European languages before Indo-European

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European languages before Indo-European

Post by WeepingElf »

As this matter came up in another thread in Ephemera, I set up this thread to discuss the question:

What are your ideas about the languages spoken in Europe before the spread of Indo-European?

There are several theories around. Theo Vennemann assumes that most of western Europe was occupied by languages related to Basque, but his arguments in favour of his "Vasconic" hypothesis so far have failed to convince most scholars.

Mario Alinei declares pre-IE languages nonexistent (other than Neanderthal semi-language) as Homo sapiens in Europe had been speaking Indo-European languages from the start - but that is rejected by virtually everybody else, as PIE clearly was, according to the reconstructible vocabulary, a languages spoken by farmers who knew wheeled vehicles, copper and probably also domesticated horses, meaning that PIE can hardly be earlier than 4000 BC.

My personal pet theory involves a group of languages I call Hesperic, which formed a sister group of Indo-European and spread across much of Europe in the Neolithic about 2,000 years before the spread of IE, but did not displace all the earlier languages; after all, Basque and the Caucasian languages survived.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Io »

WeepingElf wrote:Mario Alinei declares pre-IE languages nonexistent (other than Neanderthal semi-language) as Homo sapiens in Europe had been speaking Indo-European languages from the start - but that is rejected by virtually everybody else, as PIE clearly was, according to the reconstructible vocabulary, a languages spoken by farmers who knew wheeled vehicles, copper and probably also domesticated horses, meaning that PIE can hardly be earlier than 4000 BC.
So because they can't reconstruct it any further it means it isn't older?
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Travis B. »

Io wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:Mario Alinei declares pre-IE languages nonexistent (other than Neanderthal semi-language) as Homo sapiens in Europe had been speaking Indo-European languages from the start - but that is rejected by virtually everybody else, as PIE clearly was, according to the reconstructible vocabulary, a languages spoken by farmers who knew wheeled vehicles, copper and probably also domesticated horses, meaning that PIE can hardly be earlier than 4000 BC.
So because they can't reconstruct it any further it means it isn't older?
What that means is that PIE could not have started breaking apart earlier, as otherwise common vocabulary would have existed for things not developed yet at the time it started breaking apart.
Last edited by Travis B. on Fri Sep 03, 2010 6:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by Soap »

Im pretty sure that the PIE speakers were not the first anatomically modern people in Europe, or else you wouldnt be able to explain the Basques, pre-IE Minoans, Etruscans, etc. (Although Etruscan may be related to IE, it isn't likely actually descended from PIE.) Possibly Uralic speakers occupied much of Europe before the IE arrivals, or possibly there were Etruscan-related people who had moved up from Italy after the last Ice Age. The mystical prehistoric Irish tribes are also intriguing since genetics indicate the pre-PIE Irish may have been more widepsread in the past. Or maybe all of these theories are true, and there were just a bunch of little tribes that had each been living there for 10000+ years and would seem effectively unrelated even to each other.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by WeepingElf »

Io wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:Mario Alinei declares pre-IE languages nonexistent (other than Neanderthal semi-language) as Homo sapiens in Europe had been speaking Indo-European languages from the start - but that is rejected by virtually everybody else, as PIE clearly was, according to the reconstructible vocabulary, a languages spoken by farmers who knew wheeled vehicles, copper and probably also domesticated horses, meaning that PIE can hardly be earlier than 4000 BC.
So because they can't reconstruct it any further it means it isn't older?
What do you mean by "older"? Of course, the language from which all Indo-European languages descend has a history before that. But the breakup cannot have happened before the wheel was invented - and the notion that all of Europe spoke a single, homogenous language for thousands of years before that is absurd. Languages develop dialects, diversify and break up, that is the normal path of development. There must have been numerous languages in Europe besides PIE - some related to it, others not. (Basque, Etruscan and the Caucasian languages did not sprout from nowhere. They are remnants of an earlier linguistic landscape now lost.)

