The place of the Armenian language in the Indo-European family

A very interesting talk at the Library of Congress making a good case for a Greek-Phrygian-Armenian clade within the Indo-European family.
 


Of course the testimony of Herodotus is -at least for me- the most convincing argument for an ultimately Balkan origin of the Phrygo-Armenians.

Modern Armenians are quite distinct from modern populations of the Balkans but who knows how both they and the populations of the Balkans have changed since the beginning of the Iron Age when the Phrygians established themselves in Asia Minor? The recent study by Hellenthal et al. did not find any good evidence for recent admixture in Armenians but this might be due to (i) Armenians being unmixed descendants of Proto-Armenians, (ii) Armenians being near-unmixed descendants of pre-Armenians, or (iii) the method not having enough power to detect admixture.

My guess is that the relative remoteness of the Armenian highlands coupled with the heterodox position of the Armenian church hindered substantial gene flow into the Armenian population over at least the last 1,500 years.

Armenians as Phrygian colonists, or, rolloff analysis of Armenians as a mixture of Sardinians+Balochi

I analyze the Yunusbayev et al. Armenians_Y sample in a similar manner as the South Indian Brahmins. The 30 lowest f3 statistics are:

Sardinian Velamas_M Armenians_15_Y -0.00349 0.000264 -13.23 239451
Sardinian Piramalai_Kallars_M Armenians_15_Y -0.003213 0.00028 -11.484 239389
Sardinian GIH30 Armenians_15_Y -0.002983 0.00023 -12.986 241310
Balochi Sardinian Armenians_15_Y -0.002837 0.000193 -14.681 241698
Sardinian Sindhi Armenians_15_Y -0.002794 0.000203 -13.757 241928
Sardinian Muslim_M Armenians_15_Y -0.002761 0.000295 -9.351 238639
Indian_D Sardinian Armenians_15_Y -0.002743 0.000224 -12.226 241916
Sardinian Kanjars_M Armenians_15_Y -0.002727 0.000281 -9.722 239240
Iyer_D Sardinian Armenians_15_Y -0.002718 0.000263 -10.322 238943
Brahui Sardinian Armenians_15_Y -0.002715 0.000196 -13.882 241885
Sardinian Dusadh_M Armenians_15_Y -0.002666 0.000281 -9.502 238994
Sardinian INS30 Armenians_15_Y -0.00265 0.000237 -11.162 240965
Iyengar_D Sardinian Armenians_15_Y -0.002624 0.000297 -8.847 238564
Sardinian Dharkars_M Armenians_15_Y -0.002501 0.000267 -9.359 239505
Sardinian North_Kannadi Armenians_15_Y -0.002463 0.000288 -8.545 239278
Sardinian Chamar_M Armenians_15_Y -0.002445 0.000275 -8.904 240102
Sardinian Kshatriya_M Armenians_15_Y -0.002372 0.000267 -8.897 239047
Pathan Sardinian Armenians_15_Y -0.00224 0.000199 -11.264 241759
Sardinian Brahmins_from_Uttar_Pradesh_M Armenians_15_Y -0.002189 0.00025 -8.774 239395
Jatt_D Sardinian Armenians_15_Y -0.001806 0.000273 -6.608 238465
Cypriots Kanjars_M Armenians_15_Y -0.001699 0.00026 -6.547 238237
Cypriots Velamas_M Armenians_15_Y -0.001642 0.000275 -5.965 238392
Cypriots Muslim_M Armenians_15_Y -0.001618 0.000279 -5.798 237762
Cypriots Dusadh_M Armenians_15_Y -0.001611 0.000279 -5.779 238096
GIH30 Cypriots Armenians_15_Y -0.001608 0.000223 -7.216 239819
Iyer_D Cypriots Armenians_15_Y -0.001562 0.000251 -6.217 238012
Sindhi Cypriots Armenians_15_Y -0.001544 0.000209 -7.383 240276
Cypriots North_Kannadi Armenians_15_Y -0.001464 0.000276 -5.298 238273
Cypriots Kshatriya_M Armenians_15_Y -0.001438 0.00026 -5.534 238076

I carried out rolloff analysis using the Balochi and Sardinians as references, for a total of 510,844 SNPs. Note that the Burusho were not used in this experiment, because they were culled due to more than 5% East Eurasian admixture, as per the followed procedure. 

