The place of Armenian in the Indo-European language family: the relationship with Greek and Indo-Iranian

Abstract

The place of Armenian in the Indo-European language family: the relationship with Greek and Indo-Iranian*The main purpose of this paper is to present lexical correspondences that unite Armenian with Greek and/or Indo-Iranian.They include shared innovations on the one hand, and isolated lexemes on the other.These two lexical corpora -lexical innovations on an inherited basis and isolated words -can be placed within the same temporal and spatial framework.After the Indo-European dispersal Proto-Armenian would have continued to come into contact with genetically related Indo-European dialects.Simultaneously, it would certainly also have been in contact with neighbouring non-Indo-European languages.A word can be of a substrate origin if it is characterized by: (1) limited geographical distribution; (2) unusual phonology and word formation; (3) characteristic semantics.The material presented here, albeit not exhaustive, allows to preliminarily conclude that Armenian, Greek, (Phrygian) and Indo-Iranian were dialectally close to each other.Within this hypothetical dialect group, Proto-Armenian was situated between Proto-Greek (to the west) and Proto-Indo-Iranian (to the east).The Indo-Iranians then moved eastwards, while the Proto-Armenians and Proto-Greeks remained in a common geographical region for a long period and developed numerous shared innovations.At a later stage, together or independently, they borrowed a large number of words from the Mediterranean / Pontic substrate language(s), mostly cultural and agricultural words, as well as animal and plant designations.On the other hand, Armenian shows a considerable number of lexical correspondences with European branches of the Indo-European language family, a large portion of which too should be explained in terms of substrate rather than Indo-European heritage.

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