WeepingElf's Europic thread

[Octaviano]

Although I'm not defending it, Arnaud's theory of a PIE homeland in Anatolia is quite different from Renfrew's in chronology and linguistic implications. Arnaud proposes a Pre-Mesolithic expansion from Anatolia to the Balkans, and then a Mesolithic one from there to West and East Europe.

That only makes it worse. There is too much Neolithic farming terminology in PIE to allow for a Mesolithic disintegration of PIE.

Yes, although much of this lexicon was borrowed, this doesn't make PIE that older.

[WeepingElf]

Although I'm not defending it, Arnaud's theory of a PIE homeland in Anatolia is quite different from Renfrew's in chronology and linguistic implications. Arnaud proposes a Pre-Mesolithic expansion from Anatolia to the Balkans, and then a Mesolithic one from there to West and East Europe.

That only makes it worse. There is too much Neolithic farming terminology in PIE to allow for a Mesolithic disintegration of PIE.

Yes, although much of this lexicon was borrowed, this doesn't make PIE that older.

It is virtually certain that PIE borrowed from other languages - almost all languages do. It is very likely that words for crops, farm implements, livestock etc. were borrowed from language to language in the Neolithic together with the things themselves as more and more communities adopted farming. There appear to be lexical similarities between IE, Semitic and other languages which are probably just that - Neolithic Wanderwörter. But as their reflexes in the IE daughter languages are in most cases perfectly regular in terms of sound correspondences, they were already present in PIE proper, rather than being borrowed individually by the daughter languages from some nebulous common source. In my opinion, there is no way to project the breakup of PIE back to somewhen before about 4500-4000 BC.

[sangi39]

Although I'm not defending it, Arnaud's theory of a PIE homeland in Anatolia is quite different from Renfrew's in chronology and linguistic implications. Arnaud proposes a Pre-Mesolithic expansion from Anatolia to the Balkans, and then a Mesolithic one from there to West and East Europe.

That only makes it worse. There is too much Neolithic farming terminology in PIE to allow for a Mesolithic disintegration of PIE.

Yes, although much of this lexicon was borrowed, this doesn't make PIE that older.

It is virtually certain that PIE borrowed from other languages - almost all languages do. It is very likely that words for crops, farm implements, livestock etc. were borrowed from language to language in the Neolithic together with the things themselves as more and more communities adopted farming. There appear to be lexical similarities between IE, Semitic and other languages which are probably just that - Neolithic Wanderwörter. But as their reflexes in the IE daughter languages are in most cases perfectly regular in terms of sound correspondences, they were already present in PIE proper, rather than being borrowed individually by the daughter languages from some nebulous common source. In my opinion, there is no way to project the breakup of PIE back to somewhen before about 4500-4000 BC.

I personally agree with this. Whether or not the words fro Neolithic technologies were borrowed into PIE or into a part of the PIE speech community (meaning PIE may have had two words for one concept, one being used in one area and the other word in another area), the fact that all the reflexes are pretty much regular indicates that PIE was, by the time the language began to divide past mutual intelligibility, a language of a Neolithic people. At the very least, PIE thus marks a language spoken on either side of the Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition but began to divide past dialectal forms only in the Neolithic.

[WeepingElf]

So far, my research has yielded a positive for salt production in the Neolithic (the salt works at Poiana Slatinei, Rumania), but neither a positive nor a negative for salt production in the Mesolithic or earlier. But I find it difficult to imagine hunter-gatherers running salt works - it seems anachronistic to me. Who knows more?

[sangi39]

So far, my research has yielded a positive for salt production in the Neolithic (the salt works at Poiana Slatinei, Rumania), but neither a positive nor a negative for salt production in the Mesolithic or earlier. But I find it difficult to imagine hunter-gatherers running salt works - it seems anachronistic to me. Who knows more?

