This text was found in Bolu, Turkey, at my uncle's house. What language is it written in?
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4The alphabet is Armenian, but the text could be Armenian, Turkish, Kurdish or Kipchak.– user6726Feb 3, 2015 at 22:41
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1@user6726 Turkish written in Armenian had umlauts. There was not much if any Kurdish or Kipchak languages written in Armenian. Anyway this example is Armenian.– Adam BittlingmayerJan 28, 2018 at 10:44
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1A good method for lang id is stopwords. In this case և, որ, մեր...– Adam BittlingmayerJan 28, 2018 at 10:48
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1@A.M.Bittlingmayer as of Kipchak you are wrong, there are some well known examples like ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/…– shabuncJan 29, 2018 at 13:07
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@shabunc Yes, and there are Kurmanji examples too. But both are unlikely for something found in Bolu.– Adam BittlingmayerJan 29, 2018 at 14:12
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2 Answers
I'm fairly sure that the language is Armenian. For example, the second word on the top line is միշտ (mishd) meaning "always", and the fourth line has the words քեզ (kez) "you" and մարդ (mard) "man".
I'm not fluent enough in Armenian to easily decipher the whole text, but the final line appears to read "January 1861".
This is Armenian. I'm failing to translate whole text, though it's not a dialect, on the contrary, it seems to me to be a literary language, quite standard, it's just that I'm failing to understand 10% (or to read, some letters are unclear) of words, but this is 100% Armenian.
Some words I understand but never heard in that form (like "ջուրիկ խըմելու"). Still, it's Armenian.
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Far western Armenian possibly? There were many dialects of West Armenian in Turkey before the Genocide Jan 29, 2018 at 2:13
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@Darkgamma written language != spoken language. This is simply en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Armenian_orthography. Jan 29, 2018 at 12:14
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@A.M.Bittlingmayer I understand that, but a written form of Western Armenian would fit the mark hypothetically. Orthography, after all, isn't the same as a written language, either Jan 29, 2018 at 22:29