Here is an interesting article about the linguistic diversity of aboriginal Europe. I think that pre-colonial North America is a fairly good model for pre-IE Europe (overall roughly similar climate and cultural development). Pre-colonial North America (what is now USA and Canada) had about 60 language families, some major ones with 20-30 languages, and many minor ones including isolates. Europe is about half the size, so one can assume the existence of about 30 families.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Cathbad »

Io wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:Mario Alinei declares pre-IE languages nonexistent (other than Neanderthal semi-language) as Homo sapiens in Europe had been speaking Indo-European languages from the start - but that is rejected by virtually everybody else, as PIE clearly was, according to the reconstructible vocabulary, a languages spoken by farmers who knew wheeled vehicles, copper and probably also domesticated horses, meaning that PIE can hardly be earlier than 4000 BC.
So because they can't reconstruct it any further it means it isn't older?
My thoughts (admittedly non-expert) exactly. Simply because cognates exist at the copper-horse-farmer level, surely that cannot mean that there were earlier ancestor forms without these cognates? I think I get the reasoning behind it - because everything is so neatly reconstructible for that particular point in time, it must have been a linguistic community limited enough to have something that can be called a common language - but still. Isn't it possible that PIE is actually a kind of unwarranted "dialect continuum abstraction" and that actual spoken forms would be very different?

But this is just late-night speculation.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by WeepingElf »

Cathbad wrote:
Io wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:Mario Alinei declares pre-IE languages nonexistent (other than Neanderthal semi-language) as Homo sapiens in Europe had been speaking Indo-European languages from the start - but that is rejected by virtually everybody else, as PIE clearly was, according to the reconstructible vocabulary, a languages spoken by farmers who knew wheeled vehicles, copper and probably also domesticated horses, meaning that PIE can hardly be earlier than 4000 BC.
So because they can't reconstruct it any further it means it isn't older?
My thoughts (admittedly non-expert) exactly. Simply because cognates exist at the copper-horse-farmer level, surely that cannot mean that there were earlier ancestor forms without these cognates? I think I get the reasoning behind it - because everything is so neatly reconstructible for that particular point in time, it must have been a linguistic community limited enough to have something that can be called a common language - but still. Isn't it possible that PIE is actually a kind of unwarranted "dialect continuum abstraction" and that actual spoken forms would be very different?

But this is just late-night speculation.
PIE certainly was a language with dialectal divisions - which later evolved into the various branches of Indo-European. It is hard to say how wide the area was in which it was spoken, but it probably wasn't larger than perhaps 500 or 1000 km across. The most likely homeland of PIE was north of the Black Sea - perhaps an area roughly corresponding to the eastern half of what is now Ukraine, or something like that. And certainly, our scholarly reconstruction of PIE misses many details, and that exact form of the language was never spoken anywhere - it is probably an artificial mix of several dialects and time stages. A time traveller visiting PIE-land would perhaps be able to make himself understood with the PIE he knows from the handbooks, but his dialect would be considered somewhat odd everywhere.

What regards related languages that split off earlier, they probably existed, but most of them died out later, though some are probably still spoken, only not yet recognized as being related to IE by current mainstream scholars. There are several hypotheses under discussion; Uralic is the most likely candidate.

What holds for Indo-European also holds for other language families and isolates. Basque, for instance, probably also had relatives one day, but they too are lost in time.
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Post by TaylorS »

The basis of my conlang Alpic is a sister family to IE I call "Danubian". The common ancestor of Proto-Danubian and PIE would have been spoken about 9000 BC. and Proto-Danubian would have been spoken in the Middle Danube Basin around 5000 BC.

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Post by Tropylium »

Soap wrote:Possibly Uralic speakers occupied much of Europe before the IE arrivals,
…But probably not. There's no convincing evidence for any pre-Hungarian Uralic presence southwest of Latvia (one-word unsystematic comparisions like *mëxi "land" versus some Celtic word are incapable of demonstrating anything), Samic reached central Scandinavia at about the same time as Germanic, and even Baltic-Finnic seems to be younger in the vicinity of Gulf of Finland than Baltic is.

To address the original posts that inspired this thred, if PIE had died off for some reason, Europe would probably be speaking something descended from close sister languages of it.

