my mother is armenian, and your girl was almost right, most armenians have -yan or -ian at the end... along with some variations, like -iants... Kardashian, for example, is the shame on the face of armenians... lol...

some armenians don't have -ian or -yan at the end, some have Ter- at the beginning (means that someone in the roots of the family was a priest, armenians are the very first christians on the face of earth) and some actually have very turkish or even muslim sounding names, for example, Allahverdian... the reason for that was the high infant mortality, and to "fool" the fate (do you see the theme here?!!!), a newborn was given a name of the enemy, and the bad forces would spare the baby as they would "think" that the baby is not armenian baby... Allahverdian = Allah - one of the names of God in Islam, Verdi - "given" in Turkish, so, the child is "GodGiven" but in the tongue of the enemy...

And there were many armenians living in Turkey... until the bad things happened in 1915... affected almost all armenians in the world, my family including... but, in the Old World, many calamities affected many families - the war with Nazi affected my family, my father-in-law is Halocaust survivor, my greatgrandfather survived the armenian genocide in turkey...

Very old, ancient customs, sometimes make no sense at all but engraved into the mentality of people exposed to it...

sorry, did not mean to highjack the thread with political history lessons!!!

carry on!!!