Hallo conlangers!

On 04/02/2018 02:26, And Rosta wrote:

> Where are you inclined to place North (or NE & NW) Caucasian in your
> overall picture?

I think these are most likely residues of Mesolithic languages of North
Caucasia or the South Russian steppe, pushed into the mountains by
Indo-European.

On 04/02/2018 02:40, A Walker Scott wrote:

> What about Tyrsenian? Maybe one of your language families has
> prot-pre-Etruscan as a member.

I think Tyrsenian probably originated in NW Anatolia; Proto-Tyrsenian
may have been the language of Troy. A memory of the Etruscan migration
out of Troy and its environs may be preserved in the foundation myth of
Rome, which was ruled by an Etruscan nobility before the establishment
of the Republic. It may be the case that Tyrsenian is in turn related to
Kartvelian, though this is not sure.

On 04/02/2018 14:32, Jim Thain wrote:

> In this scenario, since so little is actually known.
> There is a lot of room here for creativity.
> Pre IE Europe probably would have had several language families like the
> other continents
> have had, and currently do.
> As far as I know Europe is the only continent that is so dominated by one
> language family.
> So why not have fun here and create a language/language family completely
> unrelated to
> any of the current language families of the world?
> If I were doing that I would use current isolates to gather ideas from.

Yes, we know close to nothing - which makes it so exciting to speculate
about this! Pre-IE Europe probably was linguistically quite diverse,
though in the Neolithic, a few families probably expanded across fairly
large areas. There appear to have been some large population movements
in prehistoric Europe which would have involved the spread of largish
language families, but probably, none of these eclipsed the older layers
as totally and thoroughly as IE and Uralic did, which left only Basque
alive.

An attempt at a summary of Paleo-European language prehistory I have
posted here in September is now available under

http://www.frathwiki.com/Paleo-European_history_overview

It may be that Kartvelian is the last residue of the language family of
the first Neolithic farmers in what is now the Turkey/Syria/Iraq border
area, and spread quite far into Anatolia, the Levant, Mesopotamia and
also Georgia. It is of course also possible that this family has *no*
living descendants. This family could also have been that of the first
Neolithic farmers of Europe.

There of course were more language groups in the Ancient Near East, and
all of these are candidates for the last descendant of the language of
the first Neolithic farmers. We have written evidence of Sumerian,
Elamite, Hurrian-Urartian and Hattic, which are all apparently unrelated
to each other. Hattic and Hurrian-Urartian are considered intrusions
from the Caucasus by some scholars; there is some evidence for a
connection between Hurrian-Urartian and Nakh-Daghestanian. Sumerian and
Elamite could likewise be intrusions from the Iranian highlands. So, it
is perhaps not unlikely that the language of the first Neolithic farmers
was indeed some sort of Pre-Proto-Kartvelian - which would give us a
HUGE Macro-Kartvelian family if we include Neolithic Europe! (But
perhaps it is just my personal Kartvelophilia which taints my
speculations...)

One issue is where to put Basque in this picture. Basically, I see five
possibilities:

1. Basque is the last residue of one of the language families brought in
by the Neolithic farmers. This is parsimonious; the Basques seem
genetically descended from those farmers. In this scenario, Iberian
would probably be related to Basque, for which there is some evidence
though no proof. This scenario is also supported by the evidence of old
geographic names in Sardinia which look similar to Basque and Iberian
ones, but as the controversy about the Old European Hydronymy (claimed
for IE by some scholars and for Basque by others, and considered unreal
by yet others) shows, that kind of evidence is not particularly reliable.

2. Basque arrived together with IE as the language of an allied but
linguistically unrelated tribe; in this case, it could be distantly
related to NWC and NEC. But I consider this less likely; the mottled
retinues of Attila and Genghis Khan are not really good models because
the Proto-Indo-Europeans were not much like Huns or Mongols.

3. Basque descends from the language of a hunter-gatherer tribe that
survived in the Pyrenees and turned into warriors (it is not really a
long way from being a hunter to being a warrior) who conquered the
neighbouring farmer communities and imposed their language on them.
Possible, but uncertain.

4. Basque and Iberian were brought in by immigrants from Northwestern
Africa, for whom there apparently is some genetic evidence.

5. Basque and Iberian descend, like Paleo-Sardinian, from the languages
of the "Sea Peoples" mentioned in Egyptian chronicles. The name of
Sardinia sounds much like _Šrdŝ_, the name of one of the "Sea Peoples".
These probably originated in the Aegean. But we have no positive
evidence of "Sea Peoples" anywhere in Spain, so this scenario is not
very likely. Also, the _Šrdŝ_ may have conquered the island, gave it
their name - and adopted the language of their subjects, as the Franks
did in Gaul or the Turkic Bulgars on the Balkan Peninsula. Or they *did*
impose their language - but the names are from an earlier time! Also,
the Aegean origin of the "Sea Peoples", combined with the fact that one
of them is named _Twrš3_, who may be the Tyrsenians, suggests that we
are dealing with the family here to which Etruscan belongs - to which
Basque is of course unrelated!

Only in scenario 1, Basque would be the residue of a larger Neolithic
family. This family would then have nothing to do with Kartvelian, of
course! And scenario 1 is IMHO the most likely of the five.

On 04/02/2018 17:36, David McCann wrote:

> On Sat, 3 Feb 2018 18:39:34 +0100
> Jörg Rhiemeier <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> I wish to talk about a matter that currently does somersaults in my
>> head, and that are Paleo-European languages - languages that were
>> spoken in Europe before the spread of IE and Uralic.
> This is a blast from the past for me! Starčevo and LBK take me back to
> my undergraduate days.

So what ideas did you have about their languages?

>> Now to my conlang projects connected with all this. I have been
>> fancying that the LBK people spoke a language related to Kartvelian
>> (I admit that this is nothing but speculation, fueled by genetic
>> similarities between LBK and Georgians), but what did the Cardial
>> people speak? This ties up with the question of the origin of Basque,
>> because the most parsimonious idea is that Basque is a surviving
>> Cardial language (genetics have shown that they descend from
>> Neolithic farmers rather than hunter-gatherers). In such a scenario,
>> Basque would probably be related to Iberian. But there are other
>> possibilities:
> I'd definitely go for Cardial = Basque = North Caucasian, myself.
> Remember that North Caucasian languages like Hattic and Hurrian were
> widespread in Anatolia and Syria well into the Bronze Age.

As I wrote above, I consider a Basque-Cardial connection most likely.
However, I do not see a close connection between Basque and "North
Caucasian", which is in itself an uncertain entity. Of course, there are
people who lump these together as "Vasco-Caucasian", but the evidence I
have seen so far has failed to convince me.

> In Antiquity, Kartvelian seems to have been no more widespread than it
> is today. But Etruscan seems a much better prospect. Etruscan and
> Rhaetic in the West, Lemnian in the East, seem like the remnants of
> some early expansion.

As I said above, I consider it likely that this family spread out of NW
Anatolia around 1200 BC, probably as part of the "Sea Peoples" incursions.

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