Paleo-European languages

[WeepingElf]

This is not the place to discuss the epistemology of science, but if a theory predicts something which contradicts the observation (in this case, Goidelic names in SE Britain), that calls for an explanation, and in most cases, the easiest explanation is that the theory is flawed.

That said, Irish mythology has it that the Goidels came from Spain, but that may just be the invention of some far-travelling bards who had noticed that Goidelic was in some respects more similar to Celtiberian than to Brythonic, and these similarities, such as the preservation of Proto-Celtic /kw/, are merely archaisms and thus do not allow to construct a "Q-Celtic" node in the Celtic family tree.

[Moose-tache]

Presumably the pre-Irish reached Ireland via southern Britain, so even if we did find Goidelic placenames, that could just be an instance of interloping Britons keeping the existing name of Ceann Ulchabhan as Can Wlchaf or something. As it stands, it would be surprising if the incoming Britons, armed with nought but some extra Ps, eradicated every trace of Goidelic speakers before historic times. That's one reason why using placenames to locate groups in space and time is a fool's game. The existence of the occasional Clare or Derry in southern England doesn't tell us much about the linguistic history of the place, other than "maybe some pre-Irish were here at some point for some period of time, maybe."

[Travis B.]

Presumably the pre-Irish reached Ireland via southern Britain, so even if we did find Goidelic placenames, that could just be an instance of interloping Britons keeping the existing name of Ceann Ulchabhan as Can Wlchaf or something. As it stands, it would be surprising if the incoming Britons, armed with nought but some extra Ps, eradicated every trace of Goidelic speakers before historic times. That's one reason why using placenames to locate groups in space and time is a fool's game. The existence of the occasional Clare or Derry in southern England doesn't tell us much about the linguistic history of the place, other than "maybe some pre-Irish were here at some point for some period of time, maybe."

But remember, the assertion is not that the Goidels are merely descended from populations in SE Britain but that they were descended from populations there relatively recently, having fled from there when the Roman's arrived.

[hwhatting]

But remember, the assertion is not that the Goidels are merely descended from populations in SE Britain but that they were descended from populations there relatively recently, having fled from there when the Roman's arrived.

One point is that Goidelic must have been much closer to Brythonic in the 1st century AD (e.g. we know that syncope and apocope in Goidelic happened only a couple of centuries later), so it's not even clear whether we could easily distinguish Goidelic and Brythonic place names from that period. As for /p/ vs. /k^w/, we know that they were substituted for each other in loans between Brythonic and Goidelic even in early Christian times, so an absence of /k^w/ in British place names wouldn't be necessarily diagnostic.

[WeepingElf]

But remember, the assertion is not that the Goidels are merely descended from populations in SE Britain but that they were descended from populations there relatively recently, having fled from there when the Roman's arrived.

One point is that Goidelic must have been much closer to Brythonic in the 1st century AD (e.g. we know that syncope and apocope in Goidelic happened only a couple of centuries later), so it's not even clear whether we could easily distinguish Goidelic and Brythonic place names from that period. As for /p/ vs. /k^w/, we know that they were substituted for each other in loans between Brythonic and Goidelic even in early Christian times, so an absence of /k^w/ in British place names wouldn't be necessarily diagnostic.

Goidelic and Brythonic were close enough to be considered dialects of the same language in the 1st century AD, I think. It even appears as if the /k^w/ > /p/ shift wasn't completed yet in Gaulish and thus probably also Brythonic by the time of Julius Caesar, considering the Gaulish river name Sequana (now the Seine). These close resemblances between the different ancient Celtic languages also speak against the idea that the Bell Beaker people spoke Proto-Celtic - it just can't be that old!

[hwhatting]

It even appears as if the /k^w/ > /p/ shift wasn't completed yet in Gaulish and thus probably also Brythonic by the time of Julius Caesar, considering the Gaulish river name Sequana (now the Seine).

The occasional conservation of /k^w/ in Gaulish is disputed, BTW; I remember seeing an etymology of Sequana as containing not /k^w/, but the sequence /k/ + /w/ due to suffixation. I remember this propsal being mentioned and discussed on the now defunct Continental Celtic Yahoo group, but I don't remember the author or the name of the article.

[WeepingElf]

It even appears as if the /k^w/ > /p/ shift wasn't completed yet in Gaulish and thus probably also Brythonic by the time of Julius Caesar, considering the Gaulish river name Sequana (now the Seine).

