ԱյբուբենThe archive, letter by letter

How the letters are named

Mesrop Mashtots created the alphabet in 405 with 36 letters. Two more letters, Օ and Ֆ, were added in the Middle Ages to write the o and f sounds of foreign words, and Օ also came to spell the native o sound that had developed from the old pair աւ. In the 1920s Soviet Armenia reformed the spelling, and Western Armenians keep the traditional one. Each letter has a name and a sound, and for 15 of the 38 letters the two branches of the language say the name, the sound or both differently. The site’s own name is the Western pronunciation, Aypoupen; in Armenia it is Aybuben. On every letter the Western name comes first and the Eastern one follows, both written the way this site writes its own name, with ou for the sound u.

How the pieces are filed

A piece about a person is filed under the name Armenians know them by, usually the surname, so Charles Aznavour is under Ա. A surname written -yan in English is spelled as Armenia writes it; one written -ian is spelled the way the family writes it in Western Armenian, so Isabel Bayrakdarian, Պայրագտարեան, is under Պ. A piece about a place is filed under the place as it is written in Armenia, and a piece about a custom or an idea under the word an Armenian reader would look it up by. All 166 pieces are filed. Every article shows its letter in the line under its title, and the letter leads back here.

If you would rather read the story of the alphabet itself, it is the piece Araz wrote in 2014.