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

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 71233
Date: 2013-06-14

--- 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.

> 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.