European languages before Indo-European

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Salmoneus »

Richard W wrote:
KathTheDragon wrote:Now, wouldn't it be helpful if I could read German...
Indeed, it used to be mandatory for serious IE work.
Apologies for disappointing you; but you may note this is not the "serious IE work" forum, this is the conlangers and conworlders and their random side-interests forum.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by hwhatting »

Salmoneus wrote:
Richard W wrote:
KathTheDragon wrote:Now, wouldn't it be helpful if I could read German...
Indeed, it used to be mandatory for serious IE work.
Apologies for disappointing you; but you may note this is not the "serious IE work" forum, this is the conlangers and conworlders and their random side-interests forum.
Granted. But it still means that reading only in English can leave you seriously missing out (or at least with a very skewed overview) about ongoing topics and discussions in IE linguistics, to a much higher degree than in other fields (e.g. the natural sciences or economics).

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Matrix wrote:
hwhatting wrote:That said, learning German is always a good idea and very rewarding in itself. :-)
Says the German.
Is German a real language tho? I thought it's just English pronounced with a strong Nazi accent? :/
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Nein, Englisch ist nur Deutsch von einem Normanne mit vorgestülpte Lippen ausgesprochen.

No, English is just German pronounced by a Norman with pursed lips.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Müsst Ihr Eure Albernheiten über die deutsche Sprache ausgerechnet hier veranstalten?

Do you have to enact your sillinesses about the German language here in all places?
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by TaylorS »

Salmoneus wrote: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).
It's so nice when my own conjectures are corraborated. :-D

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Which language(s) the Beaker Folk probably spoke of course also depends on where they came from, a question on which there is no consensus yet. Some scholars assume that they came from the Iberian peninsula, others that they came from Central Europe. Perhaps a combination of both - a Central European origin and a back-migration, perhaps after acquiring metallurgy, from the Iberian peninsula. If the Beaker Folk originated in Central Europe, a relationship between their languages and IE seems plausible (but in no way certain), if they originated in the Iberian peninsula, less so.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Salmoneus »

WeepingElf wrote:Which language(s) the Beaker Folk probably spoke of course also depends on where they came from, a question on which there is no consensus yet. Some scholars assume that they came from the Iberian peninsula, others that they came from Central Europe. Perhaps a combination of both - a Central European origin and a back-migration, perhaps after acquiring metallurgy, from the Iberian peninsula. If the Beaker Folk originated in Central Europe, a relationship between their languages and IE seems plausible (but in no way certain), if they originated in the Iberian peninsula, less so.
The Beakerfolk in Ireland and central europe definitely came from the steppe. They look exactly like PIEs, and pretty much like modern europeans. The only notable difference are the R1b linneages (shared with Yamna, but not with Corded Ware). I don't think we have iberian beakerfolk samples yet, so it's possible their culture just peacefully spread to the invading indo-europeans...

Intriguingly, the R1a in Indo-Iranian populations goes along with

-----

How about a Grand Unified Theory?

- at some point, caucasian and eastern hunter gather peoples mingled on the steppe and created an agro-pastoralist society. We should probably associate this with Sredny Stog or a similar pontic culture, although it also works if we think of this happening further east, in Sogdia say. [These people were mostly R1b, but also had R1a linneages)

- some of those people came west; some didn't. Those who didn't became the Yamnaya - the reason they look genetically more like the originators is that in a less populated area their genes were less diluted. Those who went west, on the other hand, began to take in neolithic european genes.

- through this expansion, these Kurgans came to rule an area from the urals to the atlantic. But rather than a big empire, there were probably many different groups floating around, migrating backward and forward for a while, like the way the germanic tribes confusedly invaded Rome.

- in the west, two Kurgan civilisations developed, merging their natural advantages (horses, more developed livestock practices, probably a large-scale military structure) with the developments of the local agricultural populations (more developed pottery, probably more developed masonry and fortifications, in some places marine technology). These were the Beakerfolk in the far west and Corded Ware in the centre. Yamna was thus the third in a row of three sister cultures, the most genetically and culturally 'pure' of the three.

