Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe

General discussion about learning languages
Kraut
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2599
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 10:37 pm
Languages: German (N)
French (C)
English (C)
Spanish (A2)
Lithuanian
x 3204

Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe

Postby Kraut » Mon Jun 14, 2021 5:28 pm

https://eujournal.org/index.php/esj/article/view/12398

Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe: A Study Based on the Synthesis of Scientific Evidence From Archaeology, Historical Linguistics and Genetics

Csaba Barnabas Horvath Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary

Abstract
When and how did the Indo-European language family expand into western Europe? What language families were present there before, and where did they come from? Where does Basque and Etruscan come from? These are questions and puzzles that have been in the focus of the archaeological community since long ago. The present paper offers a coherent hypothesis mapping the expansion of language families in the western half of Europe from the Copper Age till the Roman conquest, based on matchings identifies between the newest genetic evidence, and earlier results of archaeology and historical linguistics. The approach focuses on matching phylogenetic and geographical distribution patterns of Y-DNA lineages with archaeological cultures, and the phylogenetics of language families in order to identify migrations and language families in Western Europe in the 3 rd -1 st millennia BCE.
5 x

Kraut
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2599
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 10:37 pm
Languages: German (N)
French (C)
English (C)
Spanish (A2)
Lithuanian
x 3204

Re: Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe

Postby Kraut » Wed Jun 16, 2021 7:57 pm

Title: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past.

David Reich - PopGen Vienna talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhlzpvQx74U
2 x

lichtrausch
Blue Belt
Posts: 511
Joined: Thu Jul 23, 2015 3:21 pm
Languages: English (N), German, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean
x 1379

Re: Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe

Postby lichtrausch » Tue Sep 28, 2021 4:47 am

Herodot erzählte Quatsch über Etrusker
Neben den Steppengenen zeigen die Gene der Etrusker den für die Zeit und Region typischen Mix aus zentraleuropäischen, nordafrikanischen und nahöstlichen Genen. Die Forscher finden dagegen keinen Beleg dafür, dass die Etrusker – wie von Herodot und verschiedenen Theoretikern angenommen – aus Anatolien oder der Ägäis stammen. Wie bei den anderen Stämmen Italiens änderte sich das Erbgut dann deutlich mit dem Aufkommen des Römischen Reichs: Nun mischen sich viele weitere Einflüsse aus dem Osten des Imperiums in den lokalen Genpool; wahrscheinlich eine Folge der größeren Mobilität der Menschen in dieser Zeit, die etwa Soldaten oder Sklaven aus dem östlichen Mittelmeer nach Italien brachte. Im frühen Mittelalter schließlich sieht man auch in den Genen in der Toskana einen weiteren neuen Einfluss: Erbgut aus dem Norden, unter anderem durch die Germanen und Langobarden, die das Ende des Imperiums begleiten.[...]

Das Etruskische könnte sich gehalten haben, weil die Zuwanderer die Kultur mitsamt der Sprache der frühen Etrusker übernommen haben, während sie sich langsam, aber in großer Zahl in die Gesellschaft eingefügt haben, spekulieren die Forscher der DNA-Studie. Der Prozess der kulturellen und genetischen Verschmelzung lief in diesem Fall dann anders ab als an anderen Orten – was dafür gesorgt haben könnte, dass Etruskisch über Jahrhunderte eine lebende Sprache blieb, während andere ältere nicht indoeuropäische Idiome ausstarben, ohne Spuren zu hinterlassen.

Linguisten diskutieren, dass Etruskisch tatsächlich ein Zweig einer sehr alten europäischen Sprachfamilie ist, die in der Jungsteinzeit verbreitet war und dann verdrängt wurde. Der Linguist Helmut Rix hatte die Theorie der tyrsenischen Sprachen vorgeschlagen, zu der neben dem Etruskischen auch die rätische Sprache des Alpenraums und der lemnischen Sprache gehört, die sich auf der Ägäis-Insel Lemnos in Schriftzeichen auf einer Stele erhalten hat. Form und Struktur des Vokabulars dieser ausgestorbenen Sprachen ähneln sich, und sie könnten, wie etwa auch die Sprache der jungsteinzeitlichen Basken, Relikte von hypothetischen präindoeuropäischen Sprachen sein.
2 x

User avatar
Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
x 14962

Re: Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe

Postby Iversen » Tue Sep 28, 2021 10:57 am

Thanks to Kraut for having started this new thread - and prepare for a looooooooooooong answer!

