Interdigitation - Greek

Source: TW

A 🧵on interdigitation in IE branches.
One of the offshoots of the recent archaeogenetic work
is the developing view that
Greek- (Greco-Armenian) sprang directly out of Yamnaya,
with Greeks sojourning in the upper Balkans
before reaching the peninsula& islands.

This is consistent with certain linguistic (word) trees
that favor an early branching of Greek (Greco-Armenian)
after the basal most branches Anatolian & Tocharian.
But until not long ago there was an alternative
or partly overlapping linguistic hypothesis of Greco-Armeno-Aryan.
Was that signal entirely illusory
or was there something to it that is still relevant.
It has 3 dimensions:

  1. Certain isoglosses;
  2. Certain literary usages;
  3. Certain seemingly apomorphic mythological elements.

The linguists who see it as illusory generally take these shared features as archaism, parallelisms or false positives.
We posit that these are instead a mix of genuine archaisms from Yamnayan IE
& the impact of a secondary pulse of Aryanization
that impacted the early Greek (Greco-Armenian) clade.
Thus, some of these were horizontally transferred from Aryan to Greek.

Why not transfer in the opposite direction?
We have reasons to argue (based on Uralic contact)
that the Aryans who reached India & Iran
were not the ones who impacted the Greeks
but a collateral branch.
This impact probably introduced chariotry
& might have even facilitated their push into the peninsula & beyond.

If this model is right
then we have the interesting task of
analyzing the Greek tradition more closely
to distinguish PIE heritage from Aryan lateral transfers.

If the former is predominant,
then it implies Aryan & Greek are most conservatively preserving
what is a deep IE tradition that was already in place in Yamnaya times.
We also suspect that even within Corded Ware
there was some Aryanization
which influenced branches like Celtic (did it impact Italic?).