AFAIK there's no salt-producing (for "internal" reasons at least) hunter-gatherers today and I don't think there's any/much evidence for hunter-gatherer salt-production in the past. In a discussion of hunter-gatherer typologies, however, Rowley-Conwy discussed hunter-gatherer storage, territoriality and movement which more-or-less produced a four-way scheme. Food storage in hunter-gatherer societies was put down to two causes. The first being seasonal variation of all available resources, e.g. all food resources decrease in winter rather than only some food resources decreasing and others remaining relatively high. The second is lack of territoriality caused by movement between locations through the year. These two conditions create an obligation for food storage. These storage methods are typically right there, such as snow/ice.

He appears to suggest that less immediate storage methods are used in sedentary and territorial societies with seasonal variation of food products, typical of agricultural societies. If the model holds, then we wouldn't expect European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to mine salt, at least not for food storage purposes.

NOTE: Territory here refers to a number of different things, like knowledge regarding the location of water, the right to immediate access to food since something you made was used in acquiring that food. It may refer to immediate access to food based on the use of intermediary campsites between a more permanent settlement and hunting grounds, i.e. the hunters bring the food to the campsite, stay overnight and have a bit then bring the rest back to the settlement in the morning.

[WeepingElf]

So far, my research has yielded a positive for salt production in the Neolithic (the salt works at Poiana Slatinei, Rumania), but neither a positive nor a negative for salt production in the Mesolithic or earlier. But I find it difficult to imagine hunter-gatherers running salt works - it seems anachronistic to me. Who knows more?

AFAIK there's no salt-producing (for "internal" reasons at least) hunter-gatherers today and I don't think there's any/much evidence for hunter-gatherer salt-production in the past. In a discussion of hunter-gatherer typologies, however, Rowley-Conwy discussed hunter-gatherer storage, territoriality and movement which more-or-less produced a four-way scheme. Food storage in hunter-gatherer societies was put down to two causes. The first being seasonal variation of all available resources, e.g. all food resources decrease in winter rather than only some food resources decreasing and others remaining relatively high. The second is lack of territoriality caused by movement between locations through the year. These two conditions create an obligation for food storage. These storage methods are typically right there, such as snow/ice.

He appears to suggest that less immediate storage methods are used in sedentary and territorial societies with seasonal variation of food products, typical of agricultural societies. If the model holds, then we wouldn't expect European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to mine salt, at least not for food storage purposes.

This is also what I think. I doubt that Mesolithic peoples knew salt (as a substance, at least; if they lived on the seashore or near a saline spring, they'd probably know salty taste, but would consider it a feature of a particular kind of "foul" water, and not attribute it to a particular substance dissolved in that water).

[sangi39]

Unless of course you happen to come across a salt flat or a similar formation where salt separates from water forming a layer of salt on the surface. IIRC, such formations aren't really all that common in Europe.

[WeepingElf]

Unless of course you happen to come across a salt flat or a similar formation where salt separates from water forming a layer of salt on the surface. IIRC, such formations aren't really all that common in Europe.

At least, I don't know of any.

[Pthagnar]

what about animals, such as deer, at salt licks?

[WeepingElf]

what about animals, such as deer, at salt licks?

A good question. While it seems unlikely that Mesolithic foragers produced salt on a commercial scale, the substance itself may have been known to them. I realize that the salt argument does not yet prove that Proto-Europic was Neolithic. But maybe the people in the area where now is the Bay of Odessa were only on the threshold of the Neolithic; at any rate, the area was a peripheral Neolithic one. Yet, I consider it most likely that the language family echoed in the "Old European hydronymy" was that of the Linearbandkeramik culture, and related to Indo-European.

[Octaviano]

Yet, I consider it most likely that the language family echoed in the "Old European hydronymy" was that of the Linearbandkeramik culture, and related to Indo-European.

Unfortunately, there's no way to prove this.

