faq

1) Why did you write this book?

Two summers ago, I realized I had written/posted enough poems for a few small chapbooks. I started looking at poem books and figured out how I’d like my book to look, feel, etc. (see Q2). I grouped the poems into first six then four categories: Armenian culture, Armenian language, Night sky, Queer. This first volume includes 29 pieces about Armenian language, food, holidays, people, coffee-cup readings.

One of the main driving forces was that I wanted there to exist a WA book that showed the written form as it came out of the writer, before the spellcheck/revision process. Basically I wanted an Armenian book with spelling mistakes, to encourage others to write and not worry about spelling as they create. I found that creation for me required putting aside the worry and shame of spelling mistakes and the ‘correct form’ of a word, aka a word with as old of armenian language origins as possible. I allowed my language to flow and write freely. This is why at the bottom of every page of my book I put ‘writen with spelling freedoms’ (ուղղագրական ազատութիւններով գրված - ughakragan azadutyunnerov kըrvadz).

It is important to have literature in Armenian where spelling and words being borrowed or Armenian isn't important. Without worrying about these two things, the writer is more likely to create and explore. Also to expand the readers possible worlds with connections to my life.

This book is intended to be a language tool for Armenian speakers and those who have some exposure to the language. I aim to figure out ways for speakers to sponge up the language.

 2) Why did you write it in this form?

Accessibility and approachability were the goals. Whenever I identified a barrier for certain reader/speakers, I kept it in the back of my mind, and asked around about it. Eventually incorporating a new dimension into the book. After half a year I got to this form of the book.

I write how I speak and assume there are no wrong way/forms. Whatever seems convenient and enjoyable for me in the moment is what i use, not what im supposed to use. For my language streams to flow, i've been ignoring the pressures of 'correct' 'pure' 'non-foreign'. This made it possible to create with Armenian, instead of thinking what the dictionary spelling or the more-Armenian version of a word is. it's extra. If we allow ourselves to put this aside, we'll get new-ities from the different Armenian communities. The important part is to use the language. By using the language, ripples will reach others. You CAN write, withOUT worry.

My poems are bilingual, Western Armenian and English. I liked the parallel texts I’ve seen for other language pairs, and decided to put the Armenian on the left and English on the right. Since I write the Armenian jivjiv before the English, it made sense to have the Armenian before, to the left of English. I wanted a line-by-line (mostly) translation between the two languages.

With accessibility in mind, I arranged my Western Armenian pronunciations under the Armenian letters. This allows the reader to experience the sound and poetic play I do with WA. And under the English you will find the Armenian lettered English pronunciations, which balances out the left and right sides. It also provides a fun way to learn/practice the Armenian letters. Language is a tool and we should use it in all and every direction. By using Armenian letters for the pronunciation of the English, I am able to get speakers of English to figure out the sounds of the Armenian letters. Of course I included a sound guide for those interested in more precise pronunciation.

In the quest for approachability, it was clear from the start that the book had to be in color since there are emojis. Some people expressed that they open books usually only if there are images/illustrations in them. This prompted me to connect with artist Amy Kazandjian (ig amykazn) who had been a Western Armenian language advocate and ig pioneer in auntie impressions. I love her work and our work together has been such a joy! She created a powerful cover and beautiful illustrations inside. Discussing more details with Amy, she came up with the size 5x7, so that it would be easily transportable.

3) Did you send these as Twitter poems originally?

Yes, all pairs of poems of the book have been posted on Twitter. I wrote my first jivjiv october 2020 during the 44 day attack on Artsakh. And since then I put out a few jivjivs per month. I post them on Twitter then take screenshots and post them on Instagram. And for the last year I’ve also been emailing my jivjivs through Substack. For the second book there were a few topics I wanted to cover and so I planned to create tweets for them so that they would end up in my book as already posted jivjivs.

For the first year of my jivjivs, there were two parts, the Armenian and English. I started adding a third part, the pronunciation of the WA after the first year. And for the past year I’ve included a fourth and fifth part. Fourth is the pronunciation of the English, and the fifth is the linguistic breakdown of the WA to aid those learning the language.

4)For our readers who don’t know Twitter well what is the rule in terms of Content and length?

I use the Twitter app to draft and post my jivjivs. Content wise most things are acceptable to write and share. I obfuscate a word when there is a word that might get my tweet flagged or demoted, like ‘genocide’ which i sometimes write as ‘gencide’.

In terms of length, each tweet has a limit of 280 characters, where every letter, number, symbol, space, new line are one characters long, and emojis and some complex punctuations like … are two characters. I also use the phone’s visual limitation of the line as a line break. My lines are never longer than however many characters one line can hold. Usually ends up being a few words per line. This limitation gives rise to abbreviations, truncations, portmanteaux, etc. aka language fun! That’s how I ended up with daror and yerazh for queer and music, taken from the longer forms darorinagvadz and yerazhըshdutyun. I really enjoy making the jivjivs exactly 280 characters. If I’m over the character limit, I start replacing words with emojis.

This limitation in length also guided how i represent the pronunciation of WA, specifically the vowels. I made a decision early on that every vowel will be represented with one character, therefore a, e, i, o, u would map to the vowels of Armenian.

I use emojis for both replacing words and as decoration/art.