The occasional conservation of /k^w/ in Gaulish is disputed, BTW; I remember seeing an etymology of Sequana as containing not /k^w/, but the sequence /k/ + /w/ due to suffixation. I remember this propsal being mentioned and discussed on the now defunct Continental Celtic Yahoo group, but I don't remember the author or the name of the article.

I have once come up with the idea that there was some sort of "Druidic" language, playing a similar role as Vedic in India, which was more conservative than the everyday language and had preserved /k^w/, and name forms such as Sequana were from that language. But as I said earlier here, I am not a Celticist. Where is Dewrad when we need him?

[Moose-tache]

Presumably the pre-Irish reached Ireland via southern Britain, so even if we did find Goidelic placenames, that could just be an instance of interloping Britons keeping the existing name of Ceann Ulchabhan as Can Wlchaf or something. As it stands, it would be surprising if the incoming Britons, armed with nought but some extra Ps, eradicated every trace of Goidelic speakers before historic times. That's one reason why using placenames to locate groups in space and time is a fool's game. The existence of the occasional Clare or Derry in southern England doesn't tell us much about the linguistic history of the place, other than "maybe some pre-Irish were here at some point for some period of time, maybe."

But remember, the assertion is not that the Goidels are merely descended from populations in SE Britain but that they were descended from populations there relatively recently, having fled from there when the Roman's arrived.

Ye- yes? Do you always start with "But remember" when you're agreeing with people?

[Travis B.]

Presumably the pre-Irish reached Ireland via southern Britain, so even if we did find Goidelic placenames, that could just be an instance of interloping Britons keeping the existing name of Ceann Ulchabhan as Can Wlchaf or something. As it stands, it would be surprising if the incoming Britons, armed with nought but some extra Ps, eradicated every trace of Goidelic speakers before historic times. That's one reason why using placenames to locate groups in space and time is a fool's game. The existence of the occasional Clare or Derry in southern England doesn't tell us much about the linguistic history of the place, other than "maybe some pre-Irish were here at some point for some period of time, maybe."

But remember, the assertion is not that the Goidels are merely descended from populations in SE Britain but that they were descended from populations there relatively recently, having fled from there when the Roman's arrived.

Ye- yes? Do you always start with "But remember" when you're agreeing with people?

I wasn't exactly agreeing with you - I was pointing out that were the Goidels to have fled SE Britain from the Romans, there would not have been much time for the Britons to have erased any linguistic signs of the Goidels' presence before the Romans started writing them down.

[abahot]

I haven't read through all of the messages in this thread so forgive me if this has been discussed before. It's sort of linguistics, sort of genetics.

We know of diverse Paleo-European languages in Southern Europe, but if I had to guess they are probably mostly languages of the Early European Farmers. Do we know, or suspect of, any places where forager languages may have survived for the longest? And an easier related question, any places where people with mostly European forager ancestry may have held out the farthest into the farmer / herder migrations? I seem to recall a comment somewhere about a pocket of high WHG ancestry in Hungary during the Bronze Age, but I don't know where or when I read it.

[WeepingElf]

I haven't read through all of the messages in this thread so forgive me if this has been discussed before. It's sort of linguistics, sort of genetics.

We know of diverse Paleo-European languages in Southern Europe, but if I had to guess they are probably mostly languages of the Early European Farmers. Do we know, or suspect of, any places where forager languages may have survived for the longest? And an easier related question, any places where people with mostly European forager ancestry may have held out the farthest into the farmer / herder migrations? I seem to recall a comment somewhere about a pocket of high WHG ancestry in Hungary during the Bronze Age, but I don't know where or when I read it.

The answer to your question is quite simple: Northern Scandinavia, whose soils never saw a plow for climatic reasons. AFAIK, the Saami languages are full of loanwords from hunter-gatherer languages. I don't know about that pocket of high WHG ancestry in Hungary, but it sounds interesting. (AFAIK, the Hungarians are genetically not very different from their neighbours, which shows that Hungarian spread in Pannonia mostly by language shift, like how Latin spread in the Roman Empire. The original Magyars formed an elite whose language was adopted by their mostly Slavic-speaking subjects, and were later absorbed by these "new" Hungarian speakers.)

[abahot]

The answer to your question is quite simple: Northern Scandinavia, whose soils never saw a plow for climatic reasons. AFAIK, the Saami languages are full of loanwords from hunter-gatherer languages.

