Could Armenians have been in Armi/Armani

We don't need to assume that, because Armenians became known as Armenians (exonym, not their endonym), then the root of the word Armenia/Armenian must have also come from Proto-Armenian roots or even from more broadly IE ones. It might well be that the Armenians were simply named by some people after some land they had come from when they first had contacts with that people, and this foreign population passed the named Armenia on to other populations, just like it happened to the various names for Greece in European and Asian languages.

So what you're saying is that Armani/Arman (and maybe Armenia itself) are related to Aram/Armen from an older source, but not derived from Aram/Armen. Makes sense. It does seem that (h)ar words mean "shining"/"white" or are associated with the sun in quite a few Indo-European languages.
 
"Djerm" is warm in Armenian, which is also related to Greek "therm" and English "warm."

And albanian Zjarm (pronounced zyarm)
 
I'm referring to research by scholars like Eric P. Hamp, Robert I. Kim, and of course Thomas Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav V. Ivanov, among others. According to Hamp, the proto-Armenians and proto-Greeks split off from one another in Georgia.

Can you refer me to where Hamp says this? He wrote a billion things so its not easy to find his different ideas
 
Can you refer me to where Hamp says this? He wrote a billion things so its not easy to find his different ideas

Sure. This is Hamp's revised view (from 2012). The Greek-Armenian relationship is discussed on pages 10 and 13. I'm not sure why he specifies Batumi (in Georgia) as being the site where they split off from one another specifically. I also don't think he says anywhere when this split happened.

http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp239_indo_european_languages.pdf

The problem with this theory is, regardless of all the thousands of loanwords from Iranian languages into Armenian, there are a lot of scholars (like Ronald I. Kim) who assert that Armenian is equally close to Indo-Iranian as it is to Greek. While Hamp's model makes sense to me (I'm not a linguist though) I don't know how this proximity to Indo-Iranian would work according to his (Hamp's) theory.
 
Sure. This is Hamp's revised view (from 2012). The Greek-Armenian relationship is discussed on pages 10 and 13. I'm not sure why he specifies Batumi (in Georgia) as being the site where they split off from one another specifically. I also don't think he says anywhere when this split happened.

http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp239_indo_european_languages.pdf

The problem with this theory is, regardless of all the thousands of loanwords from Iranian languages into Armenian, there are a lot of scholars (like Ronald I. Kim) who assert that Armenian is equally close to Indo-Iranian as it is to Greek. While Hamp's model makes sense to me (I'm not a linguist though) I don't know how this proximity to Indo-Iranian would work according to his (Hamp's) theory.

Thanks. According to Vladimir Orel, Albanian actually doesn't share many features with Armenian, or Indo-Iranian. Very few shared specific Isoglosses. He is to be taken with a grain of salt, but if Hamp is correct, then it would make sense, that Albanian was not part of the Greco-Armenian branch and only came into contact with Greek (since it shares high unique isoglosses) long after it had split off from armenian:

D8-l9S1W4AA1-_3.jpg
 
Thanks. According to Vladimir Orel, Albanian actually doesn't share many features with Armenian, or Indo-Iranian. Very few shared specific Isoglosses. He is to be taken with a grain of salt, but if Hamp is correct, then it would make sense, that Albanian was not part of the Greco-Armenian branch and only came into contact with Greek (since it shares high unique isoglosses) long after it had split off from armenian:

D8-l9S1W4AA1-_3.jpg

This doesn't surprise me. It just further supports my argument that Armenians were not originally a Balkan people.

It seems that, besides both being Indo-European and both having their own subfamilies within the greater IE language family, that's really where the similarities between Armenians and Albanians end.

As fascinating as the Albanian language is, there are quite a few threads on the board related to Albanians and Albanian. Let's go back to talking about Armenian history and language in this thread!
 
As fascinating as the Albanian language is, there are quite a few threads on the board related to Albanians and Albanian. Let's go back to talking about Armenian history and language in this thread!

Don't worry I just posted it to complement your statement, as I always thought it was weird why albanian has so little Indo-Iranian and Armenian links compared to Greek, and your scenario made sense. Keep posting more stuff as it is very interesting and compelling.
 
Don't worry I just posted it to complement your statement, as I always thought it was weird why albanian has so little Indo-Iranian and Armenian links compared to Greek, and your scenario made sense. Keep posting more stuff as it is very interesting and compelling.

I do think the djerm/djarm thing is interesting, thanks for pointing that out! I didn't know that about Albanian, but it's funny that both Armenian and Albanian developed PIE *gwermos the same way (from gw to dj).

Here are some interesting Armenian origins articles, if you have a bit of time and are interested. I've been using these as references:

This one is really comprehensive:

https://www.academia.edu/3657764/To...Proto-Armenians_A_Critical_Review_in_English_

This one is a little bit more palatable/a quicker read:

https://www.hse.ru/data/2014/09/01/1313574129/Hrach Martirosyan - Handout.pdf
 
I'm not entirely convinced that Armenians are Mushki, even the eastern ones who may have come from the Caucasus region. The -k in Mushk (Mushki) might be a Armenian plural marker (for example, Armenians are "Hayk" in old Armenian--literally just means "Hays/Hyes"). But Mush doesn't mean anything--although there is a city around Lake Van which is still called Mush. Petrosyan argued that Mushk could be a version of Missak, who was somehow connected to Aram--his brother or general, I don't remember. But the point is, unless there was a specific tribe of Armenians who were called Missak or something, and it got changed by the Assyrians or Greeks (I know that Mushki is an Assyrian name), Armenians don't use a variation of this name for themselves. Missak is a name though.

The name of the city of Mush is thought to come from the Mushki, but maybe it's the other way around? Or maybe its an exonym from another language we don't have a record of that meant something? I'm making this up but we don't know what the Mannaeans spoke...maybe "mush" meant "northerners" in their language or something (I just made this up to illustrate a point).

I should note that the Greeks differentiated between Armenians, Phrygians, and Mushki. I believe that the Assyrians differentiated between the Armenians and Mushki too.
Muskhi are Meskhetians, the Tribe that founded Mtskheta. They were Kartvelians. So if we're arguing that eastern Mushki were Armenians then that means Armenians were just a Kartvelian tribe that was subjugated and Indo-Europeanized by some other group. while Western Meskhs went on to start Kartvelian kingdoms.

The whole thing is nonsense.
 

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