The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread's Sequel

[Travis B.]

Agreed on all points; you know these things better than I do! A language with preserved PIE *p is by the current definition not Celtic, just as a language without the Germanic sound shift isn't Germanic (which is also a good reason not to consider the Nordic Bronze Age a "Germanic" culture even if they probably spoke a language ancestral to Germanic - it is very unlikely that the shift is that old). The *kw > *p change is indeed a common change, and it is not even certain whether it did not happen independently in Gaulish and Brythonic. There is, after all, good reason why the classifications "P-Celtic" and "Q-Celtic" are obsolete! Italo-Celtic is highly uncertain, and looks much like an areal grouping within IE, and the explanation you give for Sequana (which, together with the tribe name Sequani which is obviously derived from it, is the only Gaulish name with the sequence qu I am aware of) makes sense to me.

Isn't this merely a matter of saying "it's not Celtic because I define it as not being Celtic"? You can say nearly anything you want to when you get to set your definitions per your choosing.

About the Nordic Bronze Age, that's saying "it's not Germanic because it predates the Germanic sound shift", which, again, feels like playing around with the language of definitions.

Indeed, it is a matter of definition - when does Celtic (or, for that matter, Germanic) start, and what about those stages of the language that are ancestral to Celtic and no other known languages, but were "not yet Celtic" because PIE *p was still intact? What to call them? "Pre-Celtic"? That is also used for the (unknown) languages, e. g. of the British Isles, that were spoken in later Celtic territory before it became Celtic-speaking. "Ante-Celtic"? Yes, that may work. This is similar to the debate, already carried out by the ancient Greeks, whether Ancient Macedonian was a divergent dialect of Greek or a non-Greek language closely related to Greek. A matter of definition.

"Pre-Proto-Celtic"? Or in the case of languages descended from close relatives of Proto-Celtic rather than Proto-Celtic, "Para-Celtic"? I have seen "Para-Germanic" used to refer to close relatives of Proto-Germanic that did not participate in the Germanic consonant shift (as attested in names and like) and "Para-Mongolic" used to refer to extinct close relatives of Mongolic not descended from Proto-Mongolic per se.

[bradrn]

Isn't this merely a matter of saying "it's not Celtic because I define it as not being Celtic"? You can say nearly anything you want to when you get to set your definitions per your choosing.

About the Nordic Bronze Age, that's saying "it's not Germanic because it predates the Germanic sound shift", which, again, feels like playing around with the language of definitions.

Indeed, it is a matter of definition - when does Celtic (or, for that matter, Germanic) start, and what about those stages of the language that are ancestral to Celtic and no other known languages, but were "not yet Celtic" because PIE *p was still intact? What to call them? "Pre-Celtic"? That is also used for the (unknown) languages, e. g. of the British Isles, that were spoken in later Celtic territory before it became Celtic-speaking. "Ante-Celtic"? Yes, that may work. This is similar to the debate, already carried out by the ancient Greeks, whether Ancient Macedonian was a divergent dialect of Greek or a non-Greek language closely related to Greek. A matter of definition.

"Pre-Proto-Celtic"? Or in the case of languages descended from close relatives of Proto-Celtic rather than Proto-Celtic, "Para-Celtic"? I have seen "Para-Germanic" used to refer to close relatives of Proto-Germanic that did not participate in the Germanic consonant shift (as attested in names and like) and "Para-Mongolic" used to refer to extinct close relatives of Mongolic not descended from Proto-Mongolic per se.

I thought of ‘Para-’ too.

[WeepingElf]

Indeed, it is a matter of definition - when does Celtic (or, for that matter, Germanic) start, and what about those stages of the language that are ancestral to Celtic and no other known languages, but were "not yet Celtic" because PIE *p was still intact? What to call them? "Pre-Celtic"? That is also used for the (unknown) languages, e. g. of the British Isles, that were spoken in later Celtic territory before it became Celtic-speaking. "Ante-Celtic"? Yes, that may work. This is similar to the debate, already carried out by the ancient Greeks, whether Ancient Macedonian was a divergent dialect of Greek or a non-Greek language closely related to Greek. A matter of definition.

"Pre-Proto-Celtic"? Or in the case of languages descended from close relatives of Proto-Celtic rather than Proto-Celtic, "Para-Celtic"? I have seen "Para-Germanic" used to refer to close relatives of Proto-Germanic that did not participate in the Germanic consonant shift (as attested in names and like) and "Para-Mongolic" used to refer to extinct close relatives of Mongolic not descended from Proto-Mongolic per se.

