> early Greeks, and especially the Mycenaeans (c. 1750–1050 BCE), are associated with major advances in technology (including writing)
I’ve been doing a bit of reading on the Bronze Age Collapse recently. It was such an apocalyptic event that Greeks forgot how to write and read.
Before the collapse Greeks Linear A and Linear B. It took them a few hundred years after the Bronze Age Collapse to learn how to write again, this time by borrowing the Phoenician alphabet.
Imagine what an event would look like today to take us back 200-400 years technologically.
> would look like today that would take us back 200-400 years technologically.
If those technologies were concentrated amongst the elite and only a handful of palace scribes could write most people would have no or little contact with writing. Same with most people living outside of the palaces (overwhelming majority) and who had no access to the amenities.
It’s hard to say what happened but these collapses sometimes have paradoxical outcomes e.g. we have evidence that the quality of life and health improved for Western Europeans at least in some places after the Roman Empire collapsed (less population pressure, no crippling taxes etc.)
The title is super-clickbaity, as no scholar believes in a single Pre-Greek language; this was the idée fixe of the scholar Robert Beekes well over a decade ago now, and very flawed research as Beekes was succumbing to dementia then.
The article does eventually mention the current state-of-the-art, but only after perpetuating the misconception, and that is poor form for a pop-sci article.
Even for a non-linguist like myself, the article didn't feel right. I expected to find more information about the Thracians, who inhabited those lands for quite some time and left some extraordinary (albeit non-written) heritage.
The author does mention the possibility of more than one non-IE pre-Greek language, as well as the possibility of an Indo-European predecessor in the region.
There are similar arguments over Pictish, but at least with Greek there is a substantial body of vocabulary, which Pictish lacks.
I don’t agree with this characterization of the article at all. What you see as clickbaity I see as using a reductive idea to set the stage for a more complex one. I just think this is good, engaging writing.
Ya, barrrrmp!
disagree, the main thesus is lingustic evolution as sort of hereditary characteristics whose exact origins are difficult to elucidate, kind of like apples and horses, that also share the same general geographic origins. Various lists of words show conclusivly how many words are conserved over very broad geographic, temporal, and cultural ranges, so it will always be a (low stakes) game of reverse engineering how words and full languages moved around.
perhaps of interest was an early study of austrailian languages, where over time local languages became incomrehensable to distant
tribes, but the ancestral origin songs, were recognisable from there melodic and rythmic structure, and the actaul storys were essentialy identical, so language drift, but cultural continuity, which is aparently what you get after 50 millenia hanging out with marsupials.
Also, “not having a known etymology” is weak evidence for borrowing, full stop, let alone for borrowing from a substrate. There are lots of very common words in english (dog, pig, boy, girl) that have no known etymology which are incredibly unlikely to impossible to have come from a substrate language.
Languages invent new words and sound patterns endogenously all the time.
English dog has had an etymology for the last 30 years or so (Gasiorowski's). But with regard to Greek lexicon, it is not just the lack of etymology that suggests substrate but the non-IE phonology of many of these words.
For an analogous but completely unrelated example, Stoney [0] has a word for "ocean" (mînîtâga) [1], but it's also only spoken in a landlocked region. So maybe human languages have a tendency to preserve/invent the word for "ocean" for some reason?
(I actually remember asking the professor why they had a word for "ocean", but he wasn't sure either.)
Finnish language doesn't have an actual word for "ocean". We use "valtameri", which means something like main sea or great sea. And both "valta" and "meri" are Indo-European loans.
But in Livonian (an almost extinct Finnic language spoken in Latvia), Valdamer is one of the names for the Baltic Sea. So maybe that's the origin of the Finnish term as well.
One still has to do field work to gather all the linguistic data. It's rather easy with settled societies only. Researchers studying indigenous languages had to travel to hard to reach places and often live with the tribes for a quite long time.
It's a lot easier nowadays, but ease of transportation also correlates quite well with a levelling of linguistic distinctions. That's a problem because the comparative method of reconstructing older stages of a language relies on the assumption that different dialects maintain aspects of the older language.
From what I understand, and I might be oversimplifying here; many of the differences between Indo-European languages today are a result of the languages that were there before. So the reason Proto-German and Latin were different is in part because of the pre-IE languages in each of those regions. But we don’t have a ton of information on those languages, so scholars are not sure.
Of course there were other reasons languages changed, and the inheritance is only one factor.
But in some sense there are many lost languages hiding inside contemporary ones.
Greek murmēx could be an assimilation murw- => murm-, and Latin had dissimilation morm- => form- (although not clear what came first, maybe morm- was the original and morw- came later). Sanskrit valmīka "ant-hill" has a similar looking suffix.
