I have various books which attempt to show how the Indo-European languages are all related by showing the similarity of core vocabulary of the IE languages and how much they differs from similar vocabulary in some sample non-IE languaged, typically things like Turkish, Arabic, Malay, etc. Usually the numbers from 1 to 10 and a few other things like father, mother, and so forth are used for these comparisons.
But when I look at the Armenian column for the selected vocabulary items, it really doesn't look any more like the other IE ones than Turkish or Malay, etc, in particular for the numbers.
Here you can see the numbers in various Indo-European languages. http://www.zompist.com/euro.htm#ie
In some of the cases, little-known languages Yaghnobi and so forth, you might not immediately spot the similarities. But when you look at the things related to it and move out you can see chains of connection.
But with Armenian I just can't see any IE similarity at all, or at least not enough to make any sense of it. OK, 4 is very similar to various Persian languages, and 10 looks plausibly IE. But that's about it, as far as I can see. And there is as much random similarity between Malay and IE as that (1,2,3 in Malay is satu, dua, tiga). Putting the Armenian numbers next to Turkish, you can see as much random (or not?) similarities there.
So what's going on here? Are there unexpected sound changes in Armenian, t/d turned to k or something, which I might spot by seeing a much larger quantity of the vocabulary, and thus decoded the numbers would start looking like IE numbers after all? Or did Armenian borrow its numbers from other places, and you have to look to other parts of Armenian vocabulary to realise that it is IE?
I know that Armenian was not easily identified as an IE language, and it isn't to this day very clear where it fits in relative to the other ones, so I'm not expecting this to be very easy. But the relationship of Hungarian and Finnish was not easy either: but when the vocabulary comparison evidence was put in front of me it I was surprised how strong and obvious it looked, especially when some of the intermediates were shown also.