This ties in with another innovation of Europic, which I call the Great Vowel Collapse (GVC). This is a change under which all non-high vowels merged into a single vowel *a, which evolved into the ablauting vowels in PIE. Before the GVC, high vowels were lowered before resonants (this I call Resonant-Conditioned Lowering (RCL). This change is necessary to account for the non-occurence of high vowels (which manifest as *ei~oi~i and *eu~ou~u ablaut sets in PIE) before resonants in PIE. As an example, *kul- 'to turn' became *kol- by RCL, then *kWal- by GVC, and finally *kWel- in PIE.

This would be an example of a regressive assimilation were the stop is labialized and the vowel is subsequently delabialized.

I look forward to open-minded discussion.

I am too.

[Legion]

[WeepingElf]

Yet, I consider it most likely that the language family echoed in the "Old European hydronymy" was that of the Linearbandkeramik culture, and related to Indo-European.

Unfortunately, there's no way to prove this.

Sure, the evidence I have found so far does not prove it either way, but I consider it unlikely that Mesolithic Central and Western Europe was linguistically homogenous enough to allow for the existence of a uniform network of river names. The "salt argument" recently discussed here also seems to point at a Neolithic Proto-Europic, but I admit it is not watertight.

This ties in with another innovation of Europic, which I call the Great Vowel Collapse (GVC). This is a change under which all non-high vowels merged into a single vowel *a, which evolved into the ablauting vowels in PIE. Before the GVC, high vowels were lowered before resonants (this I call Resonant-Conditioned Lowering (RCL). This change is necessary to account for the non-occurence of high vowels (which manifest as *ei~oi~i and *eu~ou~u ablaut sets in PIE) before resonants in PIE. As an example, *kul- 'to turn' became *kol- by RCL, then *kWal- by GVC, and finally *kWel- in PIE.

This would be an example of a regressive assimilation were the stop is labialized and the vowel is subsequently delabialized.

The idea is that before all the non-high vowels merged into *a, adjoining velars were allophonically labialized by rounded vowels, and palatalized by front vowels, and these secondary articulations stayed behind when the vowels merged.

I look forward to open-minded discussion.

I am too.

Good.

[WeepingElf]

I am bumping this thread to report some new findings about Europic. These findings knock away one of the supporting pillars of the Europic hypothesis as initially presented, but I still don't see it collapse entirely.

I am currently reading Yanko-Hombach et al. (ed.) (2006), The Black Sea Flood Question, and apparently, the Black Sea Flood never happened. It seems that Ryan and his colleagues just misinterpreted their data in a way which seemed plausible but is not supported by other data. So, there goes the Proto-Europic homeland in where now is the Bay of Odessa.

But that's not the end of the Europic hypothesis. The linguistic evidence, and that is what counts here, still speaks for the language reflected in the "Old European hydronymy" being related to Indo-European. It has been pointed out in this thread (by gsandi) that the LBK culture appears to be a descendant of the Starčevo culture of the Lower Danube area. Now, the area of what is now Ukraine, and was the homeland of PIE 6,000 years ago, was Neolithized from the southwest, i. e., the Starčevo culture. This makes the Starčevo culture, ca. 6000 BC, a good candidate for Proto-Europic. The Black Sea Flood turns out to be an unnecessary assumption.

[WeepingElf]

Another bump.

The Europic family may be just a branch of something bigger: Eurasiatic. The Eurasiatic macrofamily was proposed by Joseph Greenberg, who includes Indo-European, Etruscan, Uralic, Altaic, Korean, Japanese, Ainu, Nivkh, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut. However, he failed to prove it - he just adduced lots of material which he subjected to his mass lexical comparison procedure, which proves nothing.