- The Yamna and the Beakerfolk both retain the dominant R1b of their ancestors. However, due to a quirk in the elite families that give rise to Corded Ware, combined with founder effects (all these populations are small and fairly inbred), Corded Ware happens to end up R1a.

- Here's the twist: Proto-Indo-European is the language of the Corded Ware Culture (or the preceding Globular Amphorae Culture). The Kurgans instead spoke what we might call Atlanto-Hittite. West of the Rhine they speak one of a family of Atlantic languages, cousins of PIE.

- Other non-PIE Atlanto-Hittite languages are spoken in the Yamna culture, and perhaps on the periphery of Corded Ware - eg in the Danubian basin

- A group of PIEs gather at the eastern edge of Corded Ware, and develop satemisation. A branch of these people then take their european technologies and re-invade the steppe, not stopping until they conquer the BMACs

- the Tocharians and the Afanasievo can be interpreted either as the easternmost PIE group and the first to go east, or else as a Yamna group outside PIE proper

- Around 2000BC, Anatolians, another non-PIE branch of AH, move into Anatolia. We don't know where from - they could be Yamna, they could be over the caucasus or from the east, or they could just come from Europe. Let's say Europe, that's neater: if Corded Ware is PIE proper, Anatolian could be spoken in the Danube or the like. They move south into both Anatolia and Greece, causing all the trouble there, but they're followed closely by the Greeks, who take over Greece. Perhaps this disruption forces a group from around here to sail west and found Etruria? [On the other hand, the I haplotypes in central Italy and peaking in croatia look like Neolithic Farmer linneages, so the Etruscans could be descendents of the Cardials?] The Greeks don't fully replace the genes of the people they conquer in Greece - it's an elite movement rather than a general population shift as elsewhere.

- a thousand years later, the bronze age collapses. Taking advantage of the chaos, western PIE-ers, particularly Celts, expand into Atlantic and pre-AH areas. They eliminate the Atlantic languages as a result (though these may linger on into the early historical period in Iberia as some or all of the paleaohispanic languages). However, since the underlying cultures are similar, the invaders don't totally overturn the local populations - R1b linneages remain most common - and since both populations are Kurgans there's no really noticeable change in the genes.

- meanwhile, if you believe in Indo-Uralic, the Yamna might speak Uralic. Alternatively, and more likely I think, the Uralics (whether IU or not) get their 'IE' loanwords from the Yamna languages, not necessarily from 'PIE proper'.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Nice and interesting post, Salmoneus, and quite close to what I think of the matters. The OEH, as I said earlier, looks as if it was from a sister language of PIE that branched off before the rise of ablaut, and its geographical distribution is very similar to that of the Beaker culture.

I used to entertain the notion that "Macro-IE" originated in what is now the Bay of Odessa, and was spread out across Central Europe, the Lower Danube and the Pontic steppe when the Black Sea Flood hit home, but it is not certain that this flood actually happened.

Etruscan is definitely farther removed from Narrow IE than Anatolian; while Anatolian is clearly related to Narrow IE, this is far from certain for Etruscan. There are hardly any lexical cognate candidates, and only a few bits of morphology that seem to match their IE counterparts - and their interpretation is still controversial (I have seen at least three different case systems reconstructed for Etruscan!). Indeed, Etruscan seems to be even farther from IE than Uralic.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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WeepingElf wrote:Nice and interesting post, Salmoneus, and quite close to what I think of the matters. The OEH, as I said earlier, looks as if it was from a sister language of PIE that branched off before the rise of ablaut, and its geographical distribution is very similar to that of the Beaker culture.
I have recently grown more and more doubt about a BB/OEH connection. The ranges are similar only when one generalizes the many gaps in BB away; and then, the similarity in the ranges is mostly due to the fact that most of the boundary are sea shores such that the correlation is trivial. But we need an atlas of the OEH in order to say anything on this; such an atlas is definitely in my pipeline, but don't hold your breath on that!