PIE as reconstructed quite possibly includes features that in actuality came about later than the erliest dialect isoglosses. This is pretty common: for example, from modern-day Germanic data you'd end up backdating a change such as *ŋg :> ŋ / _# quite farther back than it actually occur'd (possibly even all the way to PG, but for all I kno there's some obscure Dalecarlian dialect that doesn't have it).
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Post by Shm Jay »

Alas, we will never know, unless the language fairy grants our wish. My suspicion is that there were a lot of related languages to PIE in the vicinity, with varying degrees of relation, and including some not related at all.

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Post by Magb »

Tropylium wrote:for example, from modern-day Germanic data you'd end up backdating a change such as *ŋg :> ŋ / _# quite farther back than it actually occur'd (possibly even all the way to PG, but for all I kno there's some obscure Dalecarlian dialect that doesn't have it).
If I'm understanding you correctly then yes, there are Scandinavian dialects where final /ng/ is [ŋg] or [ŋk], and they don't even have to be obscure Dalecarlian ones. Not to mention Faroese and Icelandic. Your point is well taken though.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Kai_DaiGoji »

WeepingElf wrote:Here is an interesting article about the linguistic diversity of aboriginal Europe. I think that pre-colonial North America is a fairly good model for pre-IE Europe (overall roughly similar climate and cultural development). Pre-colonial North America (what is now USA and Canada) had about 60 language families, some major ones with 20-30 languages, and many minor ones including isolates. Europe is about half the size, so one can assume the existence of about 30 families.
This seems fairly likely to me. It actually reminds me of one of the arguments Jared Diamond makes in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Most continents of the world show relatively small areas covered with multiple language families and isolates, as well as relatively large areas covered by one or two families. A huge portion of Africa is covered by Bantu languages, Sino-Tibetan clearly pushed other families south and east out into the Pacific, etc. Basically, the world was once more of a patchwork quilt, but innovations arose in a few groups, and they expanded and displaced or assimilated the vast majority of their neighbors.

As for the specific question about what Europe looked like pre-Indo-European, I'd guess that there were areas with lots of families - the alps seems like a good candidate for Caucasus type small area families, barely related to the ones two valleys over. And who knows what Britain looked like.
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Post by WeepingElf »

Tropylium wrote:
Soap wrote:Possibly Uralic speakers occupied much of Europe before the IE arrivals,
…But probably not. There's no convincing evidence for any pre-Hungarian Uralic presence southwest of Latvia (one-word unsystematic comparisions like *mëxi "land" versus some Celtic word are incapable of demonstrating anything) [highlighted because it can't be said often enough in this discipline -- WE], Samic reached central Scandinavia at about the same time as Germanic, and even Baltic-Finnic seems to be younger in the vicinity of Gulf of Finland than Baltic is.
Indeed. Uralic is about the same time depth as Indo-European (ca. 6000 years) and did spread about the same time as IE, not earlier. There is indeed no convincing evidence for prehistoric Uralic languages south of a line running roughly from Riga via Moscow to Saratov.
Tropylium wrote:To address the original posts that inspired this thred, if PIE had died off for some reason, Europe would probably be speaking something descended from close sister languages of it.
Maybe.
Tropylium wrote:PIE as reconstructed quite possibly includes features that in actuality came about later than the erliest dialect isoglosses. This is pretty common: for example, from modern-day Germanic data you'd end up backdating a change such as *ŋg :> ŋ / _# quite farther back than it actually occur'd (possibly even all the way to PG, but for all I kno there's some obscure Dalecarlian dialect that doesn't have it).
Indeed. If all members of a family innovated in a particular point in parallel, the innovation is likely to be incorrectly attributed to the protolanguage. However, the larger the family, the less likely it is that this happens, and where it happens, there are often traces left behind that allow to recover the matter (see for instance the loss of laryngeals in IE; Saussure was able to reconstruct them at a time when Hittite - which retained them - was yet unknown).
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Post by Alces »

Magb wrote:
Tropylium wrote:for example, from modern-day Germanic data you'd end up backdating a change such as *ŋg :> ŋ / _# quite farther back than it actually occur'd (possibly even all the way to PG, but for all I kno there's some obscure Dalecarlian dialect that doesn't have it).
If I'm understanding you correctly then yes, there are Scandinavian dialects where final /ng/ is [ŋg] or [ŋk], and they don't even have to be obscure Dalecarlian ones. Not to mention Faroese and Icelandic. Your point is well taken though.
And English in northwest England and the West Midlands.

