Pre Italo-Celtic IE languages

[Otto Kretschmer]

Were there any IE languages in Western Europe before the arrival of Celtic and Italic?

[keenir]

Were there any IE languages in Western Europe before the arrival of Celtic and Italic?

Yes.
I used to think Welsh was one such language, but then I learned it was in fact a Celtic language.

Basque isn't an IE language, but it and any relatives it may've once had in its isolate family, were present.

Some say the Beaker peoples spoke IE languages that haven't surviving members anymore.

I've heard that the hydronymy (singular or plural) is evidence of either pre-existing languages' words, or influence from those languages onto the language branches which swamped them.

(a good reference or place to look for answers to questions like that, are threads like Paleo-European Languages)

[Talskubilos]

My personal belief is Italo-Celtic doesn't exist as such, but there would be instead an Italic substrate/adstrate in Proto-Celtic.

[Moose-tache]

Celtic and Italic languages were in central Europe by 1000 BC at the latest (which means they were almost certainly preceded by pre-Germanic). As for places like France, Iberia, and Great Britain, no. There is no clear evidence of IE languages in these regions before Celtic. But what would we even look for? Written evidence records only non-IE languages (besides Celtic), and hydronomy is pretty useless at demonstrating historical stratigraphy (if you asked a native Australian what language "River Derwent" comes from, they would be correct in saying it's from a Germanic language called English).

Do you have any specific reason for this question? Maybe we can help more.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Celtic and Italic languages were in central Europe by 1000 BC at the latest (which means they were almost certainly preceded by pre-Germanic). As for places like France, Iberia, and Great Britain, no. There is no clear evidence of IE languages in these regions before Celtic. But what would we even look for? Written evidence records only non-IE languages (besides Celtic), and hydronomy is pretty useless at demonstrating historical stratigraphy (if you asked a native Australian what language "River Derwent" comes from, they would be correct in saying it's from a Germanic language called English).

Do you have any specific reason for this question? Maybe we can help more.

Someone mentioned in another thread that there might have been IE languages spoken in Western Europe before Italic and Celtic that were related to Anatolian languages. Wanna know if there is any evidence for this

[Moose-tache]

I assume they were talking about either:

a) hypothetical languages of Old Europe and the later Bell Beaker people, neither of which have left behind clear linguistic data.*

b) Tyrrhenian languages; the Etruscans had a legend of coming from anatolia, but there is no linguistic evidence to back this up.**


* Hydronomy not withstanding
** "Lemnian" is almost certainly just Etruscan, not its distant relative, perhaps brought to the Aegean by sailors serving on Greek vessels.

[Talskubilos]

Were there any IE languages in Western Europe before the arrival of Celtic and Italic?

There're some traces of an IE-satem Baltoid (i.e. akin to Baltic) language in loanwords into Gaulish and Basque.

[WeepingElf]

Celtic and Italic languages were in central Europe by 1000 BC at the latest (which means they were almost certainly preceded by pre-Germanic). As for places like France, Iberia, and Great Britain, no. There is no clear evidence of IE languages in these regions before Celtic. But what would we even look for? Written evidence records only non-IE languages (besides Celtic), and hydronomy is pretty useless at demonstrating historical stratigraphy (if you asked a native Australian what language "River Derwent" comes from, they would be correct in saying it's from a Germanic language called English).

Do you have any specific reason for this question? Maybe we can help more.

Someone mentioned in another thread that there might have been IE languages spoken in Western Europe before Italic and Celtic that were related to Anatolian languages. Wanna know if there is any evidence for this

That was me. It is just a hypothesis I am researching, and using in my main conlanging project; yet, the evidence is meagre, and especially the "related to Anatolian" part will be extremely hard to prove or disprove because for that, some old river names and loanwords in Italic, Celtic or Germanic won't suffice. It just seems plausible to me that the old division of IE into Anatolian and the rest, being the earliest division within IE we know of, may correspond to the earliest division of the Yamnaya daughter cultures observed in the archaeological records.

[Talskubilos]

That was me. It is just a hypothesis I am researching, and using in my main conlanging project; yet, the evidence is meagre, and especially the "related to Anatolian" part will be extremely hard to prove or disprove because for that, some old river names and loanwords in Italic, Celtic or Germanic won't suffice.

In fact, some scholars linked "Tartessian" (the language of SW Iberian inscriptions) to Anatolian, but this research line has proven to be unfruitful.

