WeepingElf wrote: ↑Wed Feb 13, 2019 11:23 am
Meanwhile, the language spoken in Sardinia at the time of Roman conquest may have been a sister language of Etruscan if:
1. Sardinia has its name from the š3rdn, one of the "Sea Peoples" of Egyptian chronicles, settling in Sardinia.
2. The Etruscans are descendants of the twrš3, another of the "Sea Peoples".
Neither of these seem likely
3. Both peoples have the same ethnolinguistic origin (NW Anatolia?).
This seems unlikely at least in the short term.
That's a lot of if, of course, and therefore this idea is most likely bullfrogs, and one would rather expect a language related to Basque and Iberian there. There is also no evidence of a large-scale invasion of Sardinia around 1200 BC in the archaeological record. Also, AFAIK there is no close genetic relationship between Sardinians and Tuscans.
In fact, there's the opposite: the Sardinians are mostly pure Neolithic, or at least the purest Neolithics by far in modern Europe. It's of course possible there was some warrior-elite invasion that brought a new language at some point (another one, I mean, since obviously there was one!), but fundamentally they're a relict of the cardial culture invasions.
WeepingElf wrote: ↑Wed Feb 13, 2019 11:23 am
2. The Etruscans are descendants of the twrš3, another of the "Sea Peoples".
The twrš3 might just have been just ancient descendants of Soviet time travellers.
Ooh, that's an idea for a conlang: an otherwise modern language transplanted into the past and evolving alongside ancient languages and affecting them.
WeepingElf wrote: ↑Wed Feb 13, 2019 11:23 am
Meanwhile, the language spoken in Sardinia at the time of Roman conquest may have been a sister language of Etruscan if:
1. Sardinia has its name from the š3rdn, one of the "Sea Peoples" of Egyptian chronicles, settling in Sardinia.
2. The Etruscans are descendants of the twrš3, another of the "Sea Peoples".
Neither of these seem likely
3. Both peoples have the same ethnolinguistic origin (NW Anatolia?).
This seems unlikely at least in the short term.
That's a lot of if, of course, and therefore this idea is most likely bullfrogs, and one would rather expect a language related to Basque and Iberian there. There is also no evidence of a large-scale invasion of Sardinia around 1200 BC in the archaeological record. Also, AFAIK there is no close genetic relationship between Sardinians and Tuscans.
In fact, there's the opposite: the Sardinians are mostly pure Neolithic, or at least the purest Neolithics by far in modern Europe. It's of course possible there was some warrior-elite invasion that brought a new language at some point (another one, I mean, since obviously there was one!), but fundamentally they're a relict of the cardial culture invasions.
Yes - you are knocking at an open door here. As I said, "a lot of if". This business of finding names all about the Mediterranean that seem to match those of the "Sea Peoples" is doubtful. Other scholars have found similar names in Anatolia. There really is no need to assume that the Twrš3 are the Tyrrhenoi, the Š3rdn are the Sardinians, etc. There really is no shred of evidence for an immigration wave into Sardinia around 1200 BC, neither genetic nor archaeological. And then, we don't even know whether the Egyptians got those names right, or wrongly ascribed the incursions to peoples who had nothing to do with them! AFAIK, the Egyptians were not very versed in the geography of places outside Egypt What regards the Etruscans, the Roman foundation myth may hint at their (the Etruscans') origin in Troy and its environs, but that need not have much to do with the "Sea Peoples", even if the Trojan War was not much earlier (but it was a few decades earlier).
Znex wrote: ↑Thu Feb 14, 2019 2:05 amOoh, that's an idea for a conlang: an otherwise modern language transplanted into the past and evolving alongside ancient languages and affecting them.
I once considered the concept of a conlang with cyclic history, be it by time travel or weird cosmology; it would through convoluted paths end up as its own ancestor (and not just by general archaicity; including also things like the word for X ending up semantically drifting to become the word for Y in the next "cycle").
Tropylium wrote: ↑Wed Feb 20, 2019 3:23 pm
I once considered the concept of a conlang with cyclic history, be it by time travel or weird cosmology; it would through convoluted paths end up as its own ancestor (and not just by general archaicity; including also things like the word for X ending up semantically drifting to become the word for Y in the next "cycle").
If you ever decide to pursue this even just partially, I would love to see it. Even if there's no story behind it ... just a language by itself with a circular history.
This paper attempting to link Minoan, Hattic and Sumerian might well be of interest to Weeping Elf (and others). It uses archeological and genetic evidence alongside linguistic evidence, and steps through the hypothesis via 'reasonable assumptions'. The links are all fairly tenuous, however.