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Post by Etherman »

There were defintely pre-PIE languages in Europe. Too many European IE languages have words from non-IE substrates for me to think that they entered Europe from phantoms who disappeared without a trace after the arrival of IE speakers.

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Post by Soap »

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_s ... _influence is one example of a theory that states that the Finnic peoples were in central Europe before the Germans were, though without seeing his dictionaries I cant know how well the evidence matches up. It's possible that the Germanic substrate hypothesis is true but that some other tribe of people was the substrate, possibly one that was completely overtaken by the Germanics and therefore left no independent survivors.
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Post by WeepingElf »

Soap wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_s ... _influence is one example of a theory that states that the Finnic peoples were in central Europe before the Germans were, though without seeing his dictionaries I cant know how well the evidence matches up. It's possible that the Germanic substrate hypothesis is true but that some other tribe of people was the substrate, possibly one that was completely overtaken by the Germanics and therefore left no independent survivors.
Kalevi Wiik's hypothesis is not widely taken seriously. The fact that Wikipedia mentions it doesn't mean that scholars consider it worthy of serious discussion. Wikipedia tends to say "...and then there is also that hypothesis" a lot, mainly because crackpots edit the relevant Wikipedia articles in that direction, and start bitter edit wars when a more sober and knowledgeable mind removes them. This is a well-known content quality problem with Wikipedia.

Those who think that the Germanic languages are "weird" compared to other IE language tend to overrate the Germanic sound shift; it is of course possible that that sound shift is due to substratum influence, but there really is no shred of reason to connect it to Uralic.
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These we at least know ...

Post by WeepingElf »

Let me give a brief overview of those pre-IE languages in Europe of which we know that they were (and still are) there.

1. Languages that are still spoken

The obvious one is of course Basque in the western Pyrenees. Basque is SOV, ergative and agglutinating, and shows no shred of evidence for a relationship to any other living language.

In the southeastern corner of Europe, on the boundary to Asia, we have the Caucasian languages, which fall into three different families not known to be related to each other or to anything else. While most of them are SOV, ergative and somewhere between agglutinating and fusional, and all of them have large phoneme inventories with uvulars and ejectives, the three families are very different from each other.

2. Fragmentarily attested languages

In the west, we have Iberian in a strip about 100 km deep along the Spanish Mediterranean coast, written in a script (with a northern and a southern variant) of whose letters we roughly know the sound values, but the language is not understood. Basque is not helpful here, the languages do not seem to be particularly close.

Another language written in a similar script is Tartessian, in southwestern Spain and southern Portugal, also not understood. The celtologist John T. Koch has proposed a reading of the Tartessian inscriptions as a Celtic language, which fits the fact that many place names in the area are Celtic, but this is controversial.

The best-known of the fragmentary non-IE languages of Europe surely is Etruscan in Italy. The script can be read with few problems, but the language is poorly understood and unclassified, except that Rhaetic in the Italian Alps and Lemnian in the Aegean appear to be related, but these two are even less known.

On Crete, we have two undeciphered scripts (not counting the enigmatic Phaistos Disc), Minoan hieroglyphs and Linear A, and some inscriptions in Greek letters but an unknown language designated Eteocretan. The situation on Cyprus is similar, with an undeciphered Cypro-Minoan script and an unknown language recorded in the (readable) Cypro-Syllabic script, Eteocypriot.

Europe north of the Alps is almost completely blank, as the art of writing arrived here only after the Indo-Europeanization and Uralicization was complete - the sole exception being Pictish, the unknown language of a few Ogham inscriptions in northeastern Scotland, which may be a non-Indo-European language or just an aberrant form of Celtic.

3. Traces

The landscape of Europe is laced with place names of unknown origin. Many of them, especially river names, seem to form a vast fairly homogenous network of recurring names, the Old European hydronymy. The German scholar Hans Krahe attributed them to Indo-European; Theo Vennemann assumes that they are Vasconic, i.e. from languages related to Basque. Both hypotheses are controversial.