I have so far only read the first article, "Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe" (by Horvath), so everything I write below may have to be revised when I also have read the other texts - plus Horvath's own article about Eastern and Northern Europe from 2019. Reading this stuff is slow going because I have to assess the claims in the article with what I know from earlier sources, which I studied around 2017-2018 (discussed in several threads here and in two lectures in Bratislava) - and there are many references to different archeologic cultures which I have had to refresh.

At first glance it seems that Horvath is just reviving Renfrew's old Anatolian hypothesis, but the difference is the time frame - it operated with impossible long dispersal times for the Indoeuropean languages that started out at the same time where the Yamnaya hordes came thundering through Europa, and we now know that the major genetic upheavels were accomplished in just a few hundred years.

Horvath does however seem to support the theory that all cultural novelties came from Anatolia (or maybe areas further east, near the 'Golden Crescent' in the Middle East) and then without exception passed through the Balkan areas - that is: not at the same time as the original invasion of the Yunami from the Pontic steppes that brought the R1B haplogroup to Europe. And this 'milder' hypothesis is worth discussing.

He operates with two invasion periods within Europe after the original Yamnaya one. In this message I'll first discuss the 'second invasion', described in the article from page 9 onwards. It is supposed to have happened Europe in the early to middle part of the first millennium BCE, exactly fitting the formation of the Hallstatt C, D, and La Tene cultures - or in other words: it represents the beginning of the Celtic expansion. And according to Horvath it started in the Western Balkans. The Italic languages should then have come from the same areas, but crossed across the sea to Middle Italy instead of passing down through Italy from the North, thus avoiding an early clash with the Etruscans (and leaving the Pre-Indoeuropeans Rhaetian in the Eastern Alpes unscathed).

This hypotesis seems plausible. We have normally been told that the Hallstatt culture in its entirety represented the emergence of the Celtic culture, which later spread Eastwards to (at least) Ukraine and Westwards to just about everything from Spain to the British Isles, just leaving the Basques and maybe the Picts as isolated pockets. According to Horvath this should have happened between Hallstatt B and C (i.e. around 800 BC), but I haven't seen any reason not to include Hastatt A from around 1200 BC. And Rome was allegedly founded in 753 BC - maybe not the exact year, but too early for an arrival over Italic-speakers around 800. So lett's setlle for 1200 BC or before. By the way it is noted in the article that this second wave (contrary to the Yamnaya invasion) didn't mean major changes in the genetic makeup of the local populations of Western Europe, suggesting a softer approach.

So I'm ready to acept it as likely that the Celto-Italic language group originated in the Western Balkans and then split into two from there. But now things become a little complicated. I'll show two maps, one from Eupedia and one from from the article:

Eurpedia_Cultures_2500-2000BC.jpg

Horvath_Language-groups_1800BC.jpg

Horvath divides Pre-Indoeuropean Europe from around 1800 BC into four major zones, one speaking Vasconian languages to the West of a line roughly from Trieste to Hamburg, another called Tyrsenian (which includes Etruscan and Rhaetian and possible Lemnic from the island Lemnos) in the North-Western Balkans up to at least the Danube riverbed, the third a pocket of Indoeuropean in the far South-East and as the fourth element the whole of North-Eastern Europe including Southern Scandinavia down to Northern Ukraine. There may be some simplication at play here, but the first three claims could be true - although it should be said that there is no foundation whatever for the idea that Vasconian languages covered so much territory towards the East, nor that any kind of (Finno-)Ugrian languages were spoken South of the Baltic Sea - at least not before the Hungarians under Arpad came thundering into Europe after 900 AD, i.e. 3000 years later. I haven't read Horvath's article from 2019 yet, but I doubt that he can prove any of these claims.

If we look at the Eupedia map (which only indicate archological cultures and shows the situation slightly earlier) then the Uralic speakers (Finno-Uralic) are limited to Lapponia, Finland and the territories Eastwards into Russia - and that also where we find the haplogroup N1c1. My humble guess is that these areas never were invaded by R1-people, Protoeuropean-speaking or not. On the other hand the R1A1 group dominates the area from Poland into Russia (so when Horvath calls the R1A haplogroup "widespread in Europe" at p.16 this is clearly an exaggeration). To me this suggests a later invasion carried out by others than the Yamnaya, but from an adjacent area - and possibly Indoeuropean-speaking, but not necessarily representing any modern language family - not even the Baltoslavic languages that are spoken there now.

