What cultural traits do Armenians share?

[magdalinka]

magdalinka,

Your suggestion of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was a great help to me. I saw so many things I could relate to---I felt a sense of "OMG, our family is not so weird after all." Watching this film had the cozy familliarity of a Sunday dinner at Grandmas.

Thank you!

You are so welcome

[ArmoBarbi]

Magdalinka, many languages share words. I am learning French, and it has an amazing amount of cognates with English, and some with Russian. The words are obviously the same. All three languages are from different groups without debate. It just means that we borrowed them like we have borrowed other aspects of culture from each other. We do share the planet. Plus, Im sure there are words that just happen to be similar without really being borrowed, which makes it seem like there are more, and makes it more difficult to believe.

[rabinovich]

You actually have a point but will you please explane to me the ethimology of such words as "dur"(arm)="door"="dver'"(russ)="turr"(germ.). I mean everybody knows they belong to Indo-European language groop, but they are all separate branches not related to each other.

"belong to Indo-European language groop" means they have a common origin. So once there was a language and a group of people who spoke that language, let's say some 10000 years ago, linguists call it Proto Indo European. All these European languages, plus Persian and Sanskrit and others, are derivatives of that mother language.

Here's the roots of words used in that language, as much as linguists were able to reconstruct it: http://www.bartleby.com/61/IEroots.html

Obviously, there are many roots from this list that came into Armenian, either directly or through Greek and Persian. "Dur" meaning door is one of them.

[rabinovich]

You actually have a point but will you please explane to me the ethimology of such words as "dur"(arm)="door"="dver'"(russ)="turr"(germ.). I mean everybody knows they belong to Indo-European language groop, but they are all separate branches not related to each other.

Here's your answer, the mother root that passed to other languages:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE111.html

[ArmoBarbi]

So its scientifically acceptable to consider words as having the same common root even if that root is two letters? Ill look some more into it later...

[rabinovich]

Its true about the bad things. I have an american jewish friend, who made a research and found out that "in Erevan, the capital of Armenia people were stealing the wooden parts of benches in parks, so they can use it as a fuel in winter(simply burn them). I felt so bad when he brought it up. i think its such a shame, esp when other people find out about it.

Listen, I was in Yerevan during 90's, I didn't steal anything from anywhere at any time. What do you mean "it's true"? It's true if you say "some hungry Armenians did this or that", not when you say "Armenians do this or that". The author of that long article posted on previous page is most obviously a moron.

[rabinovich]

So its scientifically acceptable to consider words as having the same common root even if that root is two letters? Ill look some more into it later...

Even if words have no common letters - they still may be derived from same old root. As long as the derivation is linguistically proved.

[rabinovich]

Its true about the bad things. I have an american jewish friend, who made a research and found out that "in Erevan, the capital of Armenia people were stealing the wooden parts of benches in parks, so they can use it as a fuel in winter(simply burn them). I felt so bad when he brought it up. i think its such a shame, esp when other people find out about it.

Also, you shouldn't feel ashamed. Those were times of war, blockade, energetic crisis and overall depression. What do you expect?
People even ate zoo animals, I heard

[rabinovich]

But again, claiming bad things about nation in general, like "among this nation's habits are stealing stuff to heat their homes and killing zoo animals to feed their kids" is just wrong. It's the environment that dictates to do sh*t like that, not your genes or race or ethnicity or whatever else made-up thing...

[ArmoBarbi]

For a word's derivation to be scientifically proven it would have to have at least some similarity. How can the derivation be explored in the first place? No similarity = same origin not noticed. Or did I miss something?