The Balochi are very similar to the Burusho otherwise, and this also gives me the opportunity to see a Sardinian+Balochi population pair to complement a previous analysis of French as Sardinian+Burusho, which presented an f3 signal of quite similar intensity. The exponential fit is seen below.

The jackknife gives an age estimate of 113.194 +/- 14.674 generations, or 3,280 +/- 430 years, assuming a generation length of 29 years.

I had somewhat expected the Armenians to show a more recent signal of admixture than the French, as they lived much closer to the boundary of Europe and Asia, and may have had more opportunity to admix between Sardinian-like populations of Europe and "West Asian"-like populations of Asia.

But, the inferred date also raises another possibility. Herodotus says of the Armenians who were part of the army of King Xerxes:

the Armenians were equipped like Phrygians, being Phrygian colonists" (7.73)

Now, the Phrygians became masters of Central Anatolia during the tumultuous events near the end of the Bronze Age (12th century BC), following the collapse of the Hittite Empire. And, their ancestral homeland was in Thrace. And, there is fairly good evidence that Armenian is the closest language related to Greek within the Indo-European language family. And, we have some tantalising evidence that even during the Iron Age, the population of Thrace was Sardinian-like. And, the Armenians do contrast with their Caucasian neighbors in possessing ~10% of the Sardinian-like Atlantic_Med component that South and Northeast Caucasians lack.

All of the above combine to make a pretty compelling story. Could it be that Armenians preserve a legacy of admixture between a linguistically Indo-European speaking, genetically Sardinian-like population, which arrived in Asia Minor from the Balkans at the end of the Bronze Age, finally settling in the Armenian Highlands, and mixing with the local people they encountered?

The plot thickens. And, this is, certainly, a question that can be answered by ancient DNA research, e.g., by comparing the genomes of historical Phrygians and Armenians with those from Hittite-era, or earlier Anatolians.

Is Burushaski Indo-European?

I try to shy away from linguistic controversies, and I doubt that the idea of the Indo-European origin of Burushaski will go down without a fight. The JIES is a little behind the times when it comes to online access, so I can't quite comment on the substantive part of Prof. Casule's theory.

We'll have to wait to see how much of this is press release hype and how much is new evidence. This idea has been in circulation for a while, but if there is indeed an issue of JIES dedicated to it, it probably deserves our attention.

Here is a paper critical of the thesis. Here is a seminar abstract by Prof. Casule with some more citations.

Cracking the code on the origins of a new European language

There is strong evidence to support the discovery of a new European language.

Macquarie University historical linguistics researcher, Associate Professor Ilija Casule, discovered that the language, known as Burushaski, which is spoken by about 90,000 people who reside in a remote area of North West Pakistan, is Indo-European in origin, not Indo-Iranian.

Professor Casule’s discovery, which has now been verified by a number of the world’s top linguists, has excited linguistics experts around the world. An entire issue of the eminent international linguistics journal The Journal of Indo-European Studies is devoted to a discussion of his findings later this month.

More than 50 eminent linguists have tried over many years to determine the genetic relationship of Burushaski. But it was Casule’s painstaking research, based on a comprehensive grammatical, phonological, lexical and semantic analysis, which established that the Burushaski language is in fact an Indo-European language most likely descended from one of the ancient Balkan languages. Professor Casule believes that language is most probably ancient Phrygian.

The Phrygians migrated from Macedonia to Anatolia (today part of Turkey) and were famous for their legendary kings who figure prominently in Greek mythology such as King Midas who turned whatever he touched into gold. They later migrated further east, reaching India. Indeed, according to ancient legends of the Burushashki people, they are descendants of Alexander the Great.

Tracing the historical path of a language is no easy task. Professor Casule said he became interested in the origins of Burushaski more than 20 years ago.

“People knew of its existence but its Indo-European affiliation was overlooked and it was not analysed correctly. It is considered a language isolate – not related to any other language in the world in much the same way that the Basque language is classified as a language isolate,” he said.

The remoteness of the area that was independent until the early 1970s when it became part of Pakistan, ensured Burushaski retained certain grammatical and lexical features that led Professor Casule to conclude it is a North-Western Indo-European language, specifically of the Paleobalkanic language group and that it corresponds most closely with Phrygian.

Dr Casule’s work is groundbreaking, not only because it has implications for all the Indo-European language groups, but also provides a new model for figuring out the origins of isolate languages – where they reside in the linguistic family tree and how they developed and blended with other languages to form a new language.

Image: Map of Burushashki speaking areas