Yet, I consider it likely, mainly on morphological evidence, that at least some of these languages are related. I am not sold by the membership of Korean, Japanese, Ainu or Nivkh, while on the other hand, Kartvelian seems to be a candidate for membership, but I am not sure. The Eurasiatic, or "Mitian" (after the shapes of the 1st and 2nd person pronouns) phylum appears to consist of three clusters:

1. Europic - Indo-European, Hesperic and perhaps Etruscan and Kartvelian (what this thread is all about)
2. Uralo-Siberian - Uralic, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut (see M. Fortescue, Languages Relations across Bering Strait for this one)
3. Altaic - Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic

Proto-Eurasiatic would perhaps been spoken about 12,000 years ago somewhere in Central Asia. This was the end of the ice age, and its speakers began to spread across the steppe and into the taiga. One group moved east and became Altaic. One group moved north and became Uralo-Siberian. The third group moved west.

Proto-Europic evolved from the westernmost tendril of Eurasiatic, in the extreme west of the steppe (between the Danube and Dniepr rivers) about 8,000-9,000 years ago. The western part of the Proto-Europic speaker community adopted the Neolithic cultural package from their southern neighbours and founded the Starcevo-Körös culture; from there, the Neolithic cultural package and its associated vocabulary spread eastwards through the Proto-Europic speaker community. Proto-Europic is set off from the rest of Eurasiatic by a set of characteristic sound changes:

- Merger of the dental and palatal consonant series
- Split of the velar consonant series into three (palatalized, plain, labialized) according to palatality and labiality of adjacent vowels
- Lowering of high vowels before sonorants
- Great Vowel Collapse: merger of all non-high vowels into */a/

Proto-Europic, as can be reconstructed internally from PIE, was an agglutinating, verb-final active-stative language.

Around 5500 BC, Europic speakers spread into Central Europe, founding the Linearbandkeramik culture and becoming the speakers of Proto-Hesperic. The eastern part of Europic evolved into Proto-Indo-European in what is now Ukraine.

[Etherman]

It's not clear, to me anyway, if Altaic forms a valid note. I don't doubt that Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus-Manchu are related though.

[jal]

Proto-Europic, as can be reconstructed internally from PIE, was an agglutinating, verb-final active-stative language.

A few questions:
1) How can this be reconstructed from PIE? I always understood there's very little to reconstruct if one has only a single language (a reconstructed one at that, in this case). Has anyone attempted to reconstrut a proto-PIE? If so, anyone besides you?
2) Was it mostly nom/acc or abs/erg? Split-S or Fluid-S?


JAL

[TaylorS]

Proto-Europic, as can be reconstructed internally from PIE, was an agglutinating, verb-final active-stative language.

A few questions:
1) How can this be reconstructed from PIE? I always understood there's very little to reconstruct if one has only a single language (a reconstructed one at that, in this case). Has anyone attempted to reconstrut a proto-PIE? If so, anyone besides you?
2) Was it mostly nom/acc or abs/erg? Split-S or Fluid-S?


JAL

Historical linguists use what is called Internal Reconstruction, looking at the grammar to find "fossils" of older stages of the language. For example, PIE has many word pairs that mean the same thing (like *akʷa and *wodr̩, or the roots that became English "fire" and Greek "pyros", which is stative, and Sanskrit "Agni" and Latin "ignus", which is active) only with an Active vs. Stative distinction, a standard feature of Active languages

[WeepingElf]

Proto-Europic, as can be reconstructed internally from PIE, was an agglutinating, verb-final active-stative language.

A few questions:
1) How can this be reconstructed from PIE? I always understood there's very little to reconstruct if one has only a single language (a reconstructed one at that, in this case). Has anyone attempted to reconstrut a proto-PIE? If so, anyone besides you?
2) Was it mostly nom/acc or abs/erg? Split-S or Fluid-S?


