Odp: Graeco-Armeno-Phrygo-Thraco-Macedonian

----- Original Message -----

From: Mark Odegard

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Saturday, December 11, 1999 11:56 PM

Subject: [cybalist] Graeco-Armeno-Phrygo-Thraco-Macedonian

 
[... Phrygian was IMO non-satemic.  ... Some members of this group may disagree, but I think both ancient Macedonian and Phrygian should be included in the Hellenic branch -- Macedonian as a close cousin of Greek and Phrygian as a more distant relative. I can't see any real evidence for a "Thraco-Phrygian" cluster.  -- Piotr]

Mark says:

I've been having a few thoughts in this direction myself.

Some unite Greek and Armenian into a Graeco-Armenian superbranch. Armenian, however, has its own troubles as it's earliest secure attestation is in the 500s CE, and has obviously been through a massive number of changes, not the least being a more than 1,000 year Iranian adstratum that's even bigger and more far-reaching than what we get in English from French; there is an equally massive Urartian substratum. As I understand it, Armenian has also joined the Caucausian sprachbund, which makes its phonology decidedly un-Indo-European looking.

EIEC says Igor Diakonoff looks for the proto-Armenians in the Muski  (caron/hacek over s). This term was applied to Phyrgians.

The entry of the proto-Greeks into Greece is hotly debated. The dates run anywhere from ca 2200 down to 1600 BCE. The entry of Armenian/Phyrgian into Anatolia is not stated by my sources, but this was sometime before 1200 BCE, probably earlier. The implication is Armenian-Phrygian entered after Greek.

Macedonian is a mystery. We read how Alexander had to learn proper Greek at Aristotle's knee. And while Greek was the chancery language, you nonetheless wonder just what was the language they were speaking. Likely, it really was a kind of Greek; you'd think Ptolomy or Aristotle or the such would have told us if it wasn't -- and the ancient slanders about how 'Greek' the Macedonians really were would have had considerably more teeth to them.

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I'm not one of those who unite Armenian with Greek; I don't think it belongs together with Phrygian either, pace Diakonoff. Of course there are Graeco-Armenian lexical similarities, but they are due to the fact that Greek is one of the main donor languages for loanwords in Armenian. So are Parthian and Syriac Aramaic, but nobody connects them genetically with Armenian. (The Urartian element probably accounts for most Armenian words without IE etymologies, but it's influence is difficult to express in numbers, since our knowledge of the Urartian lexicon is scanty. )

 

There are some conspicuous phonological and grammatical features shared by Greek and Armenian, but some of them are simply shared archaisms visible also in Indo-Iranian, whereas others (such as the development of word-initial laryngeals) may easily be parallel but independent developments. There can be little doubt that Armenian preserves some extremely conservative features, but its shared innovations that matter in establishing genetic relatedness.

 

Werner Winter has recently argued (on the basis of early cultural borrowings) that contacts between Hurrian and some non-Indo-Iranian satemic IE adstrate, most likely Proto-Armenian, must have occurred not later than the middle of the second millennium BC, possibly during the Old Kingdom period of the Hittite empire. He even suggests (on the same grounds) that Proto-Armenians played a role in the introduction of the domestic horse into Asia Minor, which would make a substantially earlier date more likely. The arrival of the Phrygians in Anatolia is usually dated at ca. 1200 BC and connected with the Sea Peoples migrations – a reasonable theory, I dare say.

 

The tentative groupings known as "Graeco-Armenian", "Phrygian-Armenian" and "Thraco-Phrygian" are all entirely artificial (as, incidentally, is "Illyro-Albanian"). In my opinion, the most promising working hypothesis to experiment with is one that groups Macedonian and Phrygian together with Greek, and makes Armenian a distant relative of Thracian (like Armenian, a satemic language with what seems to be a consonant shift similar to Grimm's Law). The most serious problem is that Thracian is known almost exclusively from onomastic evidence and glosses, which means we really know next to nothing about its structure. The same is true of Getic/Dacian dialects, possibly clustering with Albanian. I have no illusions as to this grouping being less controversial than others, but at least it is based on linguistic arguments rather than unverifiable opinions of ancient authorities or historically motivated preconceptions.

 

The complexity of the linguistic situation in the area between the Black and Adriatic seas in early historical times is daunting; it has perhaps given rise to more confusion and ungrounded speculation than any other department of IE studies. This confusion is further aggravated by the fact that a Sprachbund analogical to the modern Balkan league may have existed in antiquity, levelling out some of the differences between distantly related language groups.

 

It's a pity that the languages in question are so poorly attested, but I believe that even with the evidence available to us (and archaeologists may yet unearth some more) further progress can be made. The problem – regrettably neglected in most handbook accounts of IE – is very important, partly because of the fact that so many well-known peoples (the Greek tribes, possibly the Armenians and surely the Phrygians) had emerged from that obscure region before they stepped out into the limelight of history. It's also of utmost importance to my "Danubian homeland" theory.

 

I hope the question will be taken up by other Cybalist members.

 

Piotr