Greco-Armenian

Abstract

It has been generally held since the beginning of the 20th century that Armenian is more closely related to Greek than to any other Indo-European branch. A more recent minority opinion posits an especially close relationship between Greek and Armenian, even going so far as to assume a period of Greco-Armenian unity. Following upon recent publications, above all Clackson 1994, this paper argues that the available evidence does not at all support this stronger hypothesis. In contrast to the lexical innovations common to Greek and Armenian, the phonological isoglosses shared by the two languages are extremely few and of an easily repeatable nature. The morphological features claimed as shared innovations may likewise represent independent developments and/or have parallels in other Indo-European branches, whereas other features of verbal morphology rather appear to connect Armenian with Indo-Iranian or Balto-Slavic. These considerations suggest that pre-Armenian belonged to a dialect continuum encompassing the ancestors of Greek, Phrygian, and Indo-Iranian for some time after the breakup of Proto-Indo-European, but made up a distinct speech community already by the late 3rd millennium BC.