In modern Germany there was a lump of socalled 'Unetice' culture (a precursor to the 'tumulus culture' mentioned by Horvath), while in Southern Scandinavia we got the battle-axe culture - also called "enkeltgravskultur" in Danish (single grave culture) because it replaced the megalitic culture around 2800 BC One evidence that it was carried by invaders is that they didn't continue the advanced use of the local flint from the earlier culture, but went back to a more primitive tool making stage. If you look at the timeframe this change took place in Denmark it can simply not be part of the same wave that produced the Celtic culture in Middle Europe, so it must be caused directly by the Yamnaya invasion - although the genetic composition here didn't change to nearly the same extent as in Western Europe (and even less in Norway and Sweden, where the old I haplogroup to this day is very common), and there was even a temporary co-existence of different pottery styles.

However what kind of language the marauding battle-axe carriers spoke is absolutely not certain. Personally I tend to believe that it was some kind of Indoeuropean, which may have served as a substratum for the Germanic languages. The battle-axe culture is however not identical with that of the Yamnaya, although it must be seen as caused by the upheavels caused by the arrival of the R1B1 bearing Yamnaya - and this further complicates the question about the languages spoken in the areas it once covered.

OK, let's return to the first of Horvath's two inner-European invasions, the one from around 1900 BC or before.

A couple of quotes (p.8f):

If the population that established the Bell Beaker culture and was characterized by
the spread of R1b-P312 was speaking Vasconic languages, then without
external incursions, all these cultures from Tumulus to La Tene should have
been Vasconic as well, even if distinct branches of that. Language shifts to
entirely different language families could have come only with external
incursions, and with all these cultures spreading from east to west, such
incursions must have come from the east, and at the right time (....)
Genetic evidence suggests two such incursions to have happened. The
first one is an event suggested by the evidence to have happened in the middle
of the second millennium BC: Among the subclades of J2b, J2b-Z2507 shows
distribution patterns in time and space that strongly suggests it to be connected
with the Tumulus and Urnfield cultures. First, its related lineages are mainly
located in Southeast Europe, and its’ most recent common ancestor being
identified to have lived around 2400 BCE,
(...)
Vasconic languages at the same time apparently survived intact in
the range of the Atlantic Bronze Age. The area of Iberian language in Eastern
Iberia, while partially included in the Urnfield range, lacks a significant R1b-
U152 presence, or presence of any other haplogroup suggesting demographic
change between the Bell Beaker and the Roman period, thus the introduction
of the Urnfield culture there likely happened by cultural diffusion only,
explaining why a Vasconic language survived there.


As I read this, the non-IndoEuropean languages survived on the Iberian peninsula for a long time (considerably longer than the megalitic monuments), and the first major change to this situation probably came with the Celts - and then of course the Italic-speaking Romans came and put an abrupt end to the Celtic-dominated era everywhere except in the Basque lands and (for a time) on the British isles - where however the Germanic invasion in the 5. century BC almost finished the job.
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
7 x

User avatar
Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
x 14962

Re: Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe

Postby Iversen » Tue Sep 28, 2021 4:04 pm

Now I have read the article about the erroneous ideas of Herodot - and as far as I can see the new evidence just states that there were a number of different genetic lineages represented in the Tuscan area during the Roman period, but before the Romans took over there were apparently not much heritage from Anatolia, nor from Northern Africa. As for the idea that the Etruscan language came from Anatolia (as suggested by Herodot) it is not very likely. In the 2021 Horvath article I commented on above there are many references to a hypothetical 'Tyrsenic' language group, which also should have included even more some scantily represented and badly known languages from the area around the Northern Adriatic sea - and there is a likely reason why these languages lived on, namely that the wave of Italic speakers travelled by boat across the Adriatic and not overland through present-day Venetia.

By the way: the site where that article is found also has some other interesting articles in German, which I may read later on - like one stating that the hearing apparatus of the Neanderthals were similar to ours, but different from that of Homo heidelbergensis who normally has been assumed to be our common ancestor - something is rotten there! And another article states that the position of a certain gyrus in the brains of early erectusses from Dmanisi in Georgia (also known as Homo ergaster) was located in the same position as in apes and earlier hominids, but then it apparently moved backwards to the position it has in newer humans - and then there was suddenly space for a broca and other fun and game things. I'll have to study that more closely.

