Re: Can Armenian and Greek IE language lineages be on the same branc

From: hwhatting
Message: 71235
Date: 2013-06-16

As far as I know, the last major treatment of a special Armenian-Greek relatioonship was Clackson's "The Linguistic Relationship Between Armenian and Greek" from 1994. Clackson dismisses most of the parallels as either spurious or as common retentions, and so dismisses the idea of a Greco-Armenian subgrouping. But it seems that many IE scholars find that he's dismissed the correspondences too lightly and sweepingly. Here is a review rejecting Clackson's findings (although I find the review not very well argued):
http://tinyurl.com/lr2g4dd
An overview (although back from 1998):
http://tinyurl.com/kc96x98
Best regards,

Hans-Werner Hatting

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mikewww7" <mwwdna@> wrote:
>
> > I've generally seen where Armenian is considered Satemized whereas Greek is not. However, I've now read that there are proposals that Armenian is not Satemized but did quite a bit of borrowing of Indo-Iranian languages. I've also seen computational cladistic runs that place Armenian and Greek on the same branch that was called Hellenic and that branch broke away right before the full Satemization completed leading to the Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian dialects.
>
> Sound shifts spread across dialects, and sometimes across language boundaries. I see no problem with the idea that Greek is a hold-out against satemisation.
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> > Is there a good case that Armenian and Greek predecessors are of the same branch?
>
> There are several signs of mutual influence between Indo-Iranian, Armenian and Greek. While it is quite possible that Greek and Armenian were of a common branch, the evidence is not very strong. Much IE subgrouping evidence is weak, suggesting rapid fragmentation into multiple groups. Gray & Atkinson quoted a 'Bayesian posterior probability' of 40% for the grouping, which is not overwhelming.
>
> Richard.
>