Basque and Armenian share a baffling litany of words and grammatical elements

More contemporarily, Sargsyan’s collaborative work in 1998 with Armenian and Basque linguists identified almost 600-shared parallel words between the two languages, which Sargsyan suggested were introduced through metallurgy and farming via an ancient migration of Armenians to this area. “It’s no accident that the Armenian and Basque languages have a number of almost identical words relating to agriculture,” he wrote in a 2006 article in Yerevan Magazine, referring to the shared words ardi (sheep), urti (water-bearing) and gari (millet in Euskara; barley in Armenian). Xabier Kintana, head director at the Euskaltzaindia, told me that Sargsyan’s list of shared Armenian-Basque words “are taken very randomly from the different modern dialects of the Basque language” and “are surely old loans of Latin, Celtic and other languages, in their time neighbours of the Basque, which invalidates their comparison.”

Source: www.bbc.com