But then I also found an older article by Horvath, succinctly named "Reconsidering the geographical origins based on the synthesis of archeological and linguistic evidence and the newest results in genetics - a Finno-Scythian hypothesis". Actually the Scythians are hardly mentioned, but the central claim is that there were not one, but two migration waves Northwards from the Pontic Steppes (where the proportion of the haplogroup R1A allegedly was high) - quote:

(...) One that of the original Corded Ware populations, apparently of the Finno-Ugric origins,
and another later one characterized by the high presence of R1a-M458 and I2a, apparently
representing the Slavic expansion.


The Corded Ware culture on Horvath's maps takes up a large area stretching from Russia into Germany and Southern Scandinavia - much larger than the area assigned to it on the Eupedia map in the preceding message which assigns some of it to the Únětice culture that flourished from 2300 to 1800 BC. Horvath is adamant that these people spoke some kind of Finno-Ugric language, while the other related branch of Uralic speakers (the 'Finno-Permian' ones) from further East went further North. As far as I have understood the Sami languages, Finnish, Estonian and some smaller languages around Ladoga are closely related and have been there for a very long time. Their languages could in theory have come from the Pontic steppes or Ukraine, but the genetic composition in their Northerly homelands points towards an Easterly origin. Along the way up there the Eastern branch of the Uralic-speakers should then have founded the long-lived Andronovo culture (2000 to 900 BC). And then the Baltoslavs should have followed later on and obliterated all traces of the socalled Finno-Ugric languages South of the Baltic Sea and Botnic Bay, but NOT in Finland - no reason given.

I must say that the idea of a large some-kind-of-Uralic speaking area in Europe somewhat speculative - especially since the hypothesis doesn't explain why the extended Corded Ware area ended up being divided into a Germanic West and a Slavic (and partly Baltic) East. Whatever the language of the Corded Ware-makers might have been, we have not one single word that can be dated that far back, although it is likely that they originally came from the Pontic steppes or Ukraine since they carry the R1A genes from that area, i.e. possibly near the Yamnaya homelands, but from another tribe since the Yamnayas seem to have been R1B carriers. So the Corded Ware language could in principle have been an Indoeuropean language, but no one knows for sure. We only know that the area where they lived now is and has been R1A country for a very long time. The original invasion was probably followed by a Baltoslavic migration that carried another Protoindoeuropean language with it - although this time definitely a Satem language, not the kind of centum language which the Italo-Celtic or Germanic languages represent. And that invasion (which may have originated in Russia, or maybe in Ukraine - nobody knows) only reached the Eastern part of the extended Corded ware area - the Western part (where R1B dominated) somehow ended up speaking Germanic languages. Actually I find that scenario more convincing than claiming that the whole of the area from Germany to Russia spoke some Uralic language that since has disappeared without a trace.

By the way: some of the characteristics of the Germanic languages could in principle have been caused by a substrate, but without ancient texts it's impossible to say what family that substratum belonged to. The Modern Slavic languages in Eastern Europe are far younger - like Hungarian they only arrived after the turmoils brought on by the Huns (and for once that's something we KNOW!).

The article doesn't say much about the origins of the Balto-Slavic group (or its predecessor, if the Corded ware people actually spoke a related language). A little documented tribe called the Kimmerians is mentioned, but just as a far-out possibility. I find it more logical to mention that the Tocharians in Central Asia spoke centum languages, while the Baltoslavs and the Iranians belong to the Satem group, so their common origin is likely to be somewhere in the middle - but in all likelihood not the same location as that inhabited by any remaining Yamnaya (alternatively the soundshifts that lead to the formation of the Satem language must have occurred after the centum warriors left their steppes around 2800 - but all that is pure speculation).

Near the end of the article Horvath states that

Such recent results, being published in the past few years, and already referenced in this paper,
are for example ancient DNA evidence confirming the population of the Corded Ware culture originating
in a massive migration from the Yamna culture, and the population of the Andronovo culture originating
from the Corded Ware culture in a similar manner.