After reading a volume about the Bell Beaker culture, it seems to me that this is not really a "culture" in the sense that LBK or La Tène represent the material cultural expressions of an autochthonous population. Rather, it seems that the Bell Beaker people were a kind of diaspora. Regarding the association of BB with some production sites of commodities such as flint, copper or salt, and the fact that they travelled a lot (many BB skeletons have strontium isotope signatures that show that they grew up far from where they were interred), they probably were merchants. If they were a diaspora, their language would have left as many traces in the hydronymy of western and central Europe as Yiddish or Romani did in that of eastern Europe: virtually none.

Also, C14 datings seem to show that they came from the Iberian peninsula, because there the oldest finds (ca. 2800 BC) were encountered. But if they are, as Sal says, genetically "from the steppe", this would mean a kind of back flow from a population that earlier came from the east. So Proto-BB would be a branch of a family that swept across Europe (though probably leaving patches of earlier languages, especially in mountainous and other areas poorly suited to Neolithic agriculture) from the east before. That would probably have been in the Neolithic.

I still think that BB was too early to have been Celtic - the Roman-era Celtic inscriptions show a dialect continuum too homogenous to be 3000 years old, and "Celtic from the West" is IMHO balderdash. They may have spoken a variety of Aquan (my term for the hypothetical OEH language family), which I suspect to be a sister group (not a daughter) of Indo-European.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Salmoneus wrote:- Around 2000BC, Anatolians, another non-PIE branch of AH, move into Anatolia. We don't know where from - they could be Yamna, they could be over the caucasus or from the east, or they could just come from Europe. Let's say Europe, that's neater: if Corded Ware is PIE proper, Anatolian could be spoken in the Danube or the like. They move south into both Anatolia and Greece, causing all the trouble there, but they're followed closely by the Greeks, who take over Greece.
This particular model leads to the interesting prediction that the pre-Greek substrate was probably Anatolian in the first hand, and we should probably be able to find Anatolian loanwords in there in particular (amidst substrate words that survived also from the pre-Anatolian languages).
Salmoneus wrote:Alternatively, and more likely I think, the Uralics (whether IU or not) get their 'IE' loanwords from the Yamna languages, not necessarily from 'PIE proper'.
Not impossible. But then again, even among the "old" stock, the majority are from (pre-)Indo-Iranian, (pre-)Balto-Slavic or (pre-)Germanic (in descending order of importance).
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Tropylium wrote:This particular model leads to the interesting prediction that the pre-Greek substrate was probably Anatolian in the first hand, and we should probably be able to find Anatolian loanwords in there in particular (amidst substrate words that survived also from the pre-Anatolian languages).
A friend of mine recently linked me to a paper that was apparently arguing that the pre-Greek settlers in Greece did indeed speak an Anatolian language.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Do you have this link?

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Tropylium wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:- Around 2000BC, Anatolians, another non-PIE branch of AH, move into Anatolia. We don't know where from - they could be Yamna, they could be over the caucasus or from the east, or they could just come from Europe. Let's say Europe, that's neater: if Corded Ware is PIE proper, Anatolian could be spoken in the Danube or the like. They move south into both Anatolia and Greece, causing all the trouble there, but they're followed closely by the Greeks, who take over Greece.
This particular model leads to the interesting prediction that the pre-Greek substrate was probably Anatolian in the first hand, and we should probably be able to find Anatolian loanwords in there in particular (amidst substrate words that survived also from the pre-Anatolian languages).
Fine. I think Cyril Babayev speculated about the pre-Greek substratum having been an IE language with Armenian-like reflexes of the stops (i.e. *T > *Th, *D > *T, *Dh > *D). This could have been a "Para-Anatolian" language, i.e. one more closely related to Anatolian than to Narrow IE, especially since it is more likely that Anatolian got to Anatolia via the Balkan peninsula than across the Caucasus. One would indeed expect Anatolian loanwords in Greek in such a scenario. I think Babayev had a list on his web site - which is AFAIK gone long ago.