In any way, it doesn't look like it must be borrowed. Historically, some words that were once labeled Pre-Indoeuropean turned out to have pretty mundane PIE origins.
It could be an original Proto-Indoeuropean word as well, because Greek has ὑιήν "grapewine" (< *wih₁-ēn), which follows PIE ablaut (weyh₁-ō ~ wih₁-ēn), which doesn't usually happen if it's just a borrowing of a foreign word. And the same root is found in Latin vitis "vine", Russian vit'sa "to twist (often about vines)" etc.
One aspect the article seems to overlook is Albanian. Since Albanian is a unique branch of Indo-European, descending from the Paleo-Balkan linguistic world and developed in the same broader region, it would be interesting to see whether the non-Greek substrate vocabulary found in Ancient Greek has been systematically compared with Proto-Albanian and other reconstructed Paleo-Balkan material.
Plato wrote about a lot of these kinds of words in the dialogue Cratylus. The dialogue is about more than just etymology, of course, but it’s worth looking at if the subject is interesting to you.
I get that the article was already super long, but I really wanted to hear how they got all the body-parts words from the Pre-Greeks. That seems like such a random corpus to lift from another language. Pre-Greeks way more into divination?
Yeah I think to calibrate you should probably look to Native American words that made it into English — place names, local foods and wildlife, cultural items. Those are going to be your substrate borrowings for most languages.
IIRC there's a common cultural tendency to put a lot of stock in the magical powers of exotic foreign wizards, so divination might not be such a bad explanation at all.
45 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 45.8 ms ] threadI’ve been doing a bit of reading on the Bronze Age Collapse recently. It was such an apocalyptic event that Greeks forgot how to write and read.
Before the collapse Greeks Linear A and Linear B. It took them a few hundred years after the Bronze Age Collapse to learn how to write again, this time by borrowing the Phoenician alphabet.
Imagine what an event would look like today to take us back 200-400 years technologically.
“Solon, oh Solon!” — are Greeks truly ancient or relative newcomers in a seafaring land?
If those technologies were concentrated amongst the elite and only a handful of palace scribes could write most people would have no or little contact with writing. Same with most people living outside of the palaces (overwhelming majority) and who had no access to the amenities.
It’s hard to say what happened but these collapses sometimes have paradoxical outcomes e.g. we have evidence that the quality of life and health improved for Western Europeans at least in some places after the Roman Empire collapsed (less population pressure, no crippling taxes etc.)
The article does eventually mention the current state-of-the-art, but only after perpetuating the misconception, and that is poor form for a pop-sci article.
There are similar arguments over Pictish, but at least with Greek there is a substantial body of vocabulary, which Pictish lacks.
Languages invent new words and sound patterns endogenously all the time.
No, it is mori, attested in marine, muir, maryadah, mal, morje, etc in farflung IE tongues today.
(I actually remember asking the professor why they had a word for "ocean", but he wasn't sure either.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoney_language
[1]: https://dictionary.stoneynakoda.org/#/L/m%C3%AEn%C3%AEt%C3%A...
Most likely a reference to Houses of the Holy.
But in Livonian (an almost extinct Finnic language spoken in Latvia), Valdamer is one of the names for the Baltic Sea. So maybe that's the origin of the Finnish term as well.
It's a lot easier nowadays, but ease of transportation also correlates quite well with a levelling of linguistic distinctions. That's a problem because the comparative method of reconstructing older stages of a language relies on the assumption that different dialects maintain aspects of the older language.
Of course there were other reasons languages changed, and the inheritance is only one factor.
But in some sense there are many lost languages hiding inside contemporary ones.
Did we have Ancient geeks?
Anthemios of Tralles, quite the prankster
> [...] Greek μύρμηξ mýrmēx ‘ant’, Latin formica
Must be an error:
Greek murmēx could be an assimilation murw- => murm-, and Latin had dissimilation morm- => form- (although not clear what came first, maybe morm- was the original and morw- came later). Sanskrit valmīka "ant-hill" has a similar looking suffix.In any way, it doesn't look like it must be borrowed. Historically, some words that were once labeled Pre-Indoeuropean turned out to have pretty mundane PIE origins.
It could be an original Proto-Indoeuropean word as well, because Greek has ὑιήν "grapewine" (< *wih₁-ēn), which follows PIE ablaut (weyh₁-ō ~ wih₁-ēn), which doesn't usually happen if it's just a borrowing of a foreign word. And the same root is found in Latin vitis "vine", Russian vit'sa "to twist (often about vines)" etc.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_textbooks
I see what you did there