The
Armenian hypothesis of the
Proto-Indo-EuropeanThe Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and there have been many attempts at reconstruction...
UrheimatUrheimat is a linguistic term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language.-Indo-European homeland:...
, based on the
Glottalic theoryThe glottalic theory holds that Proto-Indo-European had ejective stops, , but not the murmured ones, , of traditional Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions....
suggests that the
Proto-Indo-European languageThe Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and there have been many attempts at reconstruction...
was spoken during the
4th millennium BCThe 4th millennium BC saw major changes in human culture. It marks the beginning of the Bronze Age and of writing.The city states of Sumer and the kingdom of Egypt are established and grow to prominence. Agriculture spreads widely across Eurasia...
in the
Armenian HighlandThe Armenian Highland is the central-most and highest of three land-locked plateaus that together form the northern sector of the Middle East. To its west is the Anatolian plateau which rises slowly from the lowland coast of the Aegean Sea and rises to an average height of 3,000 feet...
. It is an
Indo-HittiteIn Indo-European linguistics, the term Indo-Hittite refers to Sturtevant's 1926 hypothesis that the Anatolian languages may have split off the Proto-Indo-European language considerably earlier than the separation of the remaining Indo-European languages...
model and does not include the
Anatolian languagesThe Anatolian languages are a group of extinct Indo-European languages, which were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language.-Origins:...
in its scenario. The phonological peculiarities proposed in the Glottalic theory would be best preserved in the
Armenian languageThe Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora...
and the
Germanic languagesThe Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
, the former assuming the role of the dialect which remained
in situ, implied to be particularly archaic in spite of its late attestation.
The
Armenian hypothesis of the
Proto-Indo-EuropeanThe Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and there have been many attempts at reconstruction...
UrheimatUrheimat is a linguistic term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language.-Indo-European homeland:...
, based on the
Glottalic theoryThe glottalic theory holds that Proto-Indo-European had ejective stops, , but not the murmured ones, , of traditional Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions....
suggests that the
Proto-Indo-European languageThe Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and there have been many attempts at reconstruction...
was spoken during the
4th millennium BCThe 4th millennium BC saw major changes in human culture. It marks the beginning of the Bronze Age and of writing.The city states of Sumer and the kingdom of Egypt are established and grow to prominence. Agriculture spreads widely across Eurasia...
in the
Armenian HighlandThe Armenian Highland is the central-most and highest of three land-locked plateaus that together form the northern sector of the Middle East. To its west is the Anatolian plateau which rises slowly from the lowland coast of the Aegean Sea and rises to an average height of 3,000 feet...
. It is an
Indo-HittiteIn Indo-European linguistics, the term Indo-Hittite refers to Sturtevant's 1926 hypothesis that the Anatolian languages may have split off the Proto-Indo-European language considerably earlier than the separation of the remaining Indo-European languages...
model and does not include the
Anatolian languagesThe Anatolian languages are a group of extinct Indo-European languages, which were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language.-Origins:...
in its scenario. The phonological peculiarities proposed in the Glottalic theory would be best preserved in the
Armenian languageThe Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora...
and the
Germanic languagesThe Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
, the former assuming the role of the dialect which remained
in situ, implied to be particularly archaic in spite of its late attestation. Proto-Greek would be practically equivalent to Mycenean Greek and date to the 17th century BC, closely associating Greek migration to Greece with the
Indo-Aryan migrationModels of the Indo-Aryan migration discuss scenarios of prehistoric migrations of the early Indo-Aryans to their historically attested areas of settlement in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent and from there further across all of North India...
to India at about the same time (viz., Indo-European expansion at the transition to the Late Bronze Age, including the possibility of Indo-European
KassitesThe Kassites were an ancient Near Eastern tribe who gained control of Babylonia after the fall of the Old Babylonian Empire after ca. 1531 BC to ca. 1155 BC . Their language is classified as an isolate.-History:...
).
The Armenian hypothesis argues for the latest possible date of Proto-Indo-European (
sans Anatolian), a full millennium later than the mainstream
Kurgan hypothesisThe Kurgan hypothesis is one of the proposals about early Indo-European origins, which postulates that the people of an archaeological "Kurgan culture" in the Pontic steppe were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language...
. In this, it figures as an opposite to the
Anatolian hypothesisThe Anatolian hypothesis is also called Renfrew's Neolithic Discontinuity Theory ; it proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia...
, in spite of the geographical proximity of the respective
Urheimaten suggested, diverging from the timeframe suggested there by full three millennia.
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