JAL

Historical linguists use what is called Internal Reconstruction, looking at the grammar to find "fossils" of older stages of the language. For example, PIE has many word pairs that mean the same thing (like *akʷa and *wodr̩, or the roots that became English "fire" and Greek "pyros", which is stative, and Sanskrit "Agni" and Latin "ignus", which is active) only with an Active vs. Stative distinction, a standard feature of Active languages

Yes, internal reconstruction is the method to use. The basic idea is that irregularities evolve from earlier regular systems (for instance, the English strong verbs go back to an ablaut pattern that was perfectly regular in an earlier stage of the language). There is strong evidence for active-stative alignment in pre-PIE to be found in the morphology. There are two sets of verbal personal endings, one with predominantly active meaning (the *-m, *-s, *-t set), and one with more or less stative meaning (the *-h2a, *-th2a, *-e set). Also, neuter nouns have an absolutive case instead of the nominative and accusative cases of the non-neuter nouns. This absolutive case is traditionally called "nominative-accusative", but in many older IE languages, neuter transitive subjects are always put in an oblique case (such as the instrumental or the ablative; Hittite indeed has an outright ergative case). This means that there is a split ergativity pattern in PIE nominal case marking, which can easily have evolved from an active-stative pattern with the constraint that inanimate nouns do not have an agentive case.

The shards of an earlier active-stative alignment are strewn across just about any part of the language; all you have to do is look at them from the right angle and squint a little

My actual reconstruction of Proto-Europic is still very sketchy and uncertain, and I haven't published it yet.

[WeepingElf]

Bump again.

Research on the Europic hypothesis keeps me (somewhat) busy. Currently, I am writing a preliminary grammar sketch of Proto-Europic, based on internal reconstruction from PIE. (There is too little known about Hesperic to be of much help here.) Another project is cataloguing and mapping the Old European Hydronymy - I haven't seen a good map of it anywhere yet, so I'll take Krahe's data and piece one together all by myself.

On the topic of Etruscan, I no longer see any reason to connect it to Europic. The morphological similarities boil down to just one pronoun and one case ending, and that's simply not enough to rule out chance resemblance. The same pronoun and the same case ending are also found in Kartvelian - which, like Etruscan, is otherwise so unlike IE that a relationship (at least, one closer than Uralic) seems very unlikely (there are some vague resemblances in phonology between Kartvelian and IE - but not Etruscan - , but that may be areal, and doesn't really say anything about genealogy). Also, lexical cognates appear to be completely absent.

[TaylorS]

Bump again.

Research on the Europic hypothesis keeps me (somewhat) busy. Currently, I am writing a preliminary grammar sketch of Proto-Europic, based on internal reconstruction from PIE. (There is too little known about Hesperic to be of much help here.) Another project is cataloguing and mapping the Old European Hydronymy - I haven't seen a good map of it anywhere yet, so I'll take Krahe's data and piece one together all by myself.

On the topic of Etruscan, I no longer see any reason to connect it to Europic. The morphological similarities boil down to just one pronoun and one case ending, and that's simply not enough to rule out chance resemblance. The same pronoun and the same case ending are also found in Kartvelian - which, like Etruscan, is otherwise so unlike IE that a relationship (at least, one closer than Uralic) seems very unlikely (there are some vague resemblances in phonology between Kartvelian and IE - but not Etruscan - , but that may be areal, and doesn't really say anything about genealogy). Also, lexical cognates appear to be completely absent.

So I take you you reject Glen Gordon's Indo-Aegean hypothesis?

BTW, you can see the cognate-ness between the PIE active-stative verbal endings (or objective-subjective as Gordon calls them, something I disagree with since what he is describing is just an active-statve variant) in Alpic.

Here is my current verbal ending system for Alpic:

Code: Select all

AGREEMENT  | Agentive S | Patientive S | Reflexive S |
---------------------------------------------------------
1SG        | -m         | -ch          | -gu         |
---------------------------------------------------------
2SG        | -t         | -n           | -du         |
---------------------------------------------------------
3SG        | -s         | -Ø           | -su         |
---------------------------------------------------------
1PL        | -me        | -he          | -ge         |
---------------------------------------------------------
2PL        | -te        | -ne          | -de         |
---------------------------------------------------------
3PL        | -se        | -je          | -sje        |
---------------------------------------------------------
Impersonal |           -p              | -pa         |
---------------------------------------------------------

[WeepingElf]

Bump again.

