| Graeco-Aryan | |
|---|---|
| Graeco-Armeno-Aryan | |
| (proposed) | |
| Geographic distribution | Southern Europe,South,Central,West Asia and theCaucasus |
| Linguistic classification | Indo-European
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| Proto-language | Proto-Graeco-Aryan |
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Graeco-Aryan, orGraeco-Armeno-Aryan, is a hypotheticalclade within theIndo-European family that would be the ancestor ofHellenic,Armenian, and theIndo-Iranian languages, which spansSouthern Europe,Armenian highlands andSouthern Asian regions of Eurasia.
The Graeco-Armeno-Aryan group supposedly branched off from the parent Indo-European stem by the mid-3rd millennium BC.
In the context of theKurgan 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 thePontic 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 anareal 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 byWolfram Euler's 1979 examination on shared features in Greek andSanskrit nominal inflection.[2] Graeco-Aryan is invoked in particular in studies ofcomparative mythology such asMartin Litchfield West (1999)[3] andCalvert Watkins (2001).[4]
Tamaz V. Gamkrelidze andVyacheslav 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 anArmenian-Aryan branch that comprises Armenian and Indo-Iranian.[5][6][7]
Graeco-Aryan has comparatively wide support among Indo-Europeanists who support theArmenian hypothesis, which asserts that the homeland of the Indo-European language family was in theArmenian 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]
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