Thank you for getting the discussion here back on track, Nerulent. The nonsense about languages taken back in time such that they form a closed loop (descending from themselves) does not belong here. The paper you link to looks quite interesting, though it seems as if the author deduces the relationship between Hattic and Sumerian from typological parallels, which cannot be used to deduce a common ancestor. Such similarities may be the result of a Sprachbund connecting unrelated languages that influenced each other. The 'pig' word may have been a Wanderwort. The alternation of the *amasl- ~ *masl- type he lays out in section 8 seems to be a thing, though; I call that 'alpha mobile' (whatever that may have been - perhaps an article? - in whatever source language). Peter Schrijver is a quite adventurous scholar, though not an outright crackpot, and his ideas, while often not to be taken at face value, at least are worthy of serious discussion. And we must never forget that the whole business of Paleo-European languages is one where very little is certain!
Indeed, the jump from 'a few striking parallels' to 'they must be related' is a bit strong, dismissing contact and coincidence entirely. He does, however, say that it's just a hypothesis that will need to be tested through comparative reconstruction, and the prospect of joining two isolates is always an exciting one.
I took a closer look at those Hattic and Sumerian verbal paradigms and wrote down my thoughts. Both languages have a split-ergative system, and polypersonal marking on the verb, i.e. the person and number of both subjects and objects may be encoded. Schrijver sets up that if the two systems are similar enough, then it must be due to affinity and not to contact, citing Johanna Nichols. Just to give a different perspective, here is Randy LaPolla giving a brief summary of what Nichols has to say on this topic.
“Nichols argues that the evidence that has been used in the history of Indo-European linguistics for showing relatedness is not individual word correspondences but 'whole systems or subsystems with a good deal of internal paradigmaticity, ideally multiple paradigmaticity, and involving not only categories but particular shared markers for them.' The reason for this is that there is very little likelihood of these paradigms appearing in different languages purely by chance, and so that paradigm can be said to have developed only once...”
So to say that two languages are related, we would want them to a) have the same or similar categories, b) have the same or similar markers for those categories, in order to c) make chance convergence nearly impossible. Mindful of the rhetorical success of listicles, Schrijver provides five bullet points comparing the two verbal systems. Instead of tackling these in order, I will deal with them in order from least convincing to most convincing.
First number 5: Hattic's ergative verbs may have been perfective, just as Sumerian used an ergative paradigm for perfective verbs. There is no serious effort to demonstrate this in the entire paper, besides sentence glosses of verbs that could be interpreted to have a perfective connotation or not, depending on contextual reading.
Next, number 2: obligatory elements (i.e. objects and intransitive subjects or subjects, depending on whether we are talking about ergative or accusative paradigms) are positioned later than non-obligatory elements. Verbs accumulating optional information on their left side seems like a pretty easy thing for two languages with SOV clause order to develop by coincidence.
Number 3 is the last of the throwaway arguments: split ergativity is expressed through polypersonal agreement, not through case endings. This is just a long-winded way of saying that both languages have polypersonal agreement. If they both encode information about the subject and object on the verb, of course evidence of ergativity will be found there. And for the same reason, the lack of case endings is not surprising.
The remaining two points deserve a little more scrutiny. Number 4 says that both languages in their accusative paradigms use different morphemes for transitive and intransitive subjects. Stated another way, they use a fusional affix that simultaneously indicates the person and number of the subject, as well as whether the verb is transitive or intransitive. How this works differs significantly. Sumerian uses a unique set of morphemes for transitive subjects appearing without an object, while all other subjects use the same morphemes. Hattic, on the other hand, mixes and matches morphemes for three different categories: intransitive subjects, transitive subjects with an object, and transitive subjects without an object, recycling the same morphemes but never repeating the same pattern.
Finally, we have number 3. This is where Schrijver points out the “formally similar” morphemes used in the two verbal systems. Here we go, the real meat and potatoes. Remember, this was a big part of Nichols' criteria: not just the same categories, but the same markers. Schrijver comes out of the gate with “3sg intransitive subject 0.” That's right, a null affix. A null affix for the only core argument of a monovalent verb. Next we get “3sg transitive subject n.” This does show up in both languages, but for both transitive subjects and objects, and in Sumerian it stands in for singular and plural, so a more accurate claim would be that n exists as an affix somewhere, probably as an optional element, but maybe not, and probably singular, but maybe not. That leaves Schrijver's knock-out punch, “3pl subject esh.” This does appear in both languages as well, though it's not clear if it exclusively used for subjects in both languages. It does appear as a prefix in Hattic and a suffix in Sumerian, though. I'm not sure how certain how often affixes switch positions like that. Schrijver never suggests that they derive from motile particles at any point, nor does he gives us any reassurance that this sort of thing is plausible.