[WeepingElf]

That was me. It is just a hypothesis I am researching, and using in my main conlanging project; yet, the evidence is meagre, and especially the "related to Anatolian" part will be extremely hard to prove or disprove because for that, some old river names and loanwords in Italic, Celtic or Germanic won't suffice.

In fact, some scholars linked "Tartessian" (the language of SW Iberian inscriptions) to Anatolian, but this research line has proven to be unfruitful.

That sounds interesting - IMHO Tartessian is a possible candidate for a "Southern IE" language. Can you point me at some research into that, even if you say it was "unfruitful"?

[Moose-tache]

This is always a good place to start.

Basically, we know some of the nominal endings of Tartessian because of the nature of the inscriptions, and they look vaguely IE. There appears to be a genitive plural in -n, a dative singular in -ui, and a nominative singular in -os. The thing is, most of these examples are known from only a few words (maybe even one), with plenty of counter examples that don't look very IE. So we could be tricking ourselves by assuming it's IE and seeing the data in that light. It's also possible that the proper nouns are just Celtic names anyway, since Iberia was highly diverse by this time.

[Talskubilos]

Can you point me at some research into that, even if you say it was "unfruitful"?

Wikander, “Sur la langue des inscriptions sud-hispaniques,” Studia Linguistica 20, 1966, pp. 1-8.

“Sur la langue des inscriptions sud-hispaniques” (1966) presents an analysis of funerary inscriptions from southern Spain with regard to the frequency of a final -be and the variety of preceding sounds. Wikander concluded, rightly in the author's opinion, that this -be represents Indo-European -bhi, which occurs in both Mycenian and Homeric Greek. Wikander argued that the word keonii corresponds to Ved. śaye and Gk. keītai, while the word keonabe is an equivalent, in the instrumental, of Skt. śayana “bed, couch” and Av. sayana- “habitat, country.”

https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/ ... ig-COM_881

[WeepingElf]

Can you point me at some research into that, even if you say it was "unfruitful"?

Wikander, “Sur la langue des inscriptions sud-hispaniques,” Studia Linguistica 20, 1966, pp. 1-8.

“Sur la langue des inscriptions sud-hispaniques” (1966) presents an analysis of funerary inscriptions from southern Spain with regard to the frequency of a final -be and the variety of preceding sounds. Wikander concluded, rightly in the author's opinion, that this -be represents Indo-European -bhi, which occurs in both Mycenian and Homeric Greek. Wikander argued that the word keonii corresponds to Ved. śaye and Gk. keītai, while the word keonabe is an equivalent, in the instrumental, of Skt. śayana “bed, couch” and Av. sayana- “habitat, country.”

https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/ ... ig-COM_881

How does the above show a specific link to Anatolian, rather than just IE in general? Vedic, Avestan and Greek aren't Anatolian languages, and all the items cited are common IE (AFAIK, *-bhi does not even occur in Anatolian, so this would even point to a Northern (non-Anatolian) IE language - but I may be wrong on this one). The above suggests that "Tartessian" (a misnomer anyway, as Tartessos is held to have been in the Guadalquivir delta, while the "Tartessian" inscriptions are found further west, most of them in southern Portugal) was an IE language, but I see nothing which points specifically to the Anatolian branch.

[Moose-tache]

How does the above show a specific link to Anatolian, rather than just IE in general?

You were the one who mentioned Anatolian in western Europe.

[WeepingElf]

How does the above show a specific link to Anatolian, rather than just IE in general?

You were the one who mentioned Anatolian in western Europe.

Not Anatolian proper, only something related to it more closely than to the known non-Anatolian IE languages. But T. said that "some scholars" proposed a link between Tartessian and Anatolian which was "unfruitful", and when I asked him for that, he replied with his reference to Wikander - who linked Tartessian with IE, but not specifically with Anatolian. T. thus did not really answer my question, that was the point.

Indeed, while there is some, admittedly sparse, evidence in favour of an IE language in western Europe before the spread of Italic, Celtic and Germanic, we don't know what kind of IE that was, and no evidence yet that this language was more closely related to Anatolian than to "Northern IE". I am researching this possibility, but haven't found decisive evidence yet.

My train of thought is that there apparently were two pathways of Yamnaya expansion into Central and Western Europe, a northern one (the Corded Ware culture) and a southern one (into the Lower Danube valley and form there on one hand to Western Europe - the Bell Beaker culture - and on the other into Anatolia). It would seem plausible if these two pathways corresponded to the oldest bifurcation in the Indo-European family, namely between Anatolian (as part of the southern pathway) and the rest (as the northern pathway). The question remains, though, whether there is linguistic evidence supporting this hypothesis or not.

