Paleo-European languages

[WeepingElf]

I was thinking more along the lines of, say, head-marking vs. dependent marking, ergativity, morphological typology, and so forth, the kinds of things Nichols covered in Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. But that's almost certainly completely lost without a trace.

Probably, yes. I once developed the fancy that the languages of Neolithic Central Europe were related to Kartvelian, as the Neolithic farmers of Central Europe apparently were genetically similar to modern Georgians, but genes and languages do not always travel together, and even related languages may be typologically different. One thing one may guess is that those languages had a simple present/past or imperfective/perfective distinction in verbs, because the IE languages of Central Europe collapsed the PIE tripartite verb aspect system into that kind of thing.

[hwhatting]

One thing one may guess is that those languages had a simple present/past or imperfective/perfective distinction in verbs, because the IE languages of Central Europe collapsed the PIE tripartite verb aspect system into that kind of thing.

If that's what happened; the tripartite system may not have been PIE - Anatolian doesn't have it - and it may have been developed by a range of subfamilies only. But that would include most subfamilies in Europe (maybe not Balto-Slavic).

[WeepingElf]

One thing one may guess is that those languages had a simple present/past or imperfective/perfective distinction in verbs, because the IE languages of Central Europe collapsed the PIE tripartite verb aspect system into that kind of thing.

If that's what happened; the tripartite system may not have been PIE - Anatolian doesn't have it - and it may have been developed by a range of subfamilies only. But that would include most subfamilies in Europe (maybe not Balto-Slavic).

Indeed, Anatolian doesn't have it and probably never had. I should have written "Late PIE" or "Northern IE" (my term for Non-Anatolian IE; "Southern IE" is Anatolian and hypothetically the lost language of the Bell Beaker people and its descendants).

[FlamyobatRudki]

Have there being serious academic reconstructions of paleoeuropean languages?
How similar are they likely to be to Basque?

[Travis B.]

Have there being serious academic reconstructions of paleoeuropean languages?
How similar are they likely to be to Basque?

The key question we need to know is whether the other Paleoeuropean languages were constructed by Basque monks.

[FlamyobatRudki]

Have there being serious academic reconstructions of paleoeuropean languages?
How similar are they likely to be to Basque?

The key question we need to know is whether the other Paleoeuropean languages were constructed by Basque monks.

My answer would require a new branch of mathematics called Basque monk linguistics logistics in order to forumalte a coherent answer;
in other words it'd take less time to forumulate an answer to my original question then it would to the key question.

[Travis B.]

Have there being serious academic reconstructions of paleoeuropean languages?
How similar are they likely to be to Basque?

The key question we need to know is whether the other Paleoeuropean languages were constructed by Basque monks.

My answer would require a new branch of mathematics called Basque monk linguistics logistics in order to forumalte a coherent answer;
in other words it'd take less time to forumulate an answer to my original question then it would to the key question.

Obviously you aren't familiar with the works of the late, great Edo Nyland.

[FlamyobatRudki]

The key question we need to know is whether the other Paleoeuropean languages were constructed by Basque monks.

My answer would require a new branch of mathematics called Basque monk linguistics logistics in order to forumalte a coherent answer;
in other words it'd take less time to forumulate an answer to my original question then it would to the key question.

Obviously you aren't familiar with the works of the late, great ###.

ah He who shall not be named; well we do not speak of him.
in all seriousness what evidence do we have of what paleoeuropean languages may have been like?

[Travis B.]

in all seriousness what evidence do we have of what paleoeuropean languages may have been like?

Excluding Paleoeuropean languages that are actually attested in writing, such as Etruscan, the main one I am aware of people having really any knowledge at all about is Pre-Greek, and this is mainly from the phonology of words of most-likely non-IE origin in it.

[hwhatting]

In this classic paper, Peter Schrijver identifies phonological alternations that indicate a certain group of substrate words that seem to belong to a language or group of languages that afterwards has been named the "language of bird names".

[Zju]

Thanks for sharing, I don't think I've stumbled upon it so far. Has there been any more research in that direction?

[hwhatting]

Thanks for sharing, I don't think I've stumbled upon it so far. Has there been any more research in that direction?

I don't have a good overview, but Schrijver has done some other work in the area of substrates. You should be able to find more on his academia site on which the paper I linked is located, and maybe branch out from there to the literature he quotes.

[WeepingElf]

Thanks for sharing, I don't think I've stumbled upon it so far. Has there been any more research in that direction?

