Graeco-Phrygian () is a proposed subgroup of the

Indo-European language family The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Du ...

which comprises the Hellenic and Phrygian languages. Modern consensus views Greek as the closest relative of Phrygian, a position that is supported by Brixhe, Neumann, Matzinger, Woodhouse, Ligorio, Lubotsky, and Obrador-Cursach. Furthermore, out of 36 isoglosses collected by Obrador Cursach, Phrygian shared 34 with Greek, with 22 being exclusive between them. The last 50 years of Phrygian scholarship developed a hypothesis that proposes a proto-Graeco-Phrygian stage out of which Greek and Phrygian originated, and if Phrygian was more sufficiently attested, that stage could perhaps be reconstructed. "Unquestionably, however, Phrygian is most closely linked with Greek."

Evidence

The linguist

Claude Brixhe Claude Brixhe (24 April 1933 – 2 March 2021) was a French linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Nancy in France. His research interests included ancient and modern Greek dialects, Koine Greek, the history of the Greek alphabet, an ...

points to the following features Greek and Phrygian are known to have in common and in common with no other language: * a certain class of masculine nouns in the

nominative In grammar, the nominative case ( abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of Eng ...

singular ending in ''-s'' * a certain class of

denominal verb In grammar, denominal verbs are verbs derived from nouns. Many languages have regular morphological indicators to create denominal verbs. English English examples are ''to school'', from ''school'', meaning to instruct; ''to shelve'', from ' ...

s * the

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not ...

'' auto-'' * the participial suffix ''-meno-'' * the

stem Stem or STEM may refer to: Plant structures * Plant stem, a plant's aboveground axis, made of vascular tissue, off which leaves and flowers hang * Stipe (botany), a stalk to support some other structure * Stipe (mycology), the stem of a mushro ...

''kako-'' * and the

conjunction Conjunction may refer to: * Conjunction (grammar), a part of speech * Logical conjunction, a mathematical operator ** Conjunction introduction, a rule of inference of propositional logic * Conjunction (astronomy), in which two astronomical bodies ...

''ai'' Obrador-Cursach (2019) has presented further

phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

, morphological and lexical evidence supporting a close relation between Greek and Phrygian, as seen in the following tables that compare the different isoglosses between Phrygian,

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

, Armenian, Albanian and Indo-Iranian.

Other proposals

Greek has also been variously grouped with Armenian and Indo-Iranian ( Graeco-Armenian;

Graeco-Aryan Graeco-Aryan, or Graeco-Armeno-Aryan, is a hypothetical clade within the Indo-European family that would be the ancestor of Greek, Armenian, and the Indo-Iranian languages. The Graeco-Armeno-Aryan group supposedly branched off from the parent ...

), Ancient Macedonian ( Hellenic) and, more recently,

Messapic Messapic (; also known as Messapian; or as Iapygian) is an extinct Indo-European language of the southeastern Italian Peninsula, once spoken in Apulia by the Iapygian peoples of the region: the ''Calabri'' and ''Salentini'' (known collectively as ...

. Greek and Ancient Macedonian are most often classified under Hellenic; at other times, ancient Macedonian is seen as a Greek dialect and thus, Hellenic is posited to consist of only Greek dialects. The linguist

Václav Blažek Václav Blažek (born 23 April 1959 in Sokolov, Czechoslovakia) is a Czech historical linguist. He is a professor at Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic) and also teaches at the University of West Bohemia ( Pilsen, Czech Republic). His ma ...

states that, in regard to the classification of these languages, "the lexical corpora do not allow any quantification" (see

corpus Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics Music * ...

and quantitative comparative linguistics).

References

Bibliography

* * * *

Evidence

Other proposals

References

Bibliography

Further reading