Paleo-European languages

[Talskubilos]

But there almost certainly was no satem IE language so far in the west, as T. claims as the origin of the name of Sardinia!

Why could you be so sure?

[Richard W]

But there almost certainly was no satem IE language so far in the west, as T. claims as the origin of the name of Sardinia!

Why could you be so sure?

What do you mean by 'satem'? For example, is Luwian a satem language? I don't think it is useful to call Luwian 'satem', and in that more restrictive sense, I think a satem language so far west is unlikely. However, one that softened the palato-velars is merely not probable.

[Moose-tache]

Has no one considered the possibility that, out of the nine peoples mentioned as "sea peoples," and out of the literally countless place names in the Mediterranean Basin, it just might be that š3rdn and Sardinia are a coincidence?

EDIT: to show how easy it is to come up with the correspondences, I grabbed another name for the Sea Peoples, š3krš3, and thought of a place that I think sounds most similar: Sicily. But before I could post it as a silly example of over-eager pattern finding, I found that this is also a theory that people have proposed! Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

[Talskubilos]

What do you mean by 'satem'? For example, is Luwian a satem language? I don't think it is useful to call Luwian 'satem', and in that more restrictive sense, I think a satem language so far west is unlikely. However, one that softened the palato-velars is merely not probable.

I'd call "IE-satem" a language where the output of traditional "palato-velars" and labiovelars are respectively sibilants and plain velars. For examples, Cisalpine Gaulish karnitu '(he) erected' and Lepontic karite '(he) made' can be readily explained as a satem loanword from IE *kʷer- 'to make' > Sanskrit karóti, kr̥ɳóti 'to do, to make'.

In addition, I've found some loanwords from Baltic or a Baltoid language in Etruscan and Gaulish itself. For example, French bourbe 'sludge' derives from Gaulish *borwā (f.), which in turn would be a loanword from Baltic *purwā > Lithuanian pũrva 'smudge, dregs', Latvian pùrvs, purve 'morass, swamp'.

[WeepingElf]

Has no one considered the possibility that, out of the nine peoples mentioned as "sea peoples," and out of the literally countless place names in the Mediterranean Basin, it just might be that š3rdn and Sardinia are a coincidence?

In fact this is IMHO the most likely explanation.

[Talskubilos]

Has no one considered the possibility that, out of the nine peoples mentioned as "sea peoples," and out of the literally countless place names in the Mediterranean Basin, it just might be that š3rdn and Sardinia are a coincidence?

Another "coincidence" links the Tyrrhenian Sea to another Sea People, the twrš3.

[WeepingElf]

Adding more names to your consideration makes chance resemblances more likely, not less, so it weakens your case rather than strengthening it. That said, some people opine that the Sea Peoples spoke Luwian, which, while not really a satem language, at least develops its palatovelars into coronal affricates. However, if that was the case, Etruscan cannot come from there as Etruscan is as surely non-IE as Luwian is IE (yet, there are people who nevertheless claim just that). If you ask me, this "Luwiomania", the assumption that everyone in the Late Bronze Age Aegean who didn't demonstrably spoke someone else spoke Luwian, is misguided, and I see no reason to assume that Luwian was spoken anywhere else than where it is attested in writing.

What can perhaps be salvaged from the paper I linked to above are the list of alleged Etruscan-Anatolian cognates (once one has weeded out the Sumerograms, of course) as evidence for Etruscan originating in NW Anatolia (as I said earlier, I entertain the notion that the Roman foundation myth goes back to a Trojan origin of the Etruscans who ruled pre-Republican Rome, and Proto-Tyrsenian was the language of Homeric Troy) and having borrowed these from Anatolian languages back then. Alas, I know too little about either language to tell whether these resemblances are not spurious.

[Talskubilos]

Adding more names to your consideration makes chance resemblances more likely, not less, so it weakens your case rather than strengthening it.

The fact two major islands (Sardinia and Sicily) and the sea between them (Tyrrhenian) would derive their name from the Sea Peoples doesn't seem to me a coincidence.