This, however, does not preclude an even earlier layer related to whatever in that region. We have Lemnian, which is clearly related to Etruscan and thus non-IE. We have fragments of Eteocretan and Eteocypriot, about which we can hardly say anything, but they don't look IE either. Minoan still awaits decipherment. I fancy that Proto-Tyrrhenian (i.e., the common ancestor of Etruscan, Rhaetic and Lemnian) was spoken in Troy and its environs (the foundation myth of Rome, which was ruled by an Etruscan aristocracy before the establishment of the Republic, may preserve memory of a Trojan origin of the Etruscans), but that's merely speculation as long as we don't have written records of that language (a few seals were found in Troy, and they are in Luwian, which may have been a lingua franca in this region).

There are speculations about Etruscan being distantly related to IE (Woudhuizen's idea that it was an Anatolian language has very little merit, though), but it doesn't seem closer than Uralic, and the same few morphemes that seem to match IE morphemes are also found in Kartvelian, which is perhaps a better candidate for the closest living kin of Tyrrhenian, especially if the latter originates in Asia Minor. Alas, Etruscan morphology is not very well understood, given that I have seen at least three different case systems in reasonably serious scholarly publications about Etruscan (for instance, the English and German Wikipedias disagree)!
Tropylium wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:Alternatively, and more likely I think, the Uralics (whether IU or not) get their 'IE' loanwords from the Yamna languages, not necessarily from 'PIE proper'.
Not impossible. But then again, even among the "old" stock, the majority are from (pre-)Indo-Iranian, (pre-)Balto-Slavic or (pre-)Germanic (in descending order of importance).
Yes. Most IE lookalikes in Uralic vocabulary show developments characteristic of one of these three branches of IE and are thus loanwords. Some "cognates" are analysable within IE (e.g., PIE *h1neh3mn 'name', which is often compared to PU *nimi, is hardly one morpheme, but seems to contain the well-known suffix *-men ~ *-mn, such that the root would be *h1neh3-, probably meaning something like 'to call'). Lexical cognate candidates without such hints at being loanwords in Uralic are rare; the Indo-Uralic hypothesis so far mainly rests on inflectional morphology.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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KathTheDragon wrote:Do you have this link?
Yes, although I can't access it myself (yet). :D

https://www.academia.edu/21280539/Anato ... _to_Greece?

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Vijay wrote:
KathTheDragon wrote:Do you have this link?
Yes, although I can't access it myself (yet). :D
https://www.mediafire.com/?uh25dm3960mky5v

Looks promising so far:
Margalit Finkelberg in 1997 wrote:Let us now make a fresh start by posing the following question: how do the Indo-European languages that formed the so-called "pre-Hellenic substratum" relate to Greek and other "conventional" Indo-European languages?
She doesn't seem to uncover much explicit evidence for an Anatolian affinity, but clearly the discussion is out there.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Thanks! :)
She doesn't seem to uncover much explicit evidence for an Anatolian affinity, but clearly the discussion is out there.
Yeah, it sounded like interesting stuff!

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Tropylium wrote:
Vijay wrote:
KathTheDragon wrote:Do you have this link?
Yes, although I can't access it myself (yet). :D
https://www.mediafire.com/?uh25dm3960mky5v

Looks promising so far:
Margalit Finkelberg in 1997 wrote:Let us now make a fresh start by posing the following question: how do the Indo-European languages that formed the so-called "pre-Hellenic substratum" relate to Greek and other "conventional" Indo-European languages?
She doesn't seem to uncover much explicit evidence for an Anatolian affinity, but clearly the discussion is out there.
Thank you! This looks interesting.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Speaking of Etruscan, I've always found the distribution of Etruscan, Rhaetic and Lemnian to be pretty odd. A migration from the east does seem most plausible given Lemnian and the evidence of diffusion between Anatolian and Etruscan, but it seems strange that they would end up in Northern Italy and the Alps without leaving much evidence in between.