[Talskubilos]

Here is the full text of Wikander's 1966 article. I should mention his readings of the SW script are largely outdated by now.

[WeepingElf]

Here is the full text of Wikander's 1966 article. I should mention his readings of the SW script are largely outdated by now.

Thank you. He indeed does mention Anatolian hi-conjugation verbs. But if his readings of the script are outdated, how much can we rely on it at all?

[Talskubilos]

Thank you. He indeed does mention Anatolian hi-conjugation verbs. But if his readings of the script are outdated, how much can we rely on it at all?

Very little at all. This is why I used "unfruitful".

[Moose-tache]

My train of thought is that there apparently were two pathways of Yamnaya expansion into Central and Western Europe, a northern one (the Corded Ware culture) and a southern one (into the Lower Danube valley and form there on one hand to Western Europe - the Bell Beaker culture - and on the other into Anatolia). It would seem plausible if these two pathways corresponded to the oldest bifurcation in the Indo-European family, namely between Anatolian (as part of the southern pathway) and the rest (as the northern pathway). The question remains, though, whether there is linguistic evidence supporting this hypothesis or not.

Respectfully, how does that work? If we have two lobes, Anatolian and Corded Ware (i.e. Corded War is synonymous with Late PIE), then we would expect Anatolian to be only as divergent as any other branch, or else we would expect traces of linguistic unity among Corded Ware languages (e.g. Germanic substrate words in Armenian or something). I think it's more likely that Danubian IE languages (assuming Italic and Celtic are not in this category) are simply lost, if they ever existed.

[WeepingElf]

My train of thought is that there apparently were two pathways of Yamnaya expansion into Central and Western Europe, a northern one (the Corded Ware culture) and a southern one (into the Lower Danube valley and form there on one hand to Western Europe - the Bell Beaker culture - and on the other into Anatolia). It would seem plausible if these two pathways corresponded to the oldest bifurcation in the Indo-European family, namely between Anatolian (as part of the southern pathway) and the rest (as the northern pathway). The question remains, though, whether there is linguistic evidence supporting this hypothesis or not.

Respectfully, how does that work? If we have two lobes, Anatolian and Corded Ware (i.e. Corded War is synonymous with Late PIE), then we would expect Anatolian to be only as divergent as any other branch, or else we would expect traces of linguistic unity among Corded Ware languages (e.g. Germanic substrate words in Armenian or something). I think it's more likely that Danubian IE languages (assuming Italic and Celtic are not in this category) are simply lost, if they ever existed.

I am not sure who is misunderstanding whom here, so I'll try to clarify: the Southern IE languages of Western Europe are all lost (unless some enigmatic fragmentary languages such as Tartessian or North Picene, where the opinions are divided whether they are IE or not, should turn out to be Southern IE), all known non-Anatolian IE languages, and thus all modern IE languages, are Northern IE. Why should this mean that Anatolian was only as divergent as any other branch? It would still be such that the division between Northern and Southern IE was the first division in the history of IE, about 500-1,000 years earlier than the breakup of Northern IE, and thus the known non-Anatolian IE languages are more closely related to each other than any of them is to Anatolian.

Note also that not all IEists are convinced that Anatolian was an early divergence; some maintain that it simply lost the features (such as the verb aspect system and the feminine gender) it lacks (which would have to have happened rather quickly, but see the Insular Celtic languages for an example how rapidly a language may be restructured). At any rate, Proto-Northern IE and Proto-Southern IE do not seem to have been very different from each other in terms of phonology, because the phonology of "handbook PIE" accounts for Anatolian quite well. Most likely, the phonologies were nearly isomorphic - the phonetic values of the phonemes may have been different, but they corresponded to each other almost one by one. The differences lay in the morphology.

Note especially that in my model, Italic, Celtic and Germanic are not lineal descendants of the lost "Bell Beaker" language. Germanic descends from the language of the Corded Ware people of southern Scandinavia (which was originally related to Balto-Slavic but isolated for some time, giving it enough time to develop its idiosyncrasies), and expanded southward in the Nordic Bronze Age; Italic and Celtic descend from languages of Corded Ware people in the Pannonian Basin and expanded westward in the Urnfield expansion - Italic south and Celtic north of the Alps. The time depth of both branches seems to be about 1500-1000 BC, which is consistent with the assumption that they spread with the Urnfield culture which happened around 1300 BC.