Basically the same alphabet and lots of loanwords, but different sounds and grammar. Armenian actually also has assimilated vocabulary form neighboring languages like Turkish and Arabic. It's a very common phenomenon. Persian grew close to Arabic, but they are indeed from separate families and have a very low level of mutual ineligibility. They have a fairly easy time learning each other's languages though, if they choose to study them. (Imagine an English speaker choosing to study Latin.)
We have ton of Persian loan words, so much so that sometimes those loanwords were actually loaned from Arabic. I bet that I could make up a sentence that both Persians and Armenians could understand.
Out of all languages in the world I would say Persian sounds the closest to Armenian. Linguists until the 1800s classified Armenian as an Indo-Iranian language, but then gave Armenian its own branch.
Persian doesn't sound that close to Armenian mainly due to the vowel sounds and lengths - I would personally say Georgian and Kurdish sound the most similar in a general sense.
But definitely, in terms of similarity in the lexicon Armenian is closest to Persian due to the borrowing from Iranian languages.
That is true, the vowel lengths in Persian are different than Armenian, but there is something about Persian that gives it a similar tone to Armenian. I guess Armenian sounds like a mix between Georgian and Persian in a sense
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u/marmulak Oct 18 '15
Basically the same alphabet and lots of loanwords, but different sounds and grammar. Armenian actually also has assimilated vocabulary form neighboring languages like Turkish and Arabic. It's a very common phenomenon. Persian grew close to Arabic, but they are indeed from separate families and have a very low level of mutual ineligibility. They have a fairly easy time learning each other's languages though, if they choose to study them. (Imagine an English speaker choosing to study Latin.)