Most European languages have many words with unknown etymologies. In Greek, these make about a third of the vocabulary, and are often attributed to an unknown language called Pelasgian. The situation in Germanic and Celtic is not much different. The Insular Celtic languages also have undergone a thorough restructuring of their syntax. This is sometimes attributed to a substratum language, which some scholars assume to be related to Semitic, but most scholars reject that relationship.
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Re: These we at least know ...

Post by jal »

WeepingElf wrote:The obvious one is of course Basque in the western Pyrenees.
Do we know for certain that the Basque were already in Europe before the PIE people were? Do we know they didn't wander in a thousand years later?


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Re: These we at least know ...

Post by tezcatlip0ca »

WeepingElf wrote:Eteocretan
Eteocypriot
Are those some terrestrial equivalents of Ilian languages?
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Re: These we at least know ...

Post by WeepingElf »

jal wrote:Do we know for certain that the Basque were already in Europe before the PIE people were? Do we know they didn't wander in a thousand years later?
We can't be sure, but at least, Basque (or rather, a language ancestral to it) was already there in Roman times, and we have no evidence that it moved in from elsewhere, while we know of the IE languages of the area that they came from somewhere else.
Aid'os wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:Eteocretan
Eteocypriot
Are those some terrestrial equivalents of Ilian languages?
Eteos means 'true' in Greek, and the term Eteokretoi was actually used by ancient Greek historians to refer to the pre-Greek population of Crete. I don't know whether Eteocypriot is also of ancient Greek vintage, or a neologism coined after the model of Eteocretan.
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Re: These we at least know ...

Post by tezcatlip0ca »

WeepingElf wrote:
jal wrote:Do we know for certain that the Basque were already in Europe before the PIE people were? Do we know they didn't wander in a thousand years later?
We can't be sure, but at least, Basque (or rather, a language ancestral to it) was already there in Roman times, and we have no evidence that it moved in from elsewhere, while we know of the IE languages of the area that they came from somewhere else.
Aid'os wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:Eteocretan
Eteocypriot
Are those some terrestrial equivalents of Ilian languages?
Eteos means 'true' in Greek, and the term Eteokretoi was actually used by ancient Greek historians to refer to the pre-Greek population of Crete. I don't know whether Eteocypriot is also of ancient Greek vintage, or a neologism coined after the model of Eteocretan.
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How many were there? An estimation.

Post by WeepingElf »

So, after listing those pre-IE stocks we have evidence for, here another take at it:

How many language stocks existed in prehistoric Europe?

This of course depends on what you mean by "prehistoric". I shall "visit" two points in time: 8,000 BC (just before the Neolithic Revolution) and 4,000 BC (just before the spread of Indo-European and Uralic).

For our purposes, the linguistic history of Europe begins with the entrance of Homo sapiens about 40,000 years ago. We don't know whether the Neanderthals and other hominids had language or not, but if they did, their languages probably did not survive.

Paleolithic Europe was a land of many tongues. There simply weren't any factors that could have enforced linguistic homgenity. So, there were many stocks 10,000 years ago. But how many?

Pre-colonial North America is perhaps helpful as a "standard of comparison"; so is the Caucasus region, where three indigenous stocks live today. Most likely, linguistic diversity was highest in the Mediterranean and lowest in the northeast. I think the following figures are fairly reasonable estimates:

Iberian peninsula: 3-5 stocks
Italy (with Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily): 3-4 stocks
Balkan peninsula: 3-5 stocks
Caucasus: 3-5 stocks
France: 2-3 stocks
British Isles: 1-2 stocks
Central Europe: 1-2 stocks
Scandinavia: 1-2 stocks
Eastern Europe: 1-2 stocks
----------------------------------------------
Total: 18-30 stocks

Where are Indo-European and Uralic at that time? The answer is: they aren't yet. Or rather: what would eventually be Indo-European and Uralic were then just two members of one of the stocks, somewhere north of the Caucasus. Yes, one stock: the morphological similarities between Indo-European and Uralic are such that a common ancestor seems very likely.