That said, some people opine that the Sea Peoples spoke Luwian, which, while not really a satem language, at least develops its palatovelars into coronal affricates. However, if that was the case, Etruscan cannot come from there as Etruscan is as surely non-IE as Luwian is IE (yet, there are people who nevertheless claim just that). If you ask me, this "Luwiomania", the assumption that everyone in the Late Bronze Age Aegean who didn't demonstrably spoke someone else spoke Luwian, is misguided, and I see no reason to assume that Luwian was spoken anywhere else than where it is attested in writing.

What can perhaps be salvaged from the paper I linked to above are the list of alleged Etruscan-Anatolian cognates (once one has weeded out the Sumerograms, of course) as evidence for Etruscan originating in NW Anatolia (as I said earlier, I entertain the notion that the Roman foundation myth goes back to a Trojan origin of the Etruscans who ruled pre-Republican Rome, and Proto-Tyrsenian was the language of Homeric Troy) and having borrowed these from Anatolian languages back then. Alas, I know too little about either language to tell whether these resemblances are not spurious.

Actually, I think the Italic word for 'iron', *ferso- 'iron' (Latin ferrum) was a loanword from Paleo-Etruscan, which in turn would have borrowed it from Luwian *parza- 'iron ore' (see M. Valério & I. Yakubovich's paper). This is a Wanderwort which also reached to Akkadian parzillu- and Sumerian barzil and I presume it derives from IE *bhrēK'- 'to shine'.

[WeepingElf]

Adding more names to your consideration makes chance resemblances more likely, not less, so it weakens your case rather than strengthening it.

The fact two major islands (Sardinia and Sicily) and the sea between them (Tyrrhenian) would derive their name from the Sea Peoples doesn't seem to me a coincidence.

Indeed, it is a possible scenario that the Sea Peoples, after being beaten out of Egypt, settled in the lands surrounding the Tyrrhenian Sea - Etruria, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicilia. We know hardly anything about Paleo-Sardinian, nor of Sicanian; in this scenario, those languages would be sisters of Etruscan. Some scholars attempt to connect Paleo-Sardinian with Iberian, but that is an attempt to unite two largely unknown entities, which means hardly anything.

[zompist]

That said, some people opine that the Sea Peoples spoke Luwian, which, while not really a satem language, at least develops its palatovelars into coronal affricates. However, if that was the case, Etruscan cannot come from there as Etruscan is as surely non-IE as Luwian is IE (yet, there are people who nevertheless claim just that).

Why would the Sea Peoples speak just one language?

So far as I know, it's the consensus that one component, the Peleset, settled in Palestine and became known as the Philistines (Heb. Pəleštīm). From commonalities in pottery, mostly, it's commonly assumed that they were originally Greek. (Which is not to say any other Sea Peoples were Greek or even IE.) They lost their original language and later spoke a dialect of Canaanite.

[Znex]

That said, some people opine that the Sea Peoples spoke Luwian, which, while not really a satem language, at least develops its palatovelars into coronal affricates. However, if that was the case, Etruscan cannot come from there as Etruscan is as surely non-IE as Luwian is IE (yet, there are people who nevertheless claim just that).

Why would the Sea Peoples speak just one language?

So far as I know, it's the consensus that one component, the Peleset, settled in Palestine and became known as the Philistines (Heb. Pəleštīm). From commonalities in pottery, mostly, it's commonly assumed that they were originally Greek. (Which is not to say any other Sea Peoples were Greek or even IE.) They lost their original language and later spoke a dialect of Canaanite.

Ooh, I can't believe no one's done a conlang based on that idea: Mycenaean Greek but thoroughly Semiticised before the Alexandrian campaigns.

[WeepingElf]

That said, some people opine that the Sea Peoples spoke Luwian, which, while not really a satem language, at least develops its palatovelars into coronal affricates. However, if that was the case, Etruscan cannot come from there as Etruscan is as surely non-IE as Luwian is IE (yet, there are people who nevertheless claim just that).

