Proto-Indo-Greek

The subgrouping of the Indo-European languages is a widely debated topic, but most analyses have proposed the existence of the Indo-Greek group, comprising the following three units:

• Hellenic. Usually considered equal to Greek, but Modern and Koine Greek mainly continue the Attic dialect. Much dialectal diversity existed among the early Hellenic idioms, and Proto-Hellenic (Proto-Greek) is quite close to reconstructed PIE.
• Armenian. A relatively shallow group of dialects (Old Armenian having been attested from the 5th century), and challenging to work with, due to a high number of Iranian loanwords.
• Indo-Iranian. Probably the largest Indo-European subgroup already since the 2nd millennia CE, having once controlled the Eurasian steppe and ended up the dominant language family of the whole of South Asia.

Several other members may have existed, e.g. the fragmentarily attested Phrygian.

As some of the earliest attested IE languages fall in this group (Ancient Greek, Old Persian, Avestan and Sanskrit), the Indo-Greek languages have been essential for the reconstruction of PIE. Sometimes the accusation has been advanced that standard PIE is little more than Proto-Indo-Greek with a number of amendments. This page will house an attempt to specifically reconstruct Proto-Indo-Greek, and to compare how distinct from traditional Proto-Indo-European the results will be.

Areal features

• The lenition of prevocalic *s to *h in Hellenic, Armenian and Iranian. This is preceded by the Indo-Iranian RUKI development.
• The palatalization of the labiovelar consonants, found in all three groups. In Indo-Iranian and Armenian this is however preceded by satemization (the assibilation of the front velar series), a change shared with Balto-Slavic; and in certain Hellenic dialects it is preceded by the fronting of the labiovelars to labials.
• Grassmann's Law, the dissimilation of aspirated stops. Found in Hellenic (where it is later than aspirate devoicing and the shift *s > *h) and Indic (where it is later than the rise of voiceless/voiced aspirate distinction). This may have evolved independently in the two.
• The vocalization of the syllabic nasals *n̥, *m̥, in Hellenic and Indo-Iranian; presumably originally into a nasal vowel *ã, reflected as plain /a/ in most varieties, but as /o/ in Mycenaean.