Talk:Proto-Armenian language

Hurrian or Sumerian influence
as long as we don't get a linguistic reference to Hurrian or Sumerian loanwords, we have to regard this as a popular fantasy. Feel free to cite treatments in peer reviewed linguistic literature. dab (𒁳) 17:53, 19 December 2006 (UTC)


 * There are indeed loanwords from Hurrian, this is pretty much accepted, not only from Armenian authors, read the references I have provided at the Urartu talk page. As for Sumerian, this doesn't even worth mentioning, if there are any loanwords from Summerians, it won't only stand for the Armenians, the Babylonians had strong influences in the entire region. Fad (ix) 06:09, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
 * yes, I suspected as much; it would be nice to have some specific examples of Hurrian loanwords. dab (𒁳) 10:01, 21 December 2006 (UTC)


 * excellent, I'll have to dig for one of your sources; It will be most interesting to see which soundlaws affected the Uratian loans. dab (𒁳) 10:17, 21 December 2006 (UTC)


 * If you want the papers, feel free to request them to me, I'll email them to you. Personally, I am really not interested to engage in BC history, it is too subjective, vague, contradictory, much in contradiction with my rational way of thinking. Fad (ix) 06:41, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

"8 or 9 sounds"
Aa, you are welcome to give us an encyclopedic discussion of Armenian phonology at Armenian language. Your text as it was doesn't even remotely qualify as encyclopedic, and typological observations on Armenian phonology are only of limited relevance to a discussion of Proto-Armenian. If you want to help, give us a list of Proto-Armenian sound-laws (we already say they are 'eccentric', which seems to be the point you want to make, but do give us a detailed list, citing Winter or Meillet). dab (𒁳) 23:47, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

This article needs to be constantly watched against anon edits by banned user ararat_arev.--  Ευπάτωρ   Talk!! 22:22, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

back to semiprotection... --dab (𒁳) 20:04, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Some questions
Dear Sirs/Madams, I will be thankful, if you give your reply on the following:

1. Please reply, why there is not internal link to the Greek language, if there is an article about it Wikipedia? --Zara-arush (talk) 23:28, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

2. The first sentence of the article runs: "The earliest testimony of the Armenian language dates to the 5th century AD (the Bible translation of Mesrob Mashtots)".

Don't you think it is too categorical? The fact is that the writings of the earlier period are not found or are not recognized. But it is a well-known fact that after the adoption of Christianity all that had any relation to heathendom was destroyed.--Zara-arush (talk) 23:41, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

3. ..." but its development is opaque". Opaque for who? It may be less researched and reconstructed, but is the vocabulary, applied in this article, your daily set of terms and words? I am sure the encyclopedical article shall be impartial. But this article is not. --Zara-arush (talk) 23:48, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

4. " In any case, Armenian has many layers of loanwords and shows traces of long language contact with Hurro-Urartian, Greek and Indo-Iranian". There is contradiction between "opaque" and this sentense. Is there are traces of long language contact, then the language existed and there had been people, who spoke this language in the times of the existance of Hurrians, Urartians, Greeks, etc. Too far from scientific aproach as well. --Zara-arush (talk) 23:55, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

5. "The Proto-Armenian sound-laws are varied and eccentric". Again, non-scientific description of any human language. Sorry, it is the writer of this sentense, who is eccentric. But a language "sound-laws" may be irregular, exceptional, etc.--Zara-arush (talk) 00:00, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

6. Do you mean Proto-Armenian phonological laws that differ from the sound change in younger languages? I hope the linguistics developed further after 1874 for Proto-Armenian also. --Zara-arush (talk) 00:09, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

7. Even the choice of the citations is not impartial. If you present one point of view, why you do not present the other? There are scientists that consider the theory of the academician too "eccentric", if we use your word.

"The landscape described by the reconstructed Indo-European protolanguage is mountainous—as evidenced by the many words for high mountains, mountain lakes and rapid rivers flowing from mountain sources. Such a picture cannot be reconciled with either the plains of central Europe or the steppes north of the Black Sea, which have been advanced as an alternative homeland for the Indo-Europeans. The vocabulary does, however, fit the landscape of eastern Anatolia and Transcaucasia, backed by the splendor of the Kov Kaz Mountains. The language clothes its landscape in the flora of this region, having words for "mountain oak," "birch," "beech," "hornbeam," "ash," "willow" or"white willow," "yew," "pine" or"fir," "heather" and "moss." Moreover, the language has words for animals that are alien to northern Europe: "leopard," "snow leopard," "lion," "monkey" and "elephant."

The presence of a word for "beech tree," incidentally, has been cited in favor of the European plains and against the lower Volga as the putative Indo -European homeland. Beech trees, it is true, do not grow east of a line drawn from Gdansk on the Baltic to the northwest corner of the Black Sea. Two species of beech ( Fagus orientatis and F. sylvatica) flourish, however, in what is now Turkey. Opposing the so-called beech argument is the oak argument: paleobotanical evidence shows that oak trees (which are listed in the reconstructed language's lexicon) were not native to postglacial northern Europe but began to spread there from the south as late as the turn of the fourth to the third millennium B.C." --Zara-arush (talk) 00:38, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