Why would the Sea Peoples speak just one language?

Indeed, why should they? They were apparently a confederation of several different peoples, each with their own language, and these languages may even have been unrelated. Note that I am not a Luviomaniac (otherwise, I'd not call them that way ), and seriously doubt the idea that they spoke Luwian. Luwian was, as far as we can tell, only spoken in southern Anatolia as a native language, though it had some wider distribution as a trade language.

So far as I know, it's the consensus that one component, the Peleset, settled in Palestine and became known as the Philistines (Heb. Pəleštīm). From commonalities in pottery, mostly, it's commonly assumed that they were originally Greek. (Which is not to say any other Sea Peoples were Greek or even IE.) They lost their original language and later spoke a dialect of Canaanite.

The Peleset being Greek is an interesting idea (also, as Znex observed, an interesting idea for a conlang!). How much linguistic evidence (names, loanwords, etc.) is there to bolster this hypothesis?

[zompist]

So far as I know, it's the consensus that one component, the Peleset, settled in Palestine and became known as the Philistines (Heb. Pəleštīm). From commonalities in pottery, mostly, it's commonly assumed that they were originally Greek. (Which is not to say any other Sea Peoples were Greek or even IE.) They lost their original language and later spoke a dialect of Canaanite.

The Peleset being Greek is an interesting idea (also, as Znex observed, an interesting idea for a conlang!). How much linguistic evidence (names, loanwords, etc.) is there to bolster this hypothesis?

If you have an Academia account, see here. (That seems to be an amateur work, but the other sources I googled were similar.)

There's not much evidence of the language at all, and because of that there's a tendency to play hunt-the-dictionaries. Still, an IE connection is a priori plausible. We know that the Sea Peoples came from the west by sea, and were perceived by both Egyptians and Hebrews as foreign. There's not a lot of non-IE candidates that way. (Except the Etruscans, but surely that's more of a stretch— they were not known as mariners.)

[WeepingElf]

So far as I know, it's the consensus that one component, the Peleset, settled in Palestine and became known as the Philistines (Heb. Pəleštīm). From commonalities in pottery, mostly, it's commonly assumed that they were originally Greek. (Which is not to say any other Sea Peoples were Greek or even IE.) They lost their original language and later spoke a dialect of Canaanite.

The Peleset being Greek is an interesting idea (also, as Znex observed, an interesting idea for a conlang!). How much linguistic evidence (names, loanwords, etc.) is there to bolster this hypothesis?

If you have an Academia account, see here. (That seems to be an amateur work, but the other sources I googled were similar.)

Who has hacked your account?! I always had experienced you as healthily skeptical (i.e. skeptical but not pedantic) about such things, but this is definitely the work of a crackpot. He makes his first mistake on page 2, where he deduces the name "Philistines" from a "Proto-Celtic" root *pell- - but Proto-Celtic had no *p! Further down in the text, he derives the Phoenician abjad from the "Danubian script" which he claims to have been a logography for PIE - in fact, this "script" is not only undeciphered, but most relevant scholars doubt that these markings were a script at all. And then, in Chapter 2, he draws the Olmecs into it! That alone is worth at least 500 millinylands!

I am sorry, but this is just crazy.

[zompist]

I didn't read very far, so I didn't notice the Olmec stuff. As I said, I was Googling things; that page seemed to list what little evidence there is. All the pages I found talked about "saren" and "koba", indicating that there isn't that much else to talk about. If you look at the Wikipedia article, most of the references are forty years old. And honestly the official work doesn't seem that different from the cranks. (E.g., on that page, note Bonfante's making a big deal out of finding a place name Palaeste in Epirus.) I already said people were playing hunt-the-dictionaries; when the entire corpus is a few dozen words, it's going to be hard to find anything really solid.

[Travis B.]

Now we have people parroting Edo Nyland's crackpottery...