Not directly related to the topic of the thread, but An Indo-European Linguistic Area: Ancient Anatolia by Calvert Watkins has some evidence of diffusion between Anatolian and Greek, including a word for "wine" derived from PIE *medhu which means "sweet" or "honey" in other IE languages. Interestingly, Etruscan borrowed this word from Luvian; "wine" is matu in both languages.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by WeepingElf »

8Deer wrote:Speaking of Etruscan, I've always found the distribution of Etruscan, Rhaetic and Lemnian to be pretty odd. A migration from the east does seem most plausible given Lemnian and the evidence of diffusion between Anatolian and Etruscan, but it seems strange that they would end up in Northern Italy and the Alps without leaving much evidence in between.
Egyptian chronicles mention the Trš as one of the "Sea Peoples"; this could have been the Tyrrhenians. Perhaps there were Tyrrhenian settlements on the Greek mainland, but they would have been assimilated by the Greeks. The name Trš is also reminiscent of Troas, the anicent name of the area around Troy.
Not directly related to the topic of the thread, but An Indo-European Linguistic Area: Ancient Anatolia by Calvert Watkins has some evidence of diffusion between Anatolian and Greek, including a word for "wine" derived from PIE *medhu which means "sweet" or "honey" in other IE languages. Interestingly, Etruscan borrowed this word from Luvian; "wine" is matu in both languages.
Luvian borrowings in Etruscan are to be expected when Proto-Tyrrhenian was spoken in Troy! Whatever language the Trojans spoke was certainly in contact with Luvian which functioned as a lingua franca in Late Bronze Age western Anatolia. On the other hand, if Etruscan was native to Italy, Luvian borrowings are hard to explain, so these are good evidence in favour of a western Asia Minor origin of Tyrrhenian.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Salmoneus »

Is there any reason to think the Trojans were Etruscan? Even if you think Etruscan came from that region, there seems no reason to specify Troy.
For one thing, since the Greeks were happy fingering the Lemnians and Imbrians as weirdos, you'd have thought they might have mentioned if they were Trojan. Instead, they gave them an entirely different origin.

But I think west-east makes more sense. There are apparently some people who have suggested that the Etruscans came from across the Adriatic, but only from as far away as Dalmatia. Dalmatia would indeed be a very believable place for a pre-IE language family to find refuge. A move from Dalmatia to Italy to the Alps seems rather less peculiar than one from Anatolia to Italy to the Alps - indeed, if Dalmatia is the origin, you could even allow two different migrations, one to form Etruscan and one to form Rhaetic, if indeed those languages are more divergent. The Tyrrhenian presence in the Aegean would then be a secondary, maritime expansion - not implausible, since the northern Adriatic has a history of maritime proficiency (think the Liburnians, Paganians, Venetians...), particularly appealing if Lemnian is indeed closer to Etruscan than Raetic is. And it seems to make more sense to suggest that a race of semi-civilised Adriatic pirates might migrate into the prosperous Aegean/Anatolian sphere, than that a race of sophisticated Anatolians would take to their boats, sail west into the darkness, land in barbarous Italy, set up a new civilisation, and then migrate again up into the Alps. That narrative just isn't as understandable to me!

The east-to-west hypothesis also has the problem of crowding. Imagine the poor Etruscans sitting in Troy and surrounding areas. The Anatalians sweep through their lands from the Balkans; perhaps the Armenians come through as a second wave. Greeks flood in later on. The Phrygians march through. Thracian bands roam. Minoans occupy the sea, at least for a while. Putting them in Troy is basically putting a chicken in the middle lane of a motorway...

Whereas the other scenario has: they hang around in Dalmatia, while the Italics populate Italy; they spread across the Adriatic and populate northern Italy, pushing up into the Alps; at some point, with chaos having fallen on the east, some of their merchants go east and settle on some unhinhabited islands there; the Celts come south (and Illyrians come west) and take away much of their lands, isolating them in Tuscany.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by jal »

Salmoneus wrote:But I think west-east makes more sense.
This. I think I mentioned the hypothesis somewhere above (purely based on Lemnian being closer to Etruscan than Rhaetian), but Sal's hypothesis has some other convincing ideas to back it up. That said, if we can come up with such aa hypothesis, surely the established linguists must've posed something like this?