"eccentric" may not be the best choice of wording. The intention obviously is not to sound "disparagingly" towards a class of sound laws. Sound laws are just sound laws, linguists don't distinguish between "good" and "bad" sound laws. The point is that some sound laws are typologically very common. Loss of h or dropping final syllables is found all over the world. But Armenian has some sound laws that are very peculiar and probably not found anywhere else. This is actually a good thing, because they allow to identify words derived from proto-Armenian times without any doubt, as they are impossible to fake. You will admit that in the list teri, trei, tráyas, θrāiiō, treĩs, trēs,  þreis,  treis, treí, erek῾,  tre,  trīs, trỹs, trije, tre the odd one out or "eccentric" member is clearly  erek῾ . But it is also the first objection to the Glottalic theory. It is clear that Armenian phonology has been transformed completely because proto-Armenian speakers found themselves wedged among numerous unrelated languages, Urartian, Greek, Persian and probably others. It is consequently extremely unlikely that Armenian should be the only Indo-European language that preserves the original distribution of stop series. This is an idea that seemed interesting for like five minutes at some point in the 1980s. It has since been completely abandoned, except for Mr. Gamkrelidze who for 30 years has been giving the same speech at every convention he went to, to polite audiences discreetly rolling their eyes. It is, by now, literally a one-man-theory.

I fail to see the point of your attempts to show that Armenian vocabulary fits to Transcaucasia as it is completely undisputed that Armenian developed in Transcauacsia. Obviously what holds for Armenian does not automatically hold for Proto-Indo-European. The "beech/salmon line" idea is very very old. About 170 years? It doesn't result in anything like a conclusive argument. Also, I cannot say I have ever heard that PIE vocabulary reflects a particularly "mountainous" terrain. There are words for "mountain" sure, but you have that in every language. I mean, English has "mountain", even though England has no mountains worth mentioning. The word just ends up denoting elevations that would hardly pass as hills in other, genuinely mountainous regions. --dab (𒁳) 09:30, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

A good discussion! Thanks for attention. Please check, if it is right translation: agarak "field" from Hurrian awari "field "Agarak" in Armenian - "settlement". "Art" - "field". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zara-arush (talk • contribs) 17:03, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Just what is Proto-Armenian?
This article talks about Armenian and its earliest stages, but it fails to actually say what it is. A proto-language is usually considered the ancestor of a group of languages, but since Armenian is the only attested member of its group, that definition can't apply. So what is the actual definition of Proto-Armenian? CodeCat (talk) 19:00, 21 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Good call; this article should really be called Early Armenian or Preliterary Armenian or similar, as it obviously refers to the period of development before our earliest texts. This stage cannot be reconstructed externally, only on the basis of loanwords borrowed in the same prehistoric, pre-Old-Armenian period. Unfortunately, this is not the only example by far where Proto-X is used in this inexact sense even in the specialised literature (which may form an objection to a title change, if the term Proto-Armenian in this sense is current): Proto-Albanian, Proto-Basque and Proto-Goidelic are often used to refer to a stage roughly contemporary with Classical Latin, while the real, internally reconstructible "proto-stages" might all well be as recent as 1000 years ago. Technically speaking, Proto-Goidelic falls into the Middle Irish period. My inquiry at User talk:Akerbeltz had this exact background. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:52, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Misleading information
"Instead, a combination of internal and external reconstruction, by reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European and other branches, has allowed linguists to piece together the earlier history of Armenian. The Balkan hypothesis of the origin of the Armenian language is rejected by modern glottochronological studies conducted by Russell and Atkinson, the Armenian language appears on the territory of  Anatolia and adjacent areas and has existed since 7300 BC. e."

Nowhere in Russell's and Atkinson's paper does it say that the Armenian language appears in the greater Armenia region in 7300 BCE. They are talking about pre-Proto-Indo-European. Armenian is NOT pre-Proto-Indo-European. This is not only misleading but factually incorrect.

Source in question: http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/files/gray_and_atkinson2003/grayatkinson2003.pdf Preservedmoose (talk) 02:02, 11 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Absolutely correct. Another addition which illustrates how the IP editor completely (deliberately?) misrepresents the source (Gray & Atkinson 2003): not a single mention is made of the "Balkan hypothesis of the origin of the Armenian language". – Austronesier (talk) 16:54, 11 October 2019 (UTC)
 * IP editor has been going through numerous Armenian history-related articles and spamming the same misleading and poorly written content multiple times a day while also ignoring edits/revisions and requests to cease. I am trying to get a temporary protection on the Mushki page. Perhaps we need to try to get one on this page as well?--Preservedmoose (talk) 18:08, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

"Special developments"
In the chart that showes consonant changes from PIE to Armenian there's a column that says "special developments" without specifying what they exactly are or what it means by "special". Can someone tell me why are these developments "special" and why or where do they occur? Or at least just fix the article, because that part is a bit confusing. ALBA-CENTAURI (talk) 21:37, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Dubious list of influences
There's a substantial number of references on Wikipedia and wiktionary to Akkadian and Anatolian loans. I haven't been able to find too much to corroborate this in the modern literature and I'm only familiar with Akkadian, not Armenian. Still, it's referencing a self-published source. Some improvement from someone who knows would be welcome. Photonsoup (talk) 06:50, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

Incorrect pronunciations
I don't know about the cited examples given in the previous paragraph, but with regards to ոտն and երեք, these are not examples of an aspirated stop being reduced to w, h or zero. The examples given don't work, 'ոտն' is not pronounced as 'otn' but rather 'votn'. Likewise 'երեք' is not pronounced as 'erek' but rather 'yerek'. This is because both ե(Yech) and ո(Vo) are pronounced differently at the begining of a word, than they are in the middle, this is described in the wikipedia article for each letter. --Crowjake (talk) 10:09, 10 June 2022 (UTC)


 * That is how those words are pronounced in modern Armenian. It’s not the pronunciation reconstructed for Proto-Armenian, or even Classical Armenian. Kokoshneta (talk) 23:30, 21 April 2023 (UTC)