ը = the sound of the letter "i" in the words "birth" and "dirt".
՞ = ?; it is the Armenian question mark. Unlike Latin languages, the question mark is placed adjacent to the vowel it's meant to raise the pitch of. English equivalent would be look like this: "Hu?h"
I didn't imagine question marks (or exclamation marks too?) could be placed anywhere but at the end of a sentence. The Armenian syntax makes a lot of sense, I feel smarter to know this, than!ks :)
In most latin-based languages, you'd have only one question mark at the end, although you raise your pitch twice (on "When", and on "tomorrow"). In Armenian it would look like -- "Whe՞n, tomo՞rrow."
Exclamation mark follows the same logic, and looks like: ՜
According to Wikipedia, "linguists classify Armenian as an independent branch of the Indo-European language family" and "Armenian has its own unique script, the Armenian alphabet, invented in 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots"[1].
As a Turkish citizen who lived on the other side of the border for 23 years, I was not aware that Armenian had such a unique script and grammar. Is it harder to learn than the Latin alphabet? I'm curious because we apparently switched to Latin script for writing Turkish from Arabic script just because of the steep learning curve (at least that's what they had thought us at school).