So if we return to Nichols, we can cautiously satisfy her first criterion: the two languages do have similar paradigms. The second is trickier, since we don't really have the same or similar morphemes marking those categories. We have some easily reproducible similarities, like the presence of a null affix when no disambiguation could be needed, and then one suspiciously similar-looking affix that wanders around the paradigm at will. That makes it impossible to tick off the final box. How can we say that these two systems could not develop through language contact?
As for the other similarities he points out, I'll have to take another look later. But his overall level of certainty over such a cursory juxtaposition is already alarming. Do they not believe in mathematical modeling, or robustness of evidence at the University of Utrecht?
Salmoneus wrote: ↑Fri Dec 28, 2018 9:11 amOf the other languages, it's worth pointing out that Minoan civilisation in the Aegean and on Crete and Cyprus may be associated with an influx of caucasian genes that spread across the middle east, the near east, the aegean, and even as far as Sicily. This suggests its not a pre-IE language family - or at least not 'pre' by very much. If you had to pick a language family to put Minoan into, it would probably be Hurrian or Hattic.
last I heard, Hattic was
a. a language isolate, unrelated to Hittite. Has that changed?
b. known only from deity names and a few religious quotations used (fossilized?) by the Hittites. Has our corpus of Hattic increased in recent years?
Pabappa wrote: ↑Wed Jan 16, 2019 4:20 pm
Most people seem to assume that the Iberians were stronger than the Basques and that therefore if they are loans, they are from Iberian into Basque, and that, since Basque uses them still today as numerals rather than narrowly defined terms for sets, they cannot have been loans and therefore the two langauges are in fact closely related.
even if they had been terms for sets, could they have re-become numbers? (and thereby becoming harder to see the words they were before they were loaned?)
I admit that if the Basques are known to have been subjects of the Iberians, that it's unlikely the Iberians wouldve borrowed names of coins etc from Basque.
why not? subject nations can give words to their colonizers and overlords (just off the top of my head, how many words went from the Subcontinent to the lexicon of the British Isles?)
keenir wrote: ↑Sat Apr 06, 2019 3:13 pmlast I heard, Hattic was
a. a language isolate, unrelated to Hittite. Has that changed?
b. known only from deity names and a few religious quotations used (fossilized?) by the Hittites. Has our corpus of Hattic increased in recent years?
a. No. Hattic is still considered an isolate (or rather, an unclassified language, since too little is known about it to classify it). A few brave souls still try to connect it to Northwest Caucasian, but the evidence is utterly insufficient. The competing hypothesis of a Hattic-Kartvelian connection seems to be dead now.
b. No, as far as I know. A few bits may have been found in the meantime, but AFAIK nothing groundbreaking.
And getting back to the question what Minoan and Eteocretan are related to, as long as the Minoan scripts are not deciphered and the known Eteocretan corpus comfortably fits, in transcription, on a single book page, there's no way telling. We don't even know whether Eteocretan is a descendant of Minoan or not.
1. I have just finished reading a 1960 essay by the late Johannes Hubschmid, Mediterrane Substrate, which is full of doubtful etymologies of substratum loanwords in various Romance dialects (it is hard to tell just which dialects, because he likes using abbreviations of the dialect names that are explained nowhere), and arrives at the conclusion that there were two substratum families, one being "Eurafrican" and limited to the western Mediterranean but also expanding southwards into northwestern Africa and northwards to the British Isles, the other, "Hispano-Caucasian", stretching all the way from the Iberian Peninsula to the Caucasus. Basque is a Hispano-Caucasian language on a Eurafrican substratum. In my personal model, there are two similar entities, based on other evidenlce (such as genetic evidence that was of course utterly unknown in 1960), namely "Caridal" all along the European Mediterranean, and "Paleo-Atlantic" along the European Atlantic coast. Paleo-Atlantic is associated with the Mesolithic repopulation of western Europe after the ice sheet receded, and Cardial, together with "Danubian" north of the Alps, with the immigration of Neolithic farmers from Anatolia.
2. A feature of Paleo-Atlantic may have been an alternation between fortis and lenis consonants. There are some features in languages along the Atlantic coast which may have to do with each other:
Proto-Basque: Consonants come in fortis-lenis pairs which contrast only medially.