Yes, "Para-" is an established prefix for 'related to but not properly member of'. "Pre-Proto-" is also established but a bit cumbersome.

[Travis B.]

Indeed, it is a matter of definition - when does Celtic (or, for that matter, Germanic) start, and what about those stages of the language that are ancestral to Celtic and no other known languages, but were "not yet Celtic" because PIE *p was still intact? What to call them? "Pre-Celtic"? That is also used for the (unknown) languages, e. g. of the British Isles, that were spoken in later Celtic territory before it became Celtic-speaking. "Ante-Celtic"? Yes, that may work. This is similar to the debate, already carried out by the ancient Greeks, whether Ancient Macedonian was a divergent dialect of Greek or a non-Greek language closely related to Greek. A matter of definition.

"Pre-Proto-Celtic"? Or in the case of languages descended from close relatives of Proto-Celtic rather than Proto-Celtic, "Para-Celtic"? I have seen "Para-Germanic" used to refer to close relatives of Proto-Germanic that did not participate in the Germanic consonant shift (as attested in names and like) and "Para-Mongolic" used to refer to extinct close relatives of Mongolic not descended from Proto-Mongolic per se.

Yes, "Para-" is an established prefix for 'related to but not properly member of'. "Pre-Proto-" is also established but a bit cumbersome.

Strictly speaking the two are not synonyms, as "Pre-Proto-X" indicates something from which something else that is properly "Proto-X" is descended, whereas "Para-X" as you say indicates relation without proper membership.

[WeepingElf]

Yes, "Para-" is an established prefix for 'related to but not properly member of'. "Pre-Proto-" is also established but a bit cumbersome.

Strictly speaking the two are not synonyms, as "Pre-Proto-X" indicates something from which something else that is properly "Proto-X" is descended, whereas "Para-X" as you say indicates relation without proper membership.

You must have misunderstood me. Of course, they aren't synonyms - it is just what you say. I never said that "Pre-Proto-X" and "Para-X" were synonyms.

[Travis B.]

Yes, "Para-" is an established prefix for 'related to but not properly member of'. "Pre-Proto-" is also established but a bit cumbersome.

Strictly speaking the two are not synonyms, as "Pre-Proto-X" indicates something from which something else that is properly "Proto-X" is descended, whereas "Para-X" as you say indicates relation without proper membership.

You must have misunderstood me. Of course, they aren't synonyms - it is just what you say. I never said that "Pre-Proto-X" and "Para-X" were synonyms.

I just wanted to clarify, that's all.

[WeepingElf]

Strictly speaking the two are not synonyms, as "Pre-Proto-X" indicates something from which something else that is properly "Proto-X" is descended, whereas "Para-X" as you say indicates relation without proper membership.

You must have misunderstood me. Of course, they aren't synonyms - it is just what you say. I never said that "Pre-Proto-X" and "Para-X" were synonyms.

I just wanted to clarify, that's all.

OK.

[þeprussianfrog]

Since the topic of Lusitanian was brought up recently, just as I was shaping my Lusitanian conlang...
Well, for this conlang I went for "Para-Celtic" route, essentially quite Celtic-like but with a few different sound changes, and closer to Celtic than to Italic even in a hypothetical Italo-Celtic system.

[WeepingElf]

How crazy do you think is the idea that Italic and Celtic and, perhaps to a lesser degree, Germanic, are influenced by a substratum related to Anatolian? The scholars Jaan Puhvel and Craig Melchert have adduced some lexical evidence (words the western IE languages seem to share with Hittite) for what they call "western affinity" of Anatolian, Annelies Kammenhuber (who opposed the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis) saw Anatolian as a "western" branch, and I have a feeling that there is something "western" about Anatolian, though I can't pinpoint it. So what, in your eyes, speaks for an Anatolian-related substratum in Western Europe?

[Travis B.]

How crazy do you think is the idea that Italic and Celtic and, perhaps to a lesser degree, Germanic, are influenced by a substratum related to Anatolian? The scholars Jaan Puhvel and Craig Melchert have adduced some lexical evidence (words the western IE languages seem to share with Hittite) for what they call "western affinity" of Anatolian, Annelies Kammenhuber (who opposed the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis) saw Anatolian as a "western" branch, and I have a feeling that there is something "western" about Anatolian, though I can't pinpoint it. So what, in your eyes, speaks for an Anatolian-related substratum in Western Europe?

