European languages before Indo-European

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by WeepingElf »

I admit that PIE *kwekwwlos 'wheel' uses a not very common way of derivation, but a fitting one - a wheel does not just turn, it turns and turns and turns and turns - and the pattern is not unique, either. I can think of at least one other word with zero grade in the root and e-grade in the reduplication syllable from the top of my head, namely *h1meh1msos 'meat'.

But let's take this discussion to the Great Proto-Indo-European Thread.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by marconatrix »

I've only been dipping into this thread now and again, so this might be old news. Anyway this article has just been brought to my attention and looks to be very relevant :

https://www.academia.edu/7041551/Non-In ... Hypothesis

So what do you all think?
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by KathTheDragon »

I can't get the PDF, cos Academia.edu

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by marconatrix »

KathTheDragon wrote:I can't get the PDF, cos Academia.edu
I'll see if I can attach it here ...

... but I get "the extension pdf is not allowed".

The file seems to consist of page images which are quite readable but not good enough for my software to scan and convert to text.

But I don't see your problem, IIRC I never registered and certainly didn't pay Academia anything. The link should give you a 'preview' which is actually the full text of the paper, with a download option.

EDIT : I see now that I did register, but that only meant giving them an email address and password, and I do get notification of new uploads, which is how this came to my attention.

Also the author's deductions and conclusions are more general and more interesting than the title suggests.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by KathTheDragon »

Yeah, I got it now.

Edit: So, I've read it now, and it all looks plausible.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by jal »

Another interesting article about neolithic bronze age migration, this time to Ireland. BBC article here, Guardian article here.

EDIT: The Guardian article links to another interesting one on genetics and population in the UK.
EDIT2: And another one.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Salmoneus »

Yes, this one continues to push back against the modern "there wasn't a big war or anything, people were just inspired by their neighbour's wonderful pottery" theory. It reports massive immigration into Ireland in the neolithic, followed by near-total replacement of the population in the bronze age (to the extent that they think the neolithic remnant elements in the BA samples are more likely to be german, from before the migration to ireland, than native irish).

In terms of the Bronze Age, the population appears to be basically modern Irish (complete with our famous haemochromatosis); the problem is, they were in Ireland by 2000BC. While I can imagine proto-celtic deriving from PIE by then, it seems implausible that the modern celtic languages would have separated so little in 4000 years, so presumably this Irish population must have been pre-Celtic. And it's unlikely that Ireland would have been the birthplace of proto-proto-Celtic, so we're talking a non-Celtic, pre-Celtic population. However, it was clearly steppe-derived.
[To put that another way: if these people were Celtic, that means we need to assume that either a) Irish, Welsh, Gaulish, Celtiberian etc were in place four thousand years ago, and that by AD 0 there had been at least two millennia of differentiation between these languages; or b) other Celtic languages are a result of a mass migration out of Ireland. The first seems improbable, and the second seems extremely implausible.]

This raises two possibilities: a non-IE steppe language that invaded Europe alongside, or prior to, PIE; or a non-Celtic branche of PIE that swept across Europe before the Celts got there.

Bringing in archaeology, we know that these BA Irishmen were Bell Beaker People, or had at least adopted their culture (and if we're saying that both a cultural and a genetic change had just happened, it seems easiest to assume they happened in one go, i.e. the culture came with the migrants). So the Beakerfolk (at least, by the time they reached Ireland) were either an early branch of IE, or something else. The obvious candidate for 'something else' is Basque, in which case Vasconic would have been another steppe-horse language out of the east, that just happened to get drowned out by its neighbouring ally, PIE. This would suggest a PIE-Vasconic family, though wouldn't require it (two different pastoralist groups could live side-by-side on the steppe with totally different languages - the Hungarians, for instance, presumably lived as steppe pastoralists alongside Turks, and various Turkic groups have lived closely alongside Mongols. Though we might perhaps expect to see more similarity between the languages, if this is the case - even if not genetic, at least areal similarities.

Ockham's Razor suggests the Beakerfolk in Ireland were probably IE-speakers, of an unknown early branch, perhaps or perhaps not a cousin of Italo-Celtic (perhaps Lusitanian is a parallel here - similar things have been suggested for it). This is more plausible than positing a second, unattested steppe family with the same genes as the PIE - especially if we take things like R1b as evidence for the Basques having a big Beakerfolk influx, as that would mean the Basques would have to accept genes from, but not language from, two invading groups in a row.