Western Romance: Lenition of intervocalic stops.
Insular Celtic: Lenition of intervocalic consonants, including initial mutations where this acted at phrase level.
Germanic: Verner's Law.
Saami and Balto-Finnic: Consonant gradation.
Granted, all these are different, but the general theme is that of a gradation or other kind of alternation between fortis and lenis consonants.
Consonants come in fortis-lenis pairs which contrast only medially.
I dont understand why this isnt just analyzed as gemination. sure, you have pairs like /ld/ vs /lt/ in Old Basque, but thats no problem because there are languages that have contrasts between /lt/ and /ltt/, such as Finnish.
Consonants come in fortis-lenis pairs which contrast only medially.
I dont understand why this isnt just analyzed as gemination. sure, you have pairs like /ld/ vs /lt/ in Old Basque, but thats no problem because there are languages that have contrasts between /lt/ and /ltt/, such as Finnish.
Only the fortis series can appear word-finally.
(It's more restricted than that - only *R *N *L *tz *ts, and then the clusters *rtz *ntz *ltz.)
Right, but if fortis/lenis is analyzed as gemination, we would only be putting singletons in final position anyway. /naltak/=nalttak, etc. Thus the consonant inventory of old Basque can be simplified to only 9 consonants.
WeepingElf wrote: ↑Mon May 20, 2019 1:38 pm
A feature of Paleo-Atlantic may have been an alternation between fortis and lenis consonants. There are some features in languages along the Atlantic coast which may have to do with each other:
Proto-Basque: Consonants come in fortis-lenis pairs which contrast only medially.
Western Romance: Lenition of intervocalic stops.
Insular Celtic: Lenition of intervocalic consonants, including initial mutations where this acted at phrase level.
Germanic: Verner's Law.
Saami and Balto-Finnic: Consonant gradation.
Granted, all these are different, but the general theme is that of a gradation or other kind of alternation between fortis and lenis consonants.
It's possible, but the Western Romance and Celtic changes happen way too late to make me think they're related to an older substratum; the shared Western Romance and Celtic changes in fact make most sense in light of the Western Roman Empire covering old Celtic territory. The shift happened as more and more Celtic speakers adopted Latin in place of their native language. If any shift from an older substratum were to have occurred, it seems more likely to me to have happened in pre-(Insular)-Celtic.
The Saami-Balto-Finnic and Germanic changes may stem from another unattested group on the other hand; we're still not entirely sure where a lot of Germanic vocabulary stems from for one.
Nevertheless, it's also possible some Western IE changes stem from an original fortis-lenis contrast, similar to that in Anatolian. Western IE languages do share many archaisms that weren't preserved in other IE languages.
Znex wrote: ↑Thu May 23, 2019 9:06 amIt's possible, but the Western Romance and Celtic changes happen way too late to make me think they're related to an older substratum; the shared Western Romance and Celtic changes in fact make most sense in light of the Western Roman Empire covering old Celtic territory. The shift happened as more and more Celtic speakers adopted Latin in place of their native language. If any shift from an older substratum were to have occurred, it seems more likely to me to have happened in pre-(Insular)-Celtic.
That explanation seems tempting, but then you have the problem of the fact that Continental Celtic as attested shows no such sound changes. There are also noticeable mismatches between the two lenition patterns - for one, both branches of Insular Celtic lenite *m as well, whereas I'm pretty sure this is unattested in Romance, rather instead *n is the more likely to be lost, as in Portuguese (this is a change that is shared with Basque - direction of spread is as far as I know unknown). Also no Romance language seems to have included preceding adpositions and articles to create a full-on initial mutation process, which I would expect to have happened if it was the result of imposition.
The Western Romance and Insular Celtic lenitions manifested only late, sure, but it may be the case that a kind of allophonic lenition already was in place earlier, i.e. consonants following vowels were articulated with less force than elsewhere, though people still perceived them as "the same sounds", and used the same letters to write them. And this may have been the case long before, perhaps already in Proto-Celtic or even in whatever was spoken in western Europe in the Bronze Age.
But I have to admit that the resemblance between the patterns I listed is slight, and it can be a late areal development and may not mean anything as for Paleo-Atlantic.
What regards the Etruscans, the Roman foundation myth may hint at their (the Etruscans') origin in Troy and its environs, but that need not have much to do with the "Sea Peoples", even if the Trojan War was not much earlier (but it was a few decades earlier).