IIRC Anatolian most likely reached Anatolia through the Balkans, so it is not inconceivable that there were para-Anatolian languages in more westerly parts of Europe.

[WeepingElf]

How crazy do you think is the idea that Italic and Celtic and, perhaps to a lesser degree, Germanic, are influenced by a substratum related to Anatolian? The scholars Jaan Puhvel and Craig Melchert have adduced some lexical evidence (words the western IE languages seem to share with Hittite) for what they call "western affinity" of Anatolian, Annelies Kammenhuber (who opposed the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis) saw Anatolian as a "western" branch, and I have a feeling that there is something "western" about Anatolian, though I can't pinpoint it. So what, in your eyes, speaks for an Anatolian-related substratum in Western Europe?

IIRC Anatolian most likely reached Anatolia through the Balkans, so it is not inconceivable that there were para-Anatolian languages in more westerly parts of Europe.

Yes. Some people say that "Proto-Indo-Anatolian" was spoken in the western Caucasus because "the genes say so" (but the genes of course say nothing about languages!), and Anatolian moved directly to Anatolia from there without a detour through the steppe, only "IE proper" moved from there into the steppe, where its speakers mixed with an East European population related to the people who may have been spoken Proto-Uralic. But I don't think that way. The linguistic evidence suggests a movement from the west through the Balkans, even if there was no major immigration from the steppe into Anatolia around 3000 BC. But languages can easily spread without massive migration by language shift, and indeed the Hittite tradition speaks of "500 families" founding the Hittite nation, i.e. perhaps about 10,000 or 20,000 people, who would have hardly left a mark on the gene pool of Anatolia, where probably about 1 or 2 million people lived at that time, so the Anatolian languages spread mainly by language shift. The Hittite tradition also says that the ancestors of the Hittites moved along the western shore of a sea, which could in theory have been the Caspian Sea, but more likely was the Black Sea.

And the western Caucasus of course was the homeland of Proto-NW-Caucasian, and the people migrating from there into Anatolia may have spoken a language ancestral to Hattic, about which we know only very little, but which apparently shows signs of being related or at least typologically or areally connected to NW Causasian. And then there are the bits of morphology which IE (including Anatolian) seems to share with Uralic, which suggests either a common ancestor of or intense contact between PIE and Proto-Uralic. My personal interpretation of the genetic evidence follows a hypothesis that C. C. Uhlenbeck proposed already in the 1930s (on purely linguistic grounds, of course; he couldn't know about the findings of the geneticists) according to which PIE was a Para-Uralic language on a Para-NW-Caucasian substratum.

From another angle, it appears that there is a "western" and an "eastern" type of IE languages, the former group consisting of Italic, Celtic and Germanic, the latter of Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian (Tocharian is an oddball), though I currently can't say which features define that, and the western group is typologically closer to Anatolian than the eastern group which seems to be closer to Late PIE. Of course, the "western" group is still more closely related to the "eastern" group than to Anatolian, so the resemblance between the western group and Anatolian is best explained by a lost Para-Anatolian language in western Europe. The best candidate for that Para-Anatolian language would be that of the Bell Beaker people, which seems to have left traces in the "Old European Hydronymy" (if that's a thing at all) and the lexical resemblances listed by Puhvel and Melchert in their "western affinities" papers. If the Bell Beaker language moved west along the Danube (while Corded Ware moved westward north of the Carpathians), Anatolian could easily have branched from that movement. Also, Bell Beaker and Anatolian would have descended from a western outlier of Yamnaya, while Corded Ware came from the heartland, and it is well known that outliers tend to be linguistically more conservative than the heartland, which we see in Anatolian vs. Late PIE.

[Richard W]

and indeed the Hittite tradition speaks of "500 families" founding the Hittite nation, i.e. perhaps about 10,000 or 20,000 people,

The Hittites were a minority of Anatolian speakers.

[WeepingElf]

and indeed the Hittite tradition speaks of "500 families" founding the Hittite nation, i.e. perhaps about 10,000 or 20,000 people,

The Hittites were a minority of Anatolian speakers.

Yes. Luwian was probably spoken by more people; this is a well-known fact.

[hwhatting]

My view is rather that any shared features between Anatolian and Western IE languages are retentions of PIE features that were lost in the Eastern group (Satem plus Greek) due to common areal developments.
But I'm open on the route of migration, and a lot of pre-Greek placenames look like they could be (para-)Anatolian, which would make more sense with a Western migration route than an Eastern route.