[Alternatively, re Basque: we could still see the Beakerfolk as Vasconic in origin in Iberia, but with the culture (and perhaps language!) adopted by incoming Yamna in the north - but this seems overly complex as a default assumption, given the total lack of evidence, and the probable connection of the Basque R1b with the steppe]

It's worth pointing out that the Basque and the modern celts, other than their R1b, don't look particularly closely related. The Celts are much more steppey. So I think the parsimonious model is still that PIE Beakerfolk became the modern Irish, the celts invaded and brought their language at some point but didn't massively change the genetics (the beakerfolk being their cousins already), and meanwhile the Beakerfolk and/or celts were bringing some R1b bloodlines into the Basque. Since R1b is paternal, that's not hard to imagine - some horselords conquer the place and have lots of sons, but the culture remains largely unchanged.


----

Turning to the Neolithic, we see that the Farmers reached Ireland. Specifically, the strongest connexions are to the Cardians, via Spain, rather than with the LBK from Germany. The paper links the Cardians with passage tomb culture spreading from Spain to Scandinavia, and notes the similarity of the Irish sample with one sample of Funnelbeaker in Scandinavia - apparently Funnelbeakers are mostly considered LBK-related, but the sample in question was from a megalithic tomb. Of course this could just be general mixing, but it raises the question whether perhaps the Cardian-derived passage grave culture might in some places have been a ruling class over LBKs?

This all looks like bad news for Basque. We knew that the Irish looked like everyone else, but now we know that this was true even in the neolithic. If the Cardians reached Ireland, and via the coast as well, it makes the chances of a mesolithic hold-out on the atlantic coast seem much smaller, I think. Of course, genes don't determine language - but big genetic changes do at least make language change more likely. On balance, I think the most likely option now is that the Basque linguistically represent a cardial-ware/passage-grave remnant, rather than a palaeo/mesolithic one.

----

The Irish mesolithic genes in the neolithic sample, incidentally, look pure western, without scandinavian or eastern HG contributions, which makes sense - as the ice retreated, the British Isles would probably have been settled in one movement. Apparently these WHG genes look closer to genes from Luxembourg (which are also related to those in Germany, Denmark, switzerland, etc) rather than those from spain or france.


-----

Just for fun: as you probably know, Irish legend reports six invasions of Ireland. First Cessair and her people came, but they had only three men so they died out quickly and there was no-one left on the island. Then Partholon came, defeated the Fomorians, and died in a famine so there was noone left on the island. Then Nemed came and defeated the Fomorians, but then his people were enslaved by the Fomorians and destroyed and the survivors scattered. The remainder went to Britain, Greece, and the North. The Greek lot came back as the Fir Bolg. Then the Tuatha Dé Danann came back out of the North, exiled the Fir Bolg to Connaught, and defeated the Fomorians. Then the Milesians came out of Spain, defeated the Tuatha Dé and exiled them to the underworld.

If we now have to talk about Mesolithic, Neolithic, Beakerfolk and Celtic waves, we're coming close to the six! [The older accounts only have three settlings - those of Partholon, the Tuatha Dé, and the Gaels]

In fact, we can probably add an additional neolithic wave - features like chambered cairns and grooved ware probably came from northern scotland. The tombs were later associated with the Tuatha Dé - in their post-exile, underworld incarnation they are known as the People of the Mounds. And it's hard not to want to associate the Tuatha Dé, who came out of the northern islands of the earth and were cousins of the Fir Bolg, with the grooved ware people who came from the orkneys via the hebrides and were cousins of the native neolithic population...

There seems to have been some awe around the tombs all along: the Beakerfolk were a less dense population than the Neolithics (whose population seems to have crashed), and seem to have squatted around the edges of old Neolithic settlements and tombs. And we can add a sixth wave if we postulate that the Gaels did indeed, as all the legends say, arrive by sea from Iberia, presumably replacing a Brythonic population.