I don't have a good overview, but Schrijver has done some other work in the area of substrates. You should be able to find more on his academia site on which the paper I linked is located, and maybe branch out from there to the literature he quotes.

But IMHO not all of his ideas are good. For instance, he once proposed that Goidelic was spoken in pre-Roman times not in Ireland, where a non-IE language would have been spoken, but in Southeastern Britain, and only came to Ireland when the Goidelic speakers fled the Romans and settled in Ireland. Fiddlesticks!

[hwhatting]

But IMHO not all of his ideas are good. For instance, he once proposed that Goidelic was spoken in pre-Roman times not in Ireland, where a non-IE language would have been spoken, but in Southeastern Britain, and only came to Ireland when the Goidelic speakers fled the Romans and settled in Ireland. Fiddlesticks!

What speaks against that idea?

[Travis B.]

But IMHO not all of his ideas are good. For instance, he once proposed that Goidelic was spoken in pre-Roman times not in Ireland, where a non-IE language would have been spoken, but in Southeastern Britain, and only came to Ireland when the Goidelic speakers fled the Romans and settled in Ireland. Fiddlesticks!

What speaks against that idea?

What evidence does he have for this idea?

[hwhatting]

What speaks against that idea?

What evidence does he have for this idea?

The article where he outlines his ideas is still on my reading backlog, so I can only go by second-hand reports on his arguments I picked up elsewhere:
- Old Irish shows very little regional diversification combined with lot of irregularities, which speaks for a recent spread across the area where it is spoken; the irregularities speak against spread as a lingua franca. The irregularities were reduced and the regional variation increased in the shift to Middles Irish in the course of a few centuries, which shows that Old Irish reflected an unstable state that cannot have existed for very long before its attestation.
- Interpretation of local traditions of immigrations / invasion.
- His assumptions on the non-IE character of the language previously spoken is based on his study of substrate words.

I don't say that I agree - as I said, I haven't been able to check his arguments in detail or to read any counter-arguments, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. My question to Elf was sincere - I assume he has read more about this than me and has weighted the counter-arguments

[Travis B.]

What speaks against that idea?

What evidence does he have for this idea?

The article where he outlines his ideas is still on my reading backlog, so I can only go by second-hand reports on his arguments I picked up elsewhere:
- Old Irish shows very little regional diversification combined with lot of irregularities, which speaks for a recent spread across the area where it is spoken; the irregularities speak against spread as a lingua franca. The irregularities were reduced and the regional variation increased in the shift to Middles Irish in the course of a few centuries, which shows that Old Irish reflected an unstable state that cannot have existed for very long before its attestation.
- Interpretation of local traditions of immigrations / invasion.
- His assumptions on the non-IE character of the language previously spoken is based on his study of substrate words.

I don't say that I agree - as I said, I haven't been able to check his arguments in detail or to read any counter-arguments, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. My question to Elf was sincere - I assume he has read more about this than me and has weighted the counter-arguments

The question I have, though, is what evidence does he have that Pre-Irish was spoken in southeastern Britain per se?

[WeepingElf]

I am not a Celticist, but when all mainstream Celticists agree that the Celts the Romans encountered in Britain were speaking Brythonic, they are probably not all wrong. If the people of pre-Roman Southeastern Britain had spoken Goidelic, the differences - such as preserved /kw/s - would be recognizable in the Celtic geographical names of the area and would have been noticed by Celticists long ago - but they weren't. So Schrijver is probably wrong on this count.

If Old Irish is as homogenous as hwhatting says, this ca be explained by it having spread across Ireland from a rather small centre rather recently - but why shouldn't that centre be somewhere within Ireland?

[Travis B.]

I am not a Celticist, but when all mainstream Celticists agree that the Celts the Romans encountered in Britain were speaking Brythonic, they are probably not all wrong. If the people of pre-Roman Southeastern Britain had spoken Goidelic, the differences - such as preserved /kw/s - would be recognizable in the Celtic geographical names of the area and would have been noticed by Celticists long ago - but they weren't. So Schrijver is probably wrong on this count.

If Old Irish is as homogenous as hwhatting says, this ca be explained by it having spread across Ireland from a rather small centre rather recently - but why shouldn't that centre be somewhere within Ireland?

This is exactly what I was thinking.

[hwhatting]

As I said, I haven't read his papers on this topic, so I don't know what arguments Schrijver adduces for having the speakers of Goidelic in SE Britain. Having read other papers by him, I just don't think that he doesn't have any arguments at all. Maybe we all should read those first before simply declaring that it's nonsense.