To me it seems that he here gives a good reason why there are DNA traces all the way from the steppes to Eastern Europe (but not to Finland), and why it just complicates matters to claim that the Corded Ware potmakers spoke an Uralic language which since then has disappeared without a trace. I think they spoke some kind of Indoeuropean Satem language - but it is impossible to say anything definite about that question without any shred of contemporary evidence.
4 x

DaveAgain
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1967
Joined: Mon Aug 27, 2018 11:26 am
Languages: English (native), French & German (learning).
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... &start=200
x 4049

Re: Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe

Postby DaveAgain » Tue Sep 28, 2021 4:57 pm

Iversen wrote:I must say that the idea of a large some-kind-of-Uralic speaking area in Europe somewhat speculative - especially since the hypothesis doesn't explain why the extended Corded Ware area ended up being divided into a Germanic West and a Slavic (and partly Baltic) East. Whatever the language of the Corded Ware-makers might have been, we have not one single word that can be dated that far back, although it is likely that they originally came from the Pontic steppes or Ukraine since they carry the R1A genes from that area, i.e. possibly near the Yamnaya homelands, but from another tribe since the Yamnayas seem to have been R1B carriers. So the CordedWare language could in principle have been an Indoeuropean language, but no one knows for sure. We only know that the area where they lived now is and has been R1A country for a very long time. The original invasion was probably followed by a Baltoslavic migration that carried another Protoindoeuropean language with it - although this time definitely a Satem language, not the kind of centum language which the Italo-Celtic or Germanic languages represent. And that invasion only reached the Eastern part of the extended Corded ware area - the Western part (where R1B dominated) somehow ended up speaking Germanic languages. Actually I find that scenario more convincing than claiming that the whole of the area from Germany to Russia spoke some Uralic language that since has disappeared without a trace.

By the way: some of the characteristics of the Germanic languages could in principle have been caused by a substrate, but without ancient texts it's impossible to say what family that substratum belonged to. The Modern Slavic languages in Eastern Europe are far younger - like Hungarian.
I vaguely remember a presentation of computer linguistics suggesting that Slavic languages were a distant forking of Germanic.
0 x

Kraut
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2599
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 10:37 pm
Languages: German (N)
French (C)
English (C)
Spanish (A2)
Lithuanian
x 3204

Re: Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe

Postby Kraut » Wed Sep 29, 2021 4:03 pm

off topic, but extremely interesting: we don't have their languages but their DNA

A whole New World
Archaeology and genetics keep rewriting the ancient peopling of the Americas

https://razib.substack.com/p/a-whole-ne ... YRCX6Pjrek
1 x

User avatar
outcast
Blue Belt
Posts: 585
Joined: Sat Dec 05, 2015 3:41 pm
Location: Florida, USA
Languages: ~
FLUENCY
Native: ENglish, ESpañol
Advanced: -
High Basic: DEutsch (rust), FRançais (rust), ZH中文
Basic: -
~
ACQUIRING
Formally: KO한국말, ITaliano, HI हिन्दी
Dabbling: HRvatski, GW粵語
Dormant: POrtuguês
~
Plan to learn: I BETTER NOT GO HERE FOR NOW
~
x 679

Re: Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe

Postby outcast » Wed Sep 29, 2021 6:52 pm

Quite interesting that this thread should come up. Unfortunately I am waaaaaay to busy to sit down and read it for the next couple of weeks: I got full-time work, overtime work, studying two languages full time, maintaining three others, preparing to travel, the trip itself, and on and on and on.

But I had been asking myself recently, just exactly these types of questions. Like the following: If it is so convincing that PIE is the mother tongue of the entirety of the Indo-European languages of today, and therefore of the earlier stages of today's IE languages, and therefore the mother of the "mothers" of todays languages... why is it that there is so much controversy as to the relationship between the branches themselves? (Italic, Germanic, Hittite, Greek, Sanskrit, etc, etc).

If the reconstruction from all of the Indo-European languages of today creates a "All roads lead to PIE" sort of situation, where the road from Spanish, or Irish, or Lithuanian is just walked backwards phonologically and grammatically leading to the parent language of the branch... Why would we, in following those trails backwards to the parent languages of the different branches (Latin, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Celtic), and then somehow, walking the roads back further, at the end seeing all roads merging at PIE, why would we then suddenly just lose the trail entirely between the parent branches and PIE itself? Shouldn't it be clear by now how the branches relate to each other through the same reconstruction that leads to the conclusion of PIE?
1 x
"I can speak wonderfully and clearly in zero languages, and can also fluently embarrass myself in half a dozen others."

The End of Language learning: 10 / 10000

User avatar
Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
x 14962

Re: Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe

Postby Iversen » Wed Sep 29, 2021 8:26 pm

Actually the relationships within the Indoeuropean family aren't particularly controversial, and the reason is that we have texts that go thousands of years back. It is much harder to make sensible guesses about language groups without such a long written history - and it is still not absolutely certain how the Indoeuropean cluster is related to other groups (although a supergroup named 'Nostratic' has been proposed). The key element is the notion 'soundlaw', i.e. the assumption that a certain sound in specific surroundings will develop in a certain way in all relevant words (loanword are per definition not relevant).

