Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
> 
> On Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:35:16 +0000, R A Brown wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>>
>> The site below was recently brought to my attention. I thought some of 
>> you on this list might be interested in this discussion on the languages 
>> of pre-I.E. Europe and onwards....
>> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=980
> 
> Yes, that is a very interesting read, and I have already commented
> on it here a few days ago after Roger Mills mentioned it in the
> "Amibuity" thread:
> 
> http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0901b&L=conlang&T=0&F=&S=&P=4883

Ooops!! So you did! (What's the embarrassment emoticon?)

I can understand how I missed it on Roger's email. When I'm busy and/or 
not particularly interested in a thread, I tend to skim over them, more 
often than not without reading to the end.

But how I came to forget your reply, I don't know; after all, it was 
only about twelve day ago.

I suppose because I get noticeably less mails on Aegeanet than I do on 
Conlang, things stand out more on that list.

[snip]
> many smaller ones and a handful of isolates.  Europe, of
> course, is only about half the size of USA+Canada, so we
> should expect about 25 families in pre-IE Europe.
> 
> What were those languages like typologically?  We don't know.
> I think the North American analogy ends here; 

It must, I think. Without any written records whatsoever we surely have 
no way of knowing.

> I don't expect
> pre-IE European languages to be as massively polysynthetic
> as North American languages, 

Why not?

> but the survivors (Basque and
> the Caucasian languages) are all strongly synthetic, and many
> of them ergative, and pre-IE Europe may have been like that,
> too.

I have little doubt that some pre-IE eurolangs were ergative. Whether 
all them would have been is a different matter; but I agree that such 
evidence as we have does point to a greater prevalence of the ergative 
model in the pre-IE period.

Also I agree that the evidence does point to these languages being 
strongly synthetic, which makes me wonder why you don't expect any to be 
massively polysynthetic.

> I have a hunch, though, that there was an intermediate layer,
> now completely extinct, between the Palaeolithic/Mesolithic
> heritage and the spread of Indo-European.  There are two
> reasons for this:
> 
> 1. The spread of agriculture north of the Alps appears to
>    have been demic, i.e. borne by people immigrating into
>    the area, apparently up the Danube from the northwestern
>    shore of the Black Sea (if the Black Sea flood disaster
>    really happened, as some geologists assume, they could
>    have been refugees from that event); this would also
>    mean that those immigrants also brought in their language.

Presumably it would.

> 2. There is an apparently uniform network of geographical
>    names, especially river names, covering a large area
>    in western and central Europe, and appearing to stem
>    from an unknown language or language family spoken in
>    the area before the historically attested Indo-European
>    languages moved in.

There are also vocabulary items. There is set of non-IE words common to 
Germanic & Celtic (e.g. *landa, *comba), but also a set of non-IE words 
found only in Germanic and another set found only in (insular) Celtic.

> Of course, some people assume that this neolithic language
> was Indo-European, but PIE lexical items such as *kWekWlos
> 'wheel' (and other words for wagons and parts thereof) and
> *h2ayes 'copper' set a terminus post quem at 4000 BC.  Also,
> the river names do not fit the phonologies of the attested
> IE languages, so they must have been borrowed from an
> unknown source.

Some people are unwilling to see any significant non-IE influence. There 
are theories that posit an IE origin for Etruscan! And I guess you have 
come across the 'IE Pelasgic' theory.

> My assumption is that the unknown language we are dealing
> with here was a sister language of PIE which branched off
> before the ablaut system emerged in the latter.  

In 1925 the German linguist, Paul Kretschmer, posited a similar theory. 
What we now call Proto-Indo-European he called "Urindogermanisch" (UIG); 
this had a sister language, "Rätotyrrhenisch" (RT). From RT were derived 
Raetian, Etruscan, Tyrrhenian and 'Pelasgic'. The common ancestor of UIG 
and RT, Kretschmer called "Protoindogermanisch" (PIG), i.e. his PIG is 
one generation further back than our PIE. What Kretschmer would have 
made of the Nostratic theory/theories, i don't know.

>
> The German linguist Theo Vennemann has his own ideas about
> pre-IE Europe, though.  He consideres the "Old European"
> river names to be "Vasconic", i.e. from a language family
> of which Basque is the last survivor.  He also entertains
> the notion that Europe north of the Alps was uninhabited
> during the last ice age.  This latter point, of course, is
> patently false (and I am not even considering Neanderthals
> here, which contributed nothing to the modern gene pool
> and probably also nothing to the linguistic landscape of
> Europe, either), and the assumption that pre-IE Europe
> north of the Alps was occupied by a single language family
> is unwarranted.

I agree.

[further critique of Vennemann's theory snipped]

> 
> All this is of course fodder for the League of Lost Languages!

     :-)

The first chapter of my "Evidence for Pre-Greek Speech on Crete from 
Greek Alphabetic Sources" (Amsterdam, 1985) reviews  several strange 
pre-IE eurolang theories, most of which give ample scope for the LLL  ;)

-- 
Ray
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