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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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jal wrote:That said, if we can come up with such aa hypothesis, surely the established linguists must've posed something like this?
Sure. One of them is Heiner Eichner, whose interpretation of the Lemnos stele I mentioned in this very thread.
To be precise, he comes to the conclusion that the Lemnian speakers came from Italy; I don't remember whether he excludes an Anatolian origin or whether he sees it as a back-migration.
Here is a relatively recent overview article on the various Etruscan origin theories, including on the claim published a few years ago that Etruscan cattle came from Anatolia.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by jal »

hwhatting wrote:Here is a relatively recent overview article on the various Etruscan origin theories, including on the claim published a few years ago that Etruscan cattle came from Anatolia.
Thanks, interesting read. It'd be swell if the research mentioned here was continued/repeated, as DNA sequencing is so much more advanced than 10-15 years ago.


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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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Replying here on Salmoneus's and Zaarin's posts in the Great Proto-Indo-European Thread:
Salmoneus wrote:
WeepingElf wrote: Fair. The Old European Hydronymy at least seems to point at a single large family spoken in most of Central and Western Europe before the spread of IE. As such homogeneity is unlikely to have existed in pre-Neolithic Europe, this probably was the Neolithic language family you are speaking of (I call it "Aquan", from the putative word for 'river' in that stock). Judging from the roots and suffixes those river names are made of, that family may have been related to IE, but branching off before the development of ablaut.
I know we've had this discussion before, but I still have some problems with this.

- The hydronomy would be persuasive if it were just one or two repeating names, or a bunch of names repeating very specifically. But instead it's a whole bunch of names repeating only vaguely, which makes it suspiciously easy to slot any name into one of them - particularly when you have literally thousands and thousands of placenames to go at, and only have to produce a list of dozens of correspondences. Krahe, for instance, connects Solja, Salotas, Saalach, Salanfe and Hayle as all being the same name; likewise, Aire, Eisack and Izarillo all apparently match one another.
Fair. The OEH may be nothing more than ley lines or the Bible Code: if you have enough data points, you can always find patterns - but those patterns are probably meaningless. This requires further investigation.
- if there is a real OEH, how could you judge that it was pre-ablaut IE? I mean, it's not as though you could reliably distinguish vowel sounds preserved over millennia and transferred between speakers of different languages at least once on the way. You'd pretty much expect everything to end up /a/. Even if the vowels are really representative of original /a/, it's not as though plenty of IE languages haven't moved a whole bunch of vowels to /a/. So simple IE (known branches, perhaps distorted by substrates and superstrates, or else unknown branches) seems a much safer guess. And far, far more parsimonious: we know there was one migration from the steppe, after the breakaway of anatolian, and it seems tendentious to suppose two migrations, one before and one after the breakup, when there is no direct evidence for that.
Sure, vowels are changeful little buggers, and the reconstruction with /a/ all over the place may be wrong. And as we don't really know what the names really meant, we don't even know that they are cognates of certain IE words.
- if it is a branch of pre-IE, it's presumably not the neolithic language. We know that the neolithic population migrated from the near east; we know that a horseback population later migrated from the steppe, who weren't closely related to the neolithics. We know from the language that the neolithics didn't bring PIE itself with them. So for a macro-IE neolithic europe, we need: neolithics speaking pre-macro-IE; one neolithic group is invaded by the kurgans; the kurgans learn the language of their new slave population, who they are rapidly exterminating; the kurgans then spread the slave language all across Europe, central asia and south asia. Alternatively, we would have to suggest a sort of protero-IE steppe invasion that conquers all of Europe but leaves no other trace, followed by, thousands of years later, the known deutero-IE steppe invasion that gives us the ablauting languages we know. It seems much more parsimonious just to assume that if 'Aquan' is real, and really macro-IE, it's a closely related language spoken by closely related steppe people who invaded as part of the same general wave of settlement as the known IE languages.
Yes, I am aware of the problem you are pointing out. I don't know what to make of them yet. Is an intermediate migration between Neolithization and Indo-Europeanization (which are clearly separate events, as you say) possible, and if yes, from where? I seem to have read somewhere that there is some evidence of such a migration around 5000 BC or so, but I am not sure.
- pushing back the dates also gives a big problem: the resemblances are almost too close to be real. Going back to sal-, Krahe points out that 'Seile' in northern Scotland and 'Seille' in eastern France (Switzerland?) look similar, and so do 'Sala' in Scandinavia and 'Salo' in Spain, and 'Salanza' in Switzerland and 'Salantas' in the Baltic. But hang on a moment! Within the attested historical record, many of these names have shown dramatic changes: Sayago, Jalon, Saa, Saumur, Saudre, Solk, Selz, etc. It seems implausible that these names would all hang around being more or less identical for three, four, five thousand years, and then suddenly dramatically mutate in the last few centuries as soon as we start actually looking at them! The further you push back the date of 'Aquan', the bigger this problem gets.
I see. Given the host of problems you are pointing out, it is perhaps best to abandon the idea, but then we have to say we know nothing.
But Basque is IMHO indeed a survival from the linguistic crazy quilt of Mesolithic Europe.
What's the evidence for this?
There are basically six different possible classifications for Basque, two of which we can discount:
- IE. It's not.
- a relative of IE that took part in the irruption. It's almost certainly not.
- another Steppe language, either distantly related to IE or not at all, but that hung around in the same general cultural milleau and invaded Europe at a similar time.
- another language that invaded Europe either at the beginning of the Bronze Age or at a similar time to the IE invasions.
- a language that invaded Europe during the Neolithic.
- a language that entered Europe in the Neolithic invasions.
- a Mesolithic language.