5) Did you grow up speaking Armenian at home I am what’s your position about passing the language on. Tamar Boyadjian and the late Teni Arlen were the first two American born Armenians to publish literary books in western Armenian : Tamar who is an important experimental writer writer as well as an expert in medieval Armenian studies-Attended only murders Armenian school in Los Angeles while 10 he spoke no Armenian Before attending UCLA and taking classes with Hagop Gulludjian Who has developed Armenian classes that emphasize writing and using the language in an active way from the beginning. What’s your story in this respect?

Yes, I consider myself as being an ideal product of the Western Armenian community. Spoke WA at home and got to interact in/with Armenian during most of my pre-college years. I went to Armenian school full-time and got used to typing Armenian in High school thanks to another Armenian poet, Ara Kazandjian, who had me type up the Armenian submissions for the school’s literary magazine.

I continued interacting with Armenian in college when I started taking linguistics courses. I ended up doing most projects/research on some aspect of the WA language since I had so many speakers to sample/record/survey.

I got to be Tamar’s mentee last summer working on the queer jivjiv volume. She really helped me expand my world of possibilities in both the structure of a poem and the connections/flows poems can have when arranged in certain orders.

I got to be on a panel with Hagop Gulludjian this past spring at Irvine where we discussed digital WA.

5) You obtained a PhD in linguistics specializing in Western Armenian at MIT – pretty impressive – can you elaborate a bit on what you studied and how it influenced Your writing?

Thank you, I think of it as I had the bundles of privilege and community to propel me to undergrad at UCLA and a PhD from MIT. I started with math and switched to linguistics, which was the study of the structure and patterns and math of language. I studied the connections between patterns across languages as it related to phenomena i was examining usually in Spoken Western Armenian. My focus throughout my linguistic academic run was on the present day spoken language vs. historic or written. I loved how there are structures and connections that at the surface are not obvious. My focus and thesis was on optionality in the syntax of WA. I looked at phrases where two or more word bits would be present yet give us the same meaning. Armenian’s flexibility and agility makes it a poetically fun language.

Linguistics got me to explore the sounds of WA, which at MIT I was using the IPA (international phonetics alphabet). My training in linguistics helped me create a standardized system for the pronunciations of the two languages. I decided to use one Armenian letter in the English pronunciation, ը, the schwa, which English doesn’t have a designated vowel for. To balance the English side out, I use w for the English pronunciations since WA doesn’t have the w sound. There are the ‘th’ sounds as well, which I decided to collapse to t or d depending on voicing.

6) Finally to get back to JIVJIV-Can you speak to the fact that they can be read and all sorts of different ways vertically horizontally; all in Armenian or all in English or a combination of the two and it occurs to me that you can also learn armenian while reading it.

Exactly, yes I want each pair of pages to be experiences multiple times. I indented the pronunciation lines and made them dark grey so that they won’t interfere too much if one is looking to only read the WA or English and doesn’t need the pronunciation. Every part is intended to help every other part, to inform and add.

For example if there is an Armenian word you don’t know, you can check the pronunciation to make sure it’s the word you are hearing in your mind and then check the corresponding English line which should give you the meaning.

7) Finally two things: anything you’d like to add and when does the second volume come out and what is it called

I would just like to add that this work was done in Yelamu, known as San Francisco, on lands stewarded for centuries by the Ramaytush Ohlone, the First Peoples of SF.

The second volume is the “Language” volume in the same format as the first. This book is 132 pages with 40 pairs of jivjiv poems, about language games, word bits, spelling, and 16 pairs of pages of a stream of consciousness piece, i wrote while watching Jupiter and Saturn one early morning. Jivjiv volume 2 is also illustrated and cover art by Amy Kazandjian.

We, me and Amy, are ready to present our second baby, volume ii of the Jivjiv series, about the Western Armenian language. We want to continue to remove as many barriers as possible and show how much joy there is in Western Armenian. Glad so many people have joined us in our adventure to spread the Western Armenian language through humor, playfulness, and joy.

 8) I guess I forgot Another question: Are you conscious of being an innovator with Western Armenian End of being part of a small group of people actively trying to innovate to help bring back the language which as many people know is considered “” endangered “by the UN?

Thank you for the recognition, and yes part of the fun is innovating by expanding, adding, crushing, squeezing, forming the current language as if it were clay and creating unique ceramic pieces. Yes, I am disappointed that WA got slapped with the endangered label. It helped jolt some people to action. Though I feel for most it made their shame and worry about them causing the death of the Armenian language even greater. More pressure got added to use and speak and and and, it never ends the steams of shoulds and shame.

I approach WA with a more positive light. It is 2024 and WA has survived this far. There are tons of texts, audio, video, wiki pages in WA and more and more are being produced everyday. I see WA as having made it to the internet age and will therefore be an active language forever. I don’t like to compare endangered languages to those of the past, those that have gone extinct. We will never know how those languages sounded. Yet we have a treasure trove of amazing WA which will live on forever as long as we have the internet and life on earth. Congrats Armenians, thank you to the generations and generations of continuing and passing the language along.

Final note, there is a clear class and privilege dimension that needs to be realized by the Armenian boozhwazee. That reading/writing/speaking are all tied to access, wealth, time, resources, and that we shouldn’t consider this or that Armenian/enough. It is Armenian if it’s Armenian. :)