[tied] Re: Armenian.

Your saying, then, that Armenian may indeed have made the trip over
the Caucasus. It's hard to have Azerbaijan function as the place
proto-Armenian differentiated itself unless this is what you are
saying. As for dates, I'm a little confused; is it 1st millennium or
2nd millennium BCE for the Azerbaijan sojourn? With proto-Indo-Iranian
being sometime about 2000 BCE, you'd think this would also more or
less apply to Armenian too (this gets us into the advent of chariots).

Whatever the origin of the Armenian language, the Cavalli-Sforza stuff
points to language-replacement (and not population replacement).

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> I'll address your questions A and B later to keep the length of this
posting within moderate limits.
>
> As regards the Armenian migration, my suggestion, drawing on
Winter's argument, is that its final (Anatolian) stage took place
after the collapse of Urartu (8th-6th centuries BC), when the vacuum
was filled by opportunistic settlers. Perhaps I didn't say it clearly
enough, but I don't accept either a second-millennium date for the
entry of the (Proto-)Armenians into Anatolia or (for obvious
linguistic reasons) the classification of Armenian as an Anatolian
language.
>
> However, Armenian/Hurrite contacts (whether direct or involving
intermediaries) may date back to a far deeper past. I wouldn't exclude
some part of Azerbaijan as the place where Proto-Armenian
differentiated in the early second millennium BC if not earlier. In
fact, we need such a nook for it to account for its early separation
from Indo-Iranian and for the remarkably "Caucasian" typological
features of Armenian. In Armenian etymological dictionaries some 50%+
of entries are words of "obscure origin". Many of them must reflect
borrowings from unknown or little-known ancient languages (note that
Urartian is also poorly known and that we probably wouldn't be able to
identify a large number of Urartian loans if we saw them).
>
> Finally, I wish we knew enough about Thracian to be able to assess
its genetic distance from Armenian. I also wish we knew _anything_
about the linguistic status of the Cimmerians. The knowledge of such
things would certainly bear some relevance to the question of Armenian
origins.sibly in or near
> the Caucasus.