polite singular? Not to forget the use of er for 'impolite' address. Langsam, Woyzeck, langsam... Wenn ich sag: Er, so mein ich Ihn, Ihn.

[Christian]

Keep in mind that there are two versions of the verb "to be." The Western Armenian word is "elal" while the Eastern Armenia word is "linel." The present tense of both is for the most part is the same. However, the future tense is completely different, with each dialect using the root to conjugate. In other words, "I am being" is "linum em" and "I will be" is linelu em."

It was hard at first for me to get used to conjugating "linel" since I am first and foremost a Western Armenian speaker. It's a good thing that you don't have to deal with the differing nuances of the language. But keep at it. Armenian is a beautiful language, unlike any other in the world.