[If you're really keen on myth, you can link the Fir Bolg - a seaborne population from the periphery of Greece - with the Sea Peoples...]
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by WeepingElf »

Thank you for your long and interesting post, Salmoneus. I have been wondering about the origin of the Bell Beaker people for long, and I haven't reached a result yet. Some scholars say they came from Central Europe, in which case they may have been descendants of LBK. Others, however, see their origin in the Iberian peninsula, and there are apparently C14 datings that corroborate that. Some scholars combine these two hypotheses into one: they spread first from Central Europe, and than a second wave flew back from the Iberian peninsula.

At any rate, the geographical distribution of the Bell Beaker horizon is very similar to that of the Old European Hydronymy, which looks like a sister group of IE, diverging from IE proper before the rise of ablaut in the latter (i.e., even earlier than Anatolian), and preserving the three-vowel system (*/a i u/, of which */a/ was the most frequent) that can be internally reconstructed for Pre-PIE. But that is of course uncertain; Vennemann considers those old river names Vasconic.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Salmoneus »

To be honest, I don't see any actual evidence that there was any sort of 'old european hydronomy' in the first place. The fact that virtually no actual linguists have noticed this supposed language is not a good sign - sure, Venneman believed in it, but then he was also a total crackpot who thought that the british spoke an afro-asiatic language. So far as I can see, the only actual 'evidence' appears to be a handful of syllables that, if you look hard, you can find in a handful of different placenames - I'd have thought that would be true no matter what syllable you chose. Those that may be valid are probably just Celtic.

Let's be honest here, in the world of Old European Hydronomy, it seems that you are one of the world's most prominent and serious experts. Or at least, it's hard to find anybody else in the world talking about it - if I were in your position, that would make be start to question my theory, if nobody else wanted to join in!
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Salmoneus wrote:To be honest, I don't see any actual evidence that there was any sort of 'old european hydronomy' in the first place. The fact that virtually no actual linguists have noticed this supposed language is not a good sign - sure, Venneman believed in it, but then he was also a total crackpot who thought that the british spoke an afro-asiatic language. So far as I can see, the only actual 'evidence' appears to be a handful of syllables that, if you look hard, you can find in a handful of different placenames - I'd have thought that would be true no matter what syllable you chose. Those that may be valid are probably just Celtic.

Let's be honest here, in the world of Old European Hydronomy, it seems that you are one of the world's most prominent and serious experts. Or at least, it's hard to find anybody else in the world talking about it - if I were in your position, that would make be start to question my theory, if nobody else wanted to join in!
Actually, the Old European Hydronymy was "discovered" by Hans Krahe, a German Indo-Europeanist, who considered it to be from an IE language ancestral to Italic, Celtic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic. And it may very well be a mirage. I am planning to draw maps of it, in order to find patterns. But I wouldn't call Vennemann a "total crackpot", even though I disagree with him.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by hwhatting »

@Sal - the OEH is standard textbook matter in German IEanistics, so "no actual linguists have noticed this supposed language" isn't doing it justice.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Salmoneus »

hwhatting wrote:@Sal - the OEH is standard textbook matter in German IEanistics, so "no actual linguists have noticed this supposed language" isn't doing it justice.
Well, I said virtually no linguists. I've only been able to find Krahe (whose theory that it was an ancestral IE language was quickly discarded), Venneman (whose theory that it was Basque was generally derided, and whose methodology was suspect in the extreme), a Spanish linguist I've not been able to find anything else about, and WE themselves. I didn't realise that Germans in general believed in it - if so, I'm surprised there's not anything available about it online in English. I've found a few seemingly random lists of placenames (you know the sort: suspiciously specific meaning linked to suspiciously broad and generous interpretations of the phonemes involved), but nothing that looked like it ought to be taken seriously.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by WeepingElf »

Salmoneus wrote:
hwhatting wrote:@Sal - the OEH is standard textbook matter in German IEanistics, so "no actual linguists have noticed this supposed language" isn't doing it justice.
Well, I said virtually no linguists. I've only been able to find Krahe (whose theory that it was an ancestral IE language was quickly discarded), Venneman (whose theory that it was Basque was generally derided, and whose methodology was suspect in the extreme), a Spanish linguist I've not been able to find anything else about, and WE themselves. I didn't realise that Germans in general believed in it - if so, I'm surprised there's not anything available about it online in English. I've found a few seemingly random lists of placenames (you know the sort: suspiciously specific meaning linked to suspiciously broad and generous interpretations of the phonemes involved), but nothing that looked like it ought to be taken seriously.
I understand your concerns about the OEH. IMHO Krahe was wrong, because if he was right, the names would have shown the same phonological developments as the languages in general; but especially the vowels are weird, with /a/ all over the place. IMHO Vennemann was wrong, too, for the reasons you stated, and a map of the OEH distribution from one of Vennemann's own articles shows a gap exactly where Basque and Aquitanian are known to have been spoken in antiquity, which is obviously not what to expect if the names were Vasconic.

