Romanization of Armenian
There are various systems of romanization of the Armenian alphabet.
Transliteration systems[edit]
Hübschmann-Meillet (1913)[edit]
In linguistic literature on Classical Armenian, the commonly used transliteration is that of Hübschmann-Meillet (1913). It uses a combining dot above diacritic (U+0307) to express the aspirates: ṫ, cḣ, č̇, ṗ, k̇. Some documents were rather published using the Greek rough breathing diacritic (U+0314), a reversed comma combining above the letter, which is easier to distinguish visually, and serves a similar purpose in Greek: t̔, ch̔, č̔, p̔, k̔.
However, the computer support (fonts, rendering systems, availability on usual applications) of these combining diacritics has been poor for long, so some documents resorted to use, as possible fallbacks, their spacing variants (so-called “modifier letters”) written after the letter instead of above it, such as the spacing dot above ⟨˙⟩ (U+02D9), or the spacing turned comma ⟨‘⟩ (U+02BB) — or sometimes the spacing Greek-script rough breaking ⟨῾⟩ (U+1FFE), or the spacing grave accent ⟨ˋ⟩ or ASCII backquote or ⟨`⟩ (U+02CB or U+0060) even if they are too flat, or even the ASCII apostrophe-quote ⟨'⟩ (U+0027) when there was no confusion possible.
The preferred character today is the spacing left half-ring ⟨ʿ⟩ (U+02BF), or the spacing turned comma ⟨‘⟩ (U+02BB, which has the shape of a single left quotation mark), or the spacing reversed comma ⟨ʽ⟩ (U+02BD, which is the Latin-script equivalent of the Greek-script rough breathing), with the advantage of having excellent support in many Latin fonts because it is also a simple reversed.
Also, some ambiguities were not solved to work with modern vernacular Armenian, which has two dialects, both using two possible orthographies (besides, the modern orthography is used for Classical Armenian in modern publications).
BGN/PCGN (1981)[edit]
BGN/PCGN romanization (1981) uses a right single quotation mark (more accurately, a modifier letter apostrophe) to express aspirates, tʼ, chʼ, tsʼ, pʼ, kʼ, the opposite of the original rough breathing diacritic.[1]
This romanization was taken up by ISO (1996) and is considered obsolete. This system is a loose transcription and is not reversible (without using dictionary lookup), notably for single Armenian letters romanized into digraphs (these non-reversible, or ambiguous romanizations are shown in a red cell in the table below).
Some Armenian letters have several romanizations, depending on their context: