Armenian has both changed the Classical Armenian voiced stops and voiced affricates to aspirated stops and aspirated affricates and replaced the plain stops and affricates with voiced consonants. Specifically, here are the shifts from Classical Armenian to Western Armenian: Bilabial stops: merging of Classical Armenian and as voicing of Classical to Alveolar stops: merging of Classical Armenian and as voicing of Classical to Velar stops: merging of Classical Armenian and as voicing of Classical to Alveolar affricates: merging of Classical Armenian and as voicing of Classical to Post-alveolar affricates: merging of Classical Armenian and as voicing of Classical to As a result, a word like 'water' (spelled in Classical Armenian) is cognate with Western Armenian (also spelled ). However, 'grandson' and 'stone' are pronounced similarly in both Classical and Western Armenian. Orthography Western Armenian uses Classical Armenian orthography, also known as traditional Mashtotsian orthography. The Armenian orthography reform, commonly known as the Abeghian orthography, was introduced in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and is still used by most Eastern Armenian speakers from modern Armenia. However, it has not been adopted by Eastern Armenian speakers of Iran and their diaspora or by speakers of Western Armenian, with the exception of periodical publications published in Romania and Bulgaria while under Communist regimes. Morphology Nouns Western Armenian nouns have four grammatical cases: nominative-accusative (subject / direct object), genitive-dative (possession / indirect object), ablative (origin) and instrumental (means). Of the six cases, the nominative and accusative are the same, except for personal pronouns, and the genitive and dative are the same, meaning that nouns have four distinct forms for case. Nouns in Armenian also decline for number (singular and plural), but do not decline for gender (i.e. masculine or feminine). Declension in Armenian is based on how the genitive is formed. There are several declensions, but one is dominant (the genitive in i) while a half-dozen other forms are in gradual decline and are being replaced by the i-form, which has virtually attained the status of a regular form: Articles Like English and some other languages, Armenian has definite and indefinite articles. The indefinite article in Western Armenian is , which follows the noun: ator mə ('a chair', Nom.sg), atori mə ('of a chair', Gen.sg) The definite article is a suffix attached to the noun, and is one of two forms, either -n (when the final sound is a vowel) or -ə (when the