Hallo!

On Wed, 21 Jan 2009 12:31:15 +0000, R A Brown wrote:

> 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.

I also almost missed it.  It was one of the threads which I did
not follow in detail but took only a few samples of to see if I
am missing something, and one of these samples was Roger's post.

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

I indeed wondered why you did not reply, as I know that this is
a matter which interests you, and you have something to say on it.

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

Perhaps.  CONLANG can be quite busy sometimes.

> [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.

Indeed.

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

It is indeed possible, but we have no evidence for it.  (But we
also don't have much evidence that the languages were *not*
polysynthetic.)

> > 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.

Nor do I.

>       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.

Very likely.  Today, Europe is almost entirely accusative, but that
is only due to the spread of Indo-European and Uralic.  Basque and
most Caucasian languages are ergative; that of course doesn't mean
that *all* pre-IE European languages were ergative (Etruscan, at
least, wasn't), but some certainly were.

> 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.

It is indeed quite likely that some were.  Others probably were not.

> > 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.

Certainly.

> > 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.

Yes.  I have a list of non-IE Germanic words which I have
extracted from an etymological dictionary of German, and
another I once found on a web site which by now is gone;
I would be *hotly* interested in a list of substratum
words in Insular Celtic for my Albic project.  Do you have
one, or can tell me where I can find it?

> > 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.

The Anatolian hypothesis of Colin Renfrew is quite fashionable
these days, because it tells a much more "politically correct"
story of the origin of Indo-European than the "kurgan" model.
But what counts in science is not what is fashionable, but what
agrees with the facts - and the facts speak strongly against
the Anatolian hypothesis (and a fortiori against Alinei's
"Paleolithic Continuity" nonsense, btw).

>       There  
> are theories that posit an IE origin for Etruscan! And I guess you have 
> come across the 'IE Pelasgic' theory.

Sure.  There are some vexing similarities between IE and Etruscan
in the morphology, but by far not enough to establish a relationship.
Indeed, Uralic is even more similar to IE than Etruscan.

> > 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.

I wouldn't say that a distant relationship between IE and
Etruscan-Rhaetian-Lemnian (whether Pelasgic was related to it
is another question still) is impossible, but the evidence is
not conclusive.  And I wouldn't call the common ancestor of IE
and Etruscan etc. "Protindogermanisch", that only begs for
confusion.

An IE-Etruscan relationship hypothesis is also peddled by a
certain Glen Gordon of the Nostratic-L mailing list, but his
evidence is extremely shaky; he always cites the same "cognate
pair", namely IE *kWetWor- '4': Etr. _huth_ (which he claims
was '4', but actually probably was '6').

>       What Kretschmer would have  
> made of the Nostratic theory/theories, i don't know.

He would perhaps have considered "Protindogermanisch" to be
a branch of Nostratic.  Note also that Allan Bomhard considers
Etruscan to be Nostratic without giving evidence - he takes it
as given that it was an aberrant branch of IE, which is of
course bogus.

> > [critique of Vennemann's theory]
> 
> I agree.

Vennemann makes so many dubious or even outright false assumptions
that his theory can be dismissed out of hand.

> [...]
> 
> > 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  ;)

Yes, there are many strange theories about the linguistic
landscape of pre-IE Europe, simply because so little is known
about it.

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