Even discounting the first two, the other four seem impossible to distinguish between. The steppe option would have the advantage of fitting in alongside their high levels of R1, which we know came from the steppe. There's no evidence of a major influx of new genes between the neolithic and kurgan invasions, but that doesn't necessarily rule out a small group coming in - perhaps up the Atlantic coast, or across the Med and then across Spain (it's easy to imagine the Minoan and/or Etruscan languages as later invaders across the Med, for instance). Alternatively, both time periods are associated with Big Things that a new group of people might be related to: the middle Neolithic population collapse (with a lot of killing and cannibalism*) and the development of bronzeworking respectively.

Assuming an older entrance, I don't think there can be any clear evidence of Neolithic vs Mesolithic. It's true that the Basques tilt Mesolithic rather than Neolithic genetically, so I might slightly lean toward the Mesolithic hypothesis, slightly. But that's not very convincing, because we already know that there's been massive genetic replacement: Basques are genetically basically the same as IE speakers, only with very slightly more Mesolithic in them. But we know that the mesolithics were never entirely wiped out by the neolithics, and even if neolithics conquered the basque region it wouldn't be a huge surprise if the local mesolithics survived to influence the genetics more than in other parts of Europe - after all, the existence of Basque shows that that the area can shelter holdouts...
Yes. While it seems plausible that Basque was a holdout from the pre-IE linguistic landscape of Europe, we can't be sure.
I'm also not convinced by the 'crazy quilt' idea. Again, Mesolithic Europe had only "recently" (IE-depth) been cleared of ice.
It is not that Upper Paleolithic Europe was entirely unpopulated! There have been human beings in it as far north as Ahrensburg, a northeastern suburb of Hamburg, which was only about 50 km from the edge of the Scandinavian ice sheet. So only the parts actually covered in ice were unpopulated.
While we could suppose the existence of distinct epigravettian populations in the italian and balkan refugia, most of the rest of Europe seems to have shared a single Magdalenian culture, associated with the retreat of the tundra and the domestication of the dog.
You should know that language families and cultural areas usually don't match; just look at indigenous North America.
Zaarin wrote:Where would non-Indo-European languages of the northern Mediterranean--like Etruscan, Rhaetian, Palaeoiberian, and Minoan--fit into this scheme, in your opinion? Migrants from the Near East? Holdouts from the Neolithic unrelated to the language stocks of Transalpine Europe? (I realize it would be helpful if we could actually read Minoan before attempting to classify it...)
There is evidence that Etruscan and Rhaetian have Aegean origins, perhaps from Troy. The Roman foundation myth has the founders of Rome hail from Troy, and we know that pre-Republican Rome was ruled by an Etruscan aristocracy. Iberian may be a holdout like Basque, it is even possible that the two languages were related. Minoan, well, Crete lies outside the range of the Old European Hydronymy; but we know very little about Minoan anyway as the Cretan hieroglyphic script is still undeciphered and Linear A only partially deciphered.
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