The miracle is that you can propose lineages based on this idea - a certain sound change may occur in one area,but not anywhere else - and then you have a bifurcation in the 'Stammbaum' which never can be eradicated again. Actually it can, and you can have crossing bifurvations that make up a real mesh, but that mostly happens between dialects or within a language continuum - and the classical historical linguists were not primarily interested in those messy situations. They could check that their system work by looking at situations where both an ancestor and several well defined offspring could be studied (like Latin and the Romance languages), and if the system worked there it would probably also be relevant where the ancestor was unknown. And then they took the oldest languages they could find and started to construct series of undocumented sound changes which, when seen backwards, could take them back to the latest coomon denominator. Those languages that couldn't be fitted into these systems (like Basque) were excluded from the family. And then the learned ones ended up with a reconstructed Proto-Indoeuropean.

In actual fact there is still debates concerning some points in the system - like for instance whether Albanian should be seen as a centum or a satem language (referrring to a proposed early separation of common *ProtoIndoeuopean), and if you look at the proposed grammar of *IE then there is more confusion than clarity. For instance it has been proposed that verbs generally were ergative in *proto-IE, but opinions are divided on that point - to put in mildly. Alas, grammar doesn't obey anything as simple as sound laws...

However this whole construction project says nothing about where such a hypothetical common language would have been spoken. People have tried to make educated guesses based on the kind of words that fitted into their sound laws. If for instance there were lots of words about agriculture then you would expect the last common ancestor to have been spoken in an agricultural setting. Or if the words that fitted into the system typically had something to do with horses then the the speakers could have been nomads. Most comments have so far pointed to this last possibility, but I noticed in Kraut's first reference that it in a casual remark claimed that the words mainly were agricultural (which then would support an Anatolian origin). And I can't say whether this is correct -I have to leave that question to the real experts.

Luckily we also have archeologic evidence, and during the last ten or so years the methods to extract DNA from old bones have developed to the point where we can followed migration routes with reasonable certainty. However you may see migrations, but this does not automatically prove that the languages that later were spoken along the routes were brought there by the travellers. To prove that conclusively you need written evidence - and that's precisely the thing we don't have in most of Europe for most of the relevant period. With some minor exceptions the relationships between the Indoeuropean languages and within the Finno-Ugrian(-Permian?) language groups are accepted by the majority of scholars, but something as fundamental as whether the R1B1 warriors that conquered Western Europe spoke an Indoeuropean language or not is still a moot point. Horvath apparently thinks that the Pontian Steppes fostered hordes of Pre-Uralic speaking invaders heading towards the North, while other scholars assume they spoke a Satem-language within the Indoeuropean family. And we simply don't have the crucial information - like a diary written by someone in Poland 4000 years ago - to settle the matter.

By the way, it took me one day to read up on the subject matter and write the two messages above, so I can't imagine that it would take longer time to read them. :lol:
4 x

sirgregory
Orange Belt
Posts: 171
Joined: Sat Apr 27, 2019 5:22 pm
Location: USA
Languages: Speaks: English (N), Spanish
Studies: German, French
x 615

Re: Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe

Postby sirgregory » Sun Oct 03, 2021 5:24 am

Iversen wrote:By the way: the site where that article is found also has some other interesting articles in German, which I may read later on - like one stating that the hearing apparatus of the Neanderthals were similar to ours, but different from that of Homo heidelbergensis who normally has been assumed to be our common ancestor - something is rotten there! And another article states that the position of a certain gyrus in the brains of early erectusses from Dmanisi in Georgia (also known as Homo ergaster) was located in the same position as in apes and earlier hominids, but then it apparently moved backwards to the position it has in newer humans - and then there was suddenly space for a broca and other fun and game things. I'll have to study that more closely.


My understanding is that while Europeans overall only have something like 2% Neanderthal DNA, it's very unevenly distributed, i.e., some of the Neanderthal variants became very common (perhaps 50% of the population in some cases). Evidently these were useful in some way and were selected for pretty strongly. In terms of physical characteristics, the occipital bun (a little bump in the back of the skull) that some people have is often said to be from Neanderthals. Perhaps there was something useful about this Neanderthal ear structure?
0 x


Return to “General Language Discussion”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 2 guests