A 🧵on interdigitation in IE branches. 1 of the offshoots of the recent archaeogenetic work is the developing view that Greek- (Greco-Armenian) sprang directly out of Yamnaya, with Greeks sojourning in the upper Balkans before reaching the peninsula& islands. This is consistent
with certain linguistic (word) trees that favor an early branching of Greek (Greco-Armenian) after the basal most branches Anatolian & Tocharian. But until not long ago there was an alternative or partly overlapping linguistic hypothesis of Greco-Armeno-Aryan. Was that signal
entirely illusory or was there something to it that is still relevant. It has 3 dimensions: 1. Certain isoglosses; 2. Certain literary usages; 3. Certain seemingly apomorphic mythological elements. The linguists who see it as illusory generally take these shared features as
archaism, parallelisms or false positives. We posit that these are instead a mix of genuine archaisms from Yamnayan IE & the impact of a secondary pulse of Aryanization that impacted the early Greek (Greco-Armenian) clade. Thus, some of these were *horizontally transferred* from
Aryan to Greek. Why not transfer in the opposite direction? We have reasons to argue (based on Uralic contact) that the Aryans who reached India& Iran were not the ones who impacted the Greeks but a collateral branch. This impact probably introduced chariotry & might have even
facilitated their push into the peninsula & beyond. If this model is right then we have the interesting task of analyzing the Greek tradition more closely to distinguish PIE heritage from Aryan lateral transfers. If the former is predominant, then it implies Aryan & Greek are
most conservatively preserving what is a deep IE tradition that was already in place in Yamnaya times. We also suspect that even within Corded Ware there was some Aryanization which influenced branches like Celtic (did it impact Italic?).
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