Graeco-Aryan

Last updated
Graeco-Aryan
Graeco-Armeno-Aryan
(proposed)
Geographic
distribution		 Southern Europe, South, Central, West Asia and the Caucasus
Linguistic classification Indo-European
  • Graeco-Aryan
Proto-languageProto-Graeco-Aryan
Subdivisions
Language codes
ISO 639-3 –

Graeco-Aryan, or Graeco-Armeno-Aryan, is a hypothetical clade within the Indo-European family that would be the ancestor of Hellenic, Armenian, and the Indo-Iranian languages, which spans Southern Europe, Armenian highlands and Southern Asian regions of Eurasia.

Contents

The Graeco-Armeno-Aryan group supposedly branched off from the parent Indo-European stem by the mid-3rd millennium BC.

Relation to the possible homeland

In the context of the Kurgan hypothesis, Graeco-Aryan is also known as "Late Proto-Indo-European" or "Late Indo-European" to suggest that Graeco-Aryan forms a dialect group, which corresponds to the latest stage of linguistic unity in the Indo-European homeland in the early part of the 3rd millennium BC. By 2500 BC, Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian had separated and moved respectively westward and eastward from the Pontic Steppe. [1]

If Graeco-Aryan is a valid group, Grassmann's law may have a common origin in Greek and Sanskrit. However, Grassmann's law in Greek postdates certain sound changes that happened only in Greek, not Sanskrit, which suggests that it could not have been inherited directly from a common Graeco-Aryan stage. Rather, it is more likely that an areal feature spread across a then-contiguous Graeco-Aryan–speaking area. That would have occurred after early stages of Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian had developed into separate dialects but before they ceased to be in geographic contact.[ citation needed ]

Evidence for the existence of a Graeco-Aryan subclade was given by Wolfram Euler's 1979 examination on shared features in Greek and Sanskrit nominal inflection. [2] Graeco-Aryan is invoked in particular in studies of comparative mythology such as Martin Litchfield West (1999) [3] and Calvert Watkins (2001). [4]

Tamaz V. Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav V. Ivanov included Armenian in Graeco-Aryan and argued for a primary split of Graeco-Aryan into a Greek branch with Greek as its only member, and a Armenian-Aryan branch that comprises Armenian and Indo-Iranian. [5] [6] [7]

Graeco-Aryan has comparatively wide support among Indo-Europeanists who support the Armenian hypothesis, which asserts that the homeland of the Indo-European language family was in the Armenian Highlands. [8] [9] [10]

A related proposal, Graeco-Armenian, assumes a special relation between Greek and Armenian to the exclusion of other Indo-European branches and has been popular among experts since the beginning of the 20th century, [11] although it has not gained generally acceptance, and its validity has been questioned. [12] [13]

References

  1. ↑ Martin Litchfield West, Indo-European poetry and myth (2007), p. 7.
  2. ↑ Wolfram Euler: Indoiranisch-griechische Gemeinsamkeiten der Nominalbildung und deren indogermanische Grundlagen [= Aryan-Greek Communities in Nominal Morphology and their Indoeuropean Origins]. Innsbruck, 1979 (in German).
  3. ↑ Litchfield West, Martin (1999). "The Invention of Homer". Classical Quarterly. 49 (364).
  4. ↑ Calvert Watkins (2001), How to Kill a Dragon , Oxford University Press, ISBN   978-0-19-514413-0.
  5. ↑ Handbook of Formal Languages (1997), p. 6.
  6. ↑ Gamkrelidze, Thomas V.; Ivanov, V. V. (1990). "The Early History of Indo-European Languages". Scientific American. 262 (3): 110–117. JSTOR   24996796.
  7. ↑ Gamkrelidze, Thomas V.; Ivanov, V. V. (1995). Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and Proto-Culture. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. p. 323. doi:10.1515/9783110815030.
  8. ↑ Renfrew, A. C., 1987, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, London: Pimlico. ISBN   0-7126-6612-5; T. V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov, The Early History of Indo-European Languages, Scientific American, March 1990; Renfrew, Colin (2003). "Time Depth, Convergence Theory, and Innovation in Proto-Indo-European". Languages in Prehistoric Europe. Winter. ISBN   3-8253-1449-9.
  9. ↑ A. Bammesberger in The Cambridge History of the English Language, 1992, ISBN   978-0-521-26474-7, p. 32: the model "still remains the background of much creative work in Indo-European reconstruction" even though it is "by no means uniformly accepted by all scholars."
  10. ↑ Mallory, James P. (1997). "Kuro-Araxes Culture". Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture . Fitzroy Dearborn: 341–42.
  11. ↑ Gray, Russell D.; Atkinson, Quentin D. (27 November 2003). "Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin" (PDF). Nature. 426 (6965): 435–439. Bibcode:2003Natur.426..435G. doi:10.1038/nature02029. PMID   14647380. S2CID   42340. Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 March 2009.
  12. ↑ Kim, Ronald (2018). "Greco-Armenian: The persistence of a myth". Indogermanische Forschungen. The University of British Columbia Library. doi:10.1515/if-2018-0009. S2CID   231923312 . Retrieved 9 June 2019.
  13. ↑ James Clackson (1995). The Linguistic Relationship Between Armenian and Greek. Publications of the Philological Society.
Bibliography

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.