Traveling through Yerevan & Languages

What I love about this video is that I did not dub the music on top.  I believe it's Armenian music (not Russian?) that was playing in our microbus.  You'll notice that the road is very nicely paved (unlike what you might find in Chisinau).  But a local told us there was recently a political election in the city, so the roads in the last while had been repaired and improved quite a bit.

The Armenian alphabet is so different and so interesting to me.  I also enjoy listening to Armenian being spoken. To me, the sounds are raw and throaty but yet such a low, soft, rolling song with every sentence.   Languages are so interesting and beautiful to me, displaying the diversity of life and complexity of how cultures and civilizations transform the way people speak.  I found this interesting article from the Wall Street Journal about whether language influences thoughts and thus culture.  Cognitive research in the last few years suggests it does.  

One experience I had last fall (just when I thought I was getting good at Romanian!) involved simple small talk with a young gentleman.  He asked me about where I was from, what I'm doing here in Moldova, and where I live... And then, he threw me for a loop.  He asked me, "Se primește?"  I knew what it meant.  It meant, "To receive itself?"  I asked him to repeat, and he said it again.  I had no response.  I really didn't know how to respond to that, and thus he scowled and scolded, wandering how in the world I could survive in this country not knowing how to respond to the question, "to receive itself."  It turns out that it's a direct translation into Romanian from Russian, and it means something like, how do you receive it here?  How's it going here for you?  I didn't know much Russian at all then and still don't know much now.  Inevitably, there will always be things I miss from my lack of context from spoken languages here.