Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek (linguisticdiscovery.com)
74 points by axiologist 6 hours ago
kgeist 8 minutes ago
>Words borrowed from a Pre–Indo-European language into Mediterranean languages
> [...] Greek μύρμηξ mýrmēx ‘ant’, Latin formica
Must be an error:
Proto-Celtic *morwos
Proto-Balto-Slavic: *marwis
Proto-Indo-Iranian: *marwiš
Proto-Germanic: *mauraz
Old Armenian: mrǰimn
TFNA 4 hours ago
The title is super-clickbaity, as no Indo-Europeanist working today 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. In fact, within the field "Pre-Greek!" has become something of an inside joke.
The article does eventually mention the current state-of-the-art, but only after perpetuating the misconception for some paragraphs, and that is poor form for a pop-sci article.
kavalg 27 minutes ago
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.
kleton 4 hours ago
> because the Proto-Indo-European language arose in the landlocked steppes, it had no need for—and has no securely reconstructable word for—‘sea’.
No, it is mori, attested in marine, muir, maryadah, mal, morje, etc in farflung IE tongues today.
TFNA 3 hours ago
There are decades of scholarship on those cognates, and a longstanding view that in Proto-Indo-European the word meant simply "large body of water" and not specifically "sea". Moreover, it may be a substrate word borrowed into European IE languages, as the affinity of that Sanskrit word to this cognate set is not very certain.
EdwardDiego 2 hours ago
Yep, it's the same in Māori, a Polynesian language, where "moana" refers to oceans and large lakes alike.
What's really interesting is that in Hawaiian, a close relative with some sound shifts (k/t, l/r, n/ng, so taboo is kapu in Hawaiian, in Māori, tapu, path is ala / ara, the God of the sea is Kanaloa/Tangaroa) they have more than one word for ocean, kai is coastal waters, moana is the deep ocean.
But it makes sense in the geographical context of both societies and how they evolved to their environment, the Hawaiian archipelago is made up of multiple smaller islands separated by waters exposed to the full force of the Pacific, while the archipelago of New Zealand is dominated by two large landmasses separated by a narrow strait that together are about the same area as Germany.
So the Hawaiians remained more tightly wedded to the sea to build their archipelagan societies than the Māori did.
In fact, the Māori lost the knowledge to build ocean-going vessels like the ones that had carried them to New Zealand within a few hundred years because there was no need for it. And their language lost the distinction between "coastal waters" and "ocean" while Hawaiian retained them.
While we have evidence of Māori traveling to Raoul in the Kermadecs early on, as classical Māori culture evolved on much much larger islands, their technology focus on boats switched from ocean going vessels to coastal travel and river travel.
In fact, while "Wai", water, is often considered the Māori word for "river", there's another word that also means river in Māori:
"Ara" - path.
(Of course, it still means a regular path)
dmurray a few seconds ago
medvidek 3 hours ago
You can see the same with the word "sea". Its German equivalent See still mainly means "lake", even though in some fixed expressions it can be translated as "sea" (e.g. Nordsee, Ostsee).
niemandhier an hour ago
Lutzb 2 hours ago
Utilera 2 hours ago
The cognate set is real, but jumping from that to "PIE had a word for the sea" assumes the original meaning was already maritime
kleton 3 hours ago
It is probably not a substrate word, but more likely coming from "dead" water, as in not a moving river.
TFNA 3 hours ago
schoen 4 hours ago
Wiktionary's note says some people think this root may originally have referred to freshwater/inland seas, not oceans.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
In many of the daughter languages it does regularly include saltwater connected to the world ocean (certainly the Latin "Mare Nostrum" for the Mediterranean!); it just seems uncertain from this description whether it necessarily had that sense in PIE.
That doesn't seem like "had no ... word for ... 'sea'" is a very clear or helpful description of the situation, though.
pishpash 2 hours ago
That doesn't mean no word for sea. It means sea refers to any large body of water that you dnn't see the other side of, like in some (all?) other language families. There is no discernible distinction from the perspective of the ancient observer. The Great Lakes look like oceans. Saltiness isn't of great relevance since there are salt lakes, too.
gucci-on-fleek 2 hours ago
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.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoney_language
[1]: https://dictionary.stoneynakoda.org/#/L/m%C3%AEn%C3%AEt%C3%A...
jltsiren 2 hours ago
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.
smitty1e 2 hours ago
> (I actually remember asking the professor why they had a word for "ocean", but he wasn't sure either.)
Most likely a reference to Houses of the Holy.
Utilera 2 hours ago
I think this is mostly a disagreement over semantics.
keiferski an hour ago
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.
svobodamartin 34 minutes ago
First I read pre-geek.
Did we have Ancient geeks?
Utilera 2 hours ago
What I find cool here is how much archaeology you can do without actually digging anything up
noncoml 4 hours ago
> 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 were using 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 borrowing the Phoenician alphabet.
Imagine what an event would look like today that would take us back 200-400 years technologically.
klrefg 2 hours ago
> 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.)
dr_dshiv 3 hours ago
How long ago before the Myceneneans does there remain a coherent concept of Greek-ness?
“Solon, oh Solon!” — are Greeks truly ancient or relative newcomers in a seafaring land?
whythismatters 2 hours ago
See also (hypothetical) Proto-Euphratean, "the lost language hidden within Sumerian": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Euphratean_language