[WeepingElf]

My view is rather that any shared features between Anatolian and Western IE languages are retentions of PIE features that were lost in the Eastern group (Satem plus Greek) due to common areal developments.

Fair. The standard reconstruction of PIE is based chiefly on Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, which before the discovery of Hittite were the oldest IE languages known, and may include common areal developments of these. Yet, it seems as if the "eastern" features were lost in the western languages, as for instance Latin preserves residues of both the aorist and the perfect in its preterite (what is traditionally called the "perfect" in Latin grammar, but "preterite" fits the bill better; the Celtic preterite is largely from the aorist alone and the Germanic one from the perfect). Germanic, especially, looks like a language originally close to Balto-Slavic that later converged to Italic and Celtic or whatever attracted those (the Germanic sound shift of course plays no role in these considerations, as it is not only unique to Germanic anyway, but also probably a late development).

But I'm open on the route of migration, and a lot of pre-Greek placenames look like they could be (para-)Anatolian, which would make more sense with a Western migration route than an Eastern route.

An Anatolian or Para-Anatolian language has been conjectured in Greece, yes, but there is IMHO little merit to that hypothesis. The Pre-Greek language seems to have been closely related to Minoan (because the same kind of names are found on Crete, too), which shows no signs of being an IE language. It is currently fashionable to consider every language of the Aegean region that isn't demonstrably something else a descendant of Luwian; Fred Woudhuizen has even tried to demonstrate that Etruscan descended from Luwian, which is of course just crazy, though he may be onto something: if Etruscan descended from the language of Troy, it could contain numerous Luwian loanwords that would have misled Woudhuizen into assuming that Etruscan descended from Luwian (if his Etruscan words aren't just spurious - the meanings of many Etruscan words are still controversial). One day, I want to try writing a satirical essay "proving" that Greek, the sole language of the region not yet claimed for Luwian, descended from Luwian, too!

[þeprussianfrog]

Isn't there a hypothesis that Elymian, a poorly attested language of Sicily, was in fact Anatolian?

[bradrn]

Germanic, especially, looks like a language originally close to Balto-Slavic that later converged to Italic and Celtic or whatever attracted those

Say more?

[WeepingElf]

Germanic, especially, looks like a language originally close to Balto-Slavic that later converged to Italic and Celtic or whatever attracted those

Say more?

Germanic has the dative plural in *-mos, like Balto-Slavic, the *o > *a merger, and a few common loanwords. Both branches probably descend from dialects of the Corded Ware culture. This, however, is not sufficient to construct a "Germano-Balto-Slavic" node, but it may mean that Germanic and Balto-Slavic evolved from similar, neighbouring dialects of PIE - before they were torn apart from each other by the "kentum"/"satem" isogloss.

[WeepingElf]

The Balto-Slavic languages appear to be more conservative than Italic, Celtic and Germanic. Lithuanian is famously archaic, though claims of mutual intelligibility with Sanskrit or with PIE are probably massively exaggerated. However, the changes that drew away the western language from the Late PIE model may have been at least partly too late to be meaningfully attributed to a Para-Anatolian substratum (but that substratum may have been intact in many places as late as the end of the Bronze Age, as Celtic and Germanic at least do not appear to have expanded earlier; the controversial "Nordwestblock", a proposed IE language neither Celtic nor Germanic, conjectured to have been spoken in the Low Countries and nearby parts of France and Germany well into the Iron Age, may have been such a residue, for instance), and Balto-Slavic languages have later simplified their verb (which is where the impact of the substratum is most pronounced, as Anatolian has a simpler verb, too, and seems never to have had the tripartite verb aspect system of Late PIE) as well.

[Talskubilos]

Italic Lusitanian is a hypothesis I heard of, and it definitely sounds like apotentially possible thing. Same with Belgic substrate being possibly Italic. But both could also be para-Celtic that never lost the original p, or an entirely different western Indo-European branch.

Lusitanian was an Italoid (i.e. akin to Italic) language. Apparently, it had a Gallaecian (a Q-Celtic language) superstrate, but it was also next to the P-Celtic Asturic.

Or, considering the Italo-Celtic hypothesis, they could be some "third branch", equidistant to Italic and Celtic or closer to either of those, or just outside this group...

I don't think there was an Italo-Celtic node but rather an Italic or Italoid substrate/adstrate in Celtic, most noticeable in the Iberian Peninsula.