Ah, right. I seem to remember that they retained their ancestral language probably into the common area -- it's a real shame that none have survived. I would also guess languages in the Baltic area in general although I do not know. Do we know anything about the Paleo-Laplanders' genetics? Was northern Scandinavia a SHG paradise until the 1st millennium AD?

Do we know anything about genetics (or suspect anything about languages) in central/western Europe? I would assume hunter-gatherer languages would have survived for the longest in mountainous areas or dense forest, but do we have any evidence of this, genomic or otherwise?

I find pre-Indo-European languages fascinating, especially the prospect that some of them may have been para-Indo-European themselves. But alas, it seems those languages are all lost to time ...

[WeepingElf]

The answer to your question is quite simple: Northern Scandinavia, whose soils never saw a plow for climatic reasons. AFAIK, the Saami languages are full of loanwords from hunter-gatherer languages.

Ah, right. I seem to remember that they retained their ancestral language probably into the common area -- it's a real shame that none have survived. I would also guess languages in the Baltic area in general although I do not know. Do we know anything about the Paleo-Laplanders' genetics? Was northern Scandinavia a SHG paradise until the 1st millennium AD?

Do we know anything about genetics (or suspect anything about languages) in central/western Europe? I would assume hunter-gatherer languages would have survived for the longest in mountainous areas or dense forest, but do we have any evidence of this, genomic or otherwise?

I find pre-Indo-European languages fascinating, especially the prospect that some of them may have been para-Indo-European themselves. But alas, it seems those languages are all lost to time ...

I am not a geneticist, but some things are known about the genetics of prehistoric Europeans. The papers of the geneticists (which usually have more authors than pages, BTW) are often hard to comprehend for laypeople, but a good, accessible summary of the present state of knowledge is the book Who we are and how we got here by David Reich (which does not only cover the archeogenetics of Europe but of other continents as well). It indeed seems as if SHG throve in northern Scandinavia until the 1st millennium AD, and left a big mark on the genetics of the Saami; apparently, the Saami language spread more by language shift than by population replacement.

However, I have grown somewhat weary about attempts to equate language families with genetic populations; genes and languages all too often do not travel together!

[Travis B.]

However, I have grown somewhat weary about attempts to equate language families with genetic populations; genes and languages all too often do not travel together!

An excellent example of this that people seem to overlook (even though it is so obvious) is the spread of Latin, and from it Romance -- Romans for the most part did not replace the populations around the Mediterranean, in Gaul, and in Dacia but their language most definitely did. Romance thus reflects a replacement of many languages with another language without much practical population movement.

[WeepingElf]

However, I have grown somewhat weary about attempts to equate language families with genetic populations; genes and languages all too often do not travel together!

An excellent example of this that people seem to overlook (even though it is so obvious) is the spread of Latin, and from it Romance -- Romans for the most part did not replace the populations around the Mediterranean, in Gaul, and in Dacia but their language most definitely did. Romance thus reflects a replacement of many languages with another language without much practical population movement.

Right! Latin is an excellent example. This is what I meant with "language shift".

In the early 20th century, substratum theories were popular in Romance historical linguistics: the distinctive features of the various Romance languages were attributed to influence from the languages the people spoke before they adopted Latin. Today, such substratum theories are out of fashion, as we now know more about the pre-Roman languages, and there is not really that much correlation between these and Romance isoglosses. This also means that one should be careful attributing patterns in the distribution of the historical languages to prehistoric linguistic entities.

[Richard W]

An excellent example of this that people seem to overlook (even though it is so obvious) is the spread of Latin, and from it Romance -- Romans for the most part did not replace the populations around the Mediterranean, in Gaul, and in Dacia but their language most definitely did.

Actually, I've seen a persuasive argument on Cybalist that the replacement of Dacian was a result of Vlachs immigrating from Moesia after the Romans had withdrawn from Dacia, which is why Romanian has so much in common with Albanian.

[WeepingElf]

An excellent example of this that people seem to overlook (even though it is so obvious) is the spread of Latin, and from it Romance -- Romans for the most part did not replace the populations around the Mediterranean, in Gaul, and in Dacia but their language most definitely did.

Actually, I've seen a persuasive argument on Cybalist that the replacement of Dacian was a result of Vlachs immigrating from Moesia after the Romans had withdrawn from Dacia, which is why Romanian has so much in common with Albanian.

Yes, I remember - I used to follow that Yahoogroup - and IMHO it makes sense. Which, however, doesn't really infringe on the statement that Latin spread primarily by language shift.