[Ares Land]

Egyptologist Claire Lalouette in L'empire des Ramsès mention the Sea People as Indo-European, unfortunately with no cite. (I suppose she reasons that there aren't a lot of candidates).

My time searching in that book wasn't entirely lost, though! I learned that the Egyptian army kept precise records of how many Sea People penises they cut (two piles of respectively 12,868 and 12,535 after their first battle). (Our conworlds aren't weird enough)

French Wikipedia mentions that the idea of the Philistines being Myceneans Greeks, while long consensual, is no longer current, and cites Aren M. Maeir, « Iron Age I Philistines: Entangled Identities in a Transformative Period », dans Assaf Yasur-Landau, Eric H. Cline et Yorke Rowan (dir.), The Social Archaeology of the Levant: From Prehistory to the Present, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 310-323
(I don't have access to that, but apparently plenty of ethnic groups had Mycenean-style pottery, and there's no linguistic evidence).

There are apparently enough resemblances: Ekwesh - Achaeans, Sicily, Sardinia, Philistines, also some other people that sounds like Danaeans that academia grudgingly accepts possible connections (I, myself, have no opinion on the matter. It's possible, but there's just not enough evidence)

The Etruscans, or rather whoever their ancestors were, can't be entirely ruled out, it seems. The proto-Villanovan culture (possibly the ancestors of Etruscans) appeared at about the same time.
The Etruscans were occasional seafarers; the Greeks, indeed, feared Etruscan pirates greatly. (Greek writers tell us they tied their captives to decaying corpses. Our conworlds really aren't weird enough.) But that was centuries later.

[Talskubilos]

We know hardly anything about Paleo-Sardinian, nor of Sicanian; in this scenario, those languages would be sisters of Etruscan. Some scholars attempt to connect Paleo-Sardinian with Iberian, but that is an attempt to unite two largely unknown entities, which means hardly anything.

Although we can hardly expect Paleo-Sardinian to be a single language, there're some likely connections, namely the voiced retroflex plosive shared with Sicily and some parts of Italy and with correspondences in Asturian and Aragonese Romances.

[Ares Land]

We know hardly anything about Paleo-Sardinian, nor of Sicanian; in this scenario, those languages would be sisters of Etruscan. Some scholars attempt to connect Paleo-Sardinian with Iberian, but that is an attempt to unite two largely unknown entities, which means hardly anything.

Although we can hardly expect Paleo-Sardinian to be a single language, there're some likely connections, namely the voiced retroflex plosive shared with Sicily and some parts of Italy and with correspondences in Asturian and Aragonese Romances.

Why couldn't it just be areal? Compare, for instance, the uvular rhotic in Western Europe.

[Ares Land]

š3rdn *k´erdh- 'herd' (cfr. Sanskrit śárdha- 'host, troop'). In fact, Basque has the isolated word sarda 'school fish' (Biscayan), in addition to more "metabolized" ones which I won't quote now.

I'd call "IE-satem" a language where the output of traditional "palato-velars" and labiovelars are respectively sibilants and plain velars. For examples, Cisalpine Gaulish karnitu '(he) erected' and Lepontic karite '(he) made' can be readily explained as a satem loanword from IE *kʷer- 'to make' > Sanskrit karóti, kr̥ɳóti 'to do, to make'.

In addition, I've found some loanwords from Baltic or a Baltoid language in Etruscan and Gaulish itself. For example, French bourbe 'sludge' derives from Gaulish *borwā (f.), which in turn would be a loanword from Baltic *purwā > Lithuanian pũrva 'smudge, dregs', Latvian pùrvs, purve 'morass, swamp'.

What you'd need to prove that claim is a list of regular correspondances. Is there such a list, though?
Same thing for Baltic loans: are there any possible loans in Gaulish with Gaulish initial b- ~ Baltic p- ?

Without such a list, there isn't much that can be proven.

There's also the fact that there were people there before IE people arrived, that they must have spoken something, that that something would possibly have left a few traces, so it's not really that surprising to find words with no clear IE etymology.