The OEH may not even be real. Given enough data, you can always find patterns that are in fact random and meaningless (see the infamous "Bible Code" for an example; "ley lines" probably are another case). The problem is that the original meanings of these names are unknown, and that there are probably many other names with obscure origins that did not make it onto Krahe's list because they did not seem to fit.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Maybe someone should compile a list of names forming Even Older European Hydronymy, i.e. names that are old and obscure but didn't make it to the OEH.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by jal »

The biggest problem I'd have with such a theory (the OEH), is that I don't think anything so old can survive recognizably (or derivably), especially given all the different languages spoken over that area.


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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by hwhatting »

Salmoneus wrote: I didn't realise that Germans in general believed in it - if so, I'm surprised there's not anything available about it online in English.
That's probably because a lot of linguistics - especially onomastics and historical linguistics - in Germany is still done in German. Some examples:
A Slavicist writing about OEH in the Slavic language areas: http://www.prof-udolph.com/forschung/be ... namen.html
Another well-known IEanist writing about the OEH was W. P. Schmid: https://books.google.de/books?id=Gnzzwf ... ie&f=false
An IEanist treating the OEH as Indo-European (from 2012, so relatively new): http://www.indogermanistik.uni-jena.de/ ... .ALL66.pdf
Here he notes that not a lot has been done on the OEH in the last 20-30 years (p. 12):
https://www.academia.edu/5696156/Zum_sp ... ne_Polemik
That's exactly the period when even German IEanists started to publish more in English. So part of the issue is that the OEH made it into the textbooks in Germany, but then, while it was being taken for granted in e.g. German onomastics when discussing hydronymy, not much IEanist work was done on it after Schmid.

Another thing: while in the German tradition, the existence of the OEH in itself (as combinations of certain roots and suffixes in names of bodies of water showing up in big parts of Europe) is taken for granted, its interpretation varies (remnant of pre-IE languages, PIE, some European subset of IE languages).

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by KathTheDragon »

Now, wouldn't it be helpful if I could read German...

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by hwhatting »

KathTheDragon wrote:Now, wouldn't it be helpful if I could read German...
Well, that was part of my point - the OEH lives in a German-speaking linguistic ghetto because almost the only people working on it nowadays are people doing German onomastics in German.
That said, learning German is always a good idea and very rewarding in itself. :-)

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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hwhatting wrote:That said, learning German is always a good idea and very rewarding in itself. :-)
Says the German.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by hwhatting »

Matrix wrote:
hwhatting wrote:That said, learning German is always a good idea and very rewarding in itself. :-)
Says the German.
Don't take my word for it, try it and you'll see! ;-)

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by jal »

Matrix wrote:
hwhatting wrote:That said, learning German is always a good idea and very rewarding in itself. :-)
Says the German.
To his defense, to learn German when growing up in Germany with German-speaking parents is a good idea and rewarding :). (I'll leave it to others to discuss the rewards when not being German :))


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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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jal wrote: (I'll leave it to others to discuss the rewards when not being German :))
As you probably know, the Dutch are using German to dominate GermanTV shows and retiree entertainment... shitloads of money await!

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by KathTheDragon »

Ha, I'm already trying to learn German (I'm just not very good at being consistent)

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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hwhatting wrote:
jal wrote: (I'll leave it to others to discuss the rewards when not being German :))
As you probably know, the Dutch are using German to dominate GermanTV shows and retiree entertainment... shitloads of money await!
Haha, this is getting terribly off-topic, so I'll just note that two of those are dead, and that you forgot die Sylvie!


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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Richard W »

KathTheDragon wrote:Now, wouldn't it be helpful if I could read German...
Indeed, it used to be mandatory for serious IE work.

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