Editing Armenian language (section)

====Graeco-Armenian hypothesis====
{{Main|Graeco-Armenian}}

The hypothesis that Greek is Armenian's closest living relative originates with [[Holger Pedersen (linguist)|Holger Pedersen]] (1924), who noted that the number of Greek-Armenian lexical cognates is greater than that of agreements between Armenian and any other Indo-European language. [[Antoine Meillet]] (1925, 1927) further investigated morphological and phonological agreement and postulated that the parent languages of Greek and Armenian were dialects in immediate geographical proximity during the Proto-Indo-European period. Meillet's hypothesis became popular in the wake of his book ''Esquisse d'une histoire de la langue latine'' (1936). [[Georg Renatus Solta]] (1960) does not go as far as postulating a Proto-Graeco-Armenian stage, but he concludes that considering both the lexicon and morphology, Greek is clearly the dialect to be most closely related to Armenian. [[Eric P. Hamp]] (1976, 91) supports the Graeco-Armenian thesis and even anticipates a time "when we should speak of Helleno-Armenian" (meaning the postulate of a Graeco-Armenian proto-language). Armenian shares the [[augment (Indo-European)|augment]] and a negator derived from the set phrase in the [[Proto-Indo-European language]] {{lang|ine-x-proto|*ne h₂oyu kʷid}} ("never anything" or "always nothing"), the representation of word-initial [[laryngeal theory|laryngeals]] by prothetic vowels, and other phonological and morphological peculiarities with Greek. Nevertheless, as Fortson (2004) comments, "by the time we reach our earliest Armenian records in the 5th century AD, the evidence of any such early kinship has been reduced to a few tantalizing pieces".