The Neolithic revolution brought about changes. The key question is: was the spread of agriculture demic, i. e. by immigration of farmers into new territories, or cultural, i. e. by local populations adopting farming from neighbours, or a mixture of both? It seems that it was predominantly demic north of the Alps, but less so in the Mediterranean.

This means that north of the Alps, one stock (probably that which Proto-Indo-European belonged to) spread across Central Europe from the east. The speakers of those languages were also the bearers of the Linear Pottery culture. I call this language family "Hesperic". See also "WeepingElf's Europic thread". Some of the stocks in that area may have died out, but others probably survived in refuge areas, perhaps in the Alps or in the mountains of Scandinavia.

In the Mediterranean, nothing like that happened. Some stocks probably expanded at the cost of others, and a few stocks may have disappeared. But at least half of the stocks in Mediterranean Europe survived the Neolithic revolution, and some of those lived to leave written records. By the year 4,000 BC, Europe may still have had some 10-15 stocks. Then came Indo-European and Uralic and displaced most of them, and the rest is history.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Octavià »

WeepingElf wrote: PIE certainly was a language with dialectal divisions - which later evolved into the various branches of Indo-European. It is hard to say how wide the area was in which it was spoken, but it probably wasn't larger than perhaps 500 or 1000 km across. The most likely homeland of PIE was north of the Black Sea - perhaps an area roughly corresponding to the eastern half of what is now Ukraine, or something like that. And certainly, our scholarly reconstruction of PIE misses many details, and that exact form of the language was never spoken anywhere - it is probably an artificial mix of several dialects and time stages. A time traveller visiting PIE-land would perhaps be able to make himself understood with the PIE he knows from the handbooks, but his dialect would be considered somewhat odd everywhere.
IMHO, what Indo-Europeanists commonly label as "PIE" is actually a mix of several language layers, the most recent of which it's the one I call "Pontic" (roughly corresponding to Adrados' "PIE III"), the ancestor of Greek-Armenian, Indo-Iranian, Albanian and possibly also Celtic. These languages share a series of innovations which includes the 'wheel' lexicon Jörg mentioned before. Of course, the rest of the IE languages spoken in Europe (thus excluding Tocharian and Anatolian) became "Ponticized" in a variable degree.
WeepingElf wrote: What regards related languages that split off earlier, they probably existed, but most of them died out later, though some are probably still spoken, only not yet recognized as being related to IE by current mainstream scholars. There are several hypotheses under discussion; Uralic is the most likely candidate.
The closest relatives of "Pontic" (i.e. PIE) belong to what Jörg's calls the "Europic" group, like "Hesperic", formerly spoken in parts of Western and Central Europe. For example, *abol- 'apple' would be a typical Hesperic word, corresponding to Pontic *amel- (Sanskrit āmra- 'mango tree', Greek ámpelos '(grape)vine', Gaulish amella 'honeysuckle') and Hittite samalu- 'apple'. This is a compound of *za- (NWC ž́ʷǝ 'apple') and *meH2lo- 'apple', with *z- regularly disappearing except in Anatolian.
WeepingElf wrote:There are several theories around. Theo Vennemann assumes that most of western Europe was occupied by languages related to Basque, but his arguments in favour of his "Vasconic" hypothesis so far have failed to convince most scholars.
I'm affraid Vennemann's theory is rubbish. He reverses the directions of early IE loanwords into Basque and then he claims these words come from a "Vasconic" substrate.

But his "Atlantidic" theory, namely that an Afrasian language closely related to Semitic was once spoken in parts of Western Europe, specially the Atlantic fringe (hence its name) makes much more sense. For example, *kapro- 'he-goat' (Greek kápros 'boar', Latin caper 'he-goat', Celtic *gabro- 'goat'), a substrate loanword often considered to be a PIE word, is related to Semitic *ɣupr-/*ʕupr- 'young of deer', with Celtic voiced velar *g reflecting Semitic *ɣ/*ʕ.

Shm Jay
Avisaru
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Shm Jay »

Uh-oh, let’s hope it’s not another Octaviano.

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