Research on the Europic hypothesis keeps me (somewhat) busy. Currently, I am writing a preliminary grammar sketch of Proto-Europic, based on internal reconstruction from PIE. (There is too little known about Hesperic to be of much help here.) Another project is cataloguing and mapping the Old European Hydronymy - I haven't seen a good map of it anywhere yet, so I'll take Krahe's data and piece one together all by myself.

On the topic of Etruscan, I no longer see any reason to connect it to Europic. The morphological similarities boil down to just one pronoun and one case ending, and that's simply not enough to rule out chance resemblance. The same pronoun and the same case ending are also found in Kartvelian - which, like Etruscan, is otherwise so unlike IE that a relationship (at least, one closer than Uralic) seems very unlikely (there are some vague resemblances in phonology between Kartvelian and IE - but not Etruscan - , but that may be areal, and doesn't really say anything about genealogy). Also, lexical cognates appear to be completely absent.

So I take you you reject Glen Gordon's Indo-Aegean hypothesis?

I couldn't read that file (and many others he has produced) because I don't have the right software on my machine

But what I have seen of his hypothesis is utterly unconvincing. He doesn't establish an IE-Etruscan connection, he assumes it. He often rejects the mainstream scholarly opinion on the meanings of Etruscan words, assigning them different meanings based on similarities with IE words - and then adduces the "cognate pairs" obtained that way as "evidence" for Etruscan being related to IE. That's circular reasoning.

It also doesn't help that Glen Gordon behaves pretty much the same way as Octaviano. I remember him from the Nostratic-L mailing list before I withdrew from that list because it was full of crackpots. He accused his critics of ad hominem attacks, called the entire academic mainstream names, and even invoked comparisons with the Nazis. Eventually, he decided to withdraw from Nostratic-L and similar fora, and instead started ranting away on his blog. That alone does not falsify his hypothesis, but I have pointed out the main problems with it, and if someone acts up that way, you can take it as a sure sign that you are dealing with a crackpot.

BTW, you can see the cognate-ness between the PIE active-stative verbal endings (or objective-subjective as Gordon calls them, something I disagree with since what he is describing is just an active-statve variant) in Alpic.

Here is my current verbal ending system for Alpic:

Code: Select all

AGREEMENT  | Agentive S | Patientive S | Reflexive S |
---------------------------------------------------------
1SG        | -m         | -ch          | -gu         |
---------------------------------------------------------
2SG        | -t         | -n           | -du         |
---------------------------------------------------------
3SG        | -s         | -Ø           | -su         |
---------------------------------------------------------
1PL        | -me        | -he          | -ge         |
---------------------------------------------------------
2PL        | -te        | -ne          | -de         |
---------------------------------------------------------
3PL        | -se        | -je          | -sje        |
---------------------------------------------------------
Impersonal |           -p              | -pa         |
---------------------------------------------------------

The agentive endings look cognate, but the patientive endings show no visible connection to the IE ones (singular *-h2a, *-th2a, *-e). In fact, they look like the stative (or whatever) endings in Glen Gordon's reconstruction of Nostratic, which appear to be based on Dravidian. In my opinion, there is no reason to assume a relationship between IE and Dravidian.

[MrKrov]

The morphological similarities boil down to just one pronoun and one case ending, and that's simply not enough to rule out chance resemblance. The same pronoun and the same case ending are also found in Kartvelian -

So, uh, which ones? Out of mere curiousity.

[WeepingElf]

The morphological similarities boil down to just one pronoun and one case ending, and that's simply not enough to rule out chance resemblance. The same pronoun and the same case ending are also found in Kartvelian -

So, uh, which ones? Out of mere curiousity.

The pronoun in question is Etr. mi, Geo. me (1sg.); the case marker is Etr. -s (earlier -si), Geo. -(i)s (genitive).

[MrKrov]

'K.