Talk:Paleo-European history overview

The discussion is now open. Have fun! --WeepingElf (talk) 07:25, 22 January 2018 (PST)

This is very interesting! For real!

- About the Etruscans, I found this map [1], I believe that the Aegean-Tyrrhenian languages could be from a Macro-Mithian group, together with Kartvelian and possibly Sumerian.

- In point 6, "Danubian" refers to Danubian? would be a relative of the main language of the Cardial-impresso culture (this family would be extended along with other minority groups presumably)?

- Also in the point 6, I usually believe that Iberian is not a homogenous language, maybe not even a family, surely it was a lingua franca of origin that was extended with Greek and Phoenician trade, but from a family from the north that arrived with [2], while the Basque would be Pyrenean, the Proto-Iberian family would be "Alpine" presumably from the Massif Central. It is my theory. It would be a Paleo-atlantic language, and it ends up displacing the Paleo-Mediterranean languages originating in the Iberian peninsula (6 or 3 families more or less) like this [3]. So it seems no known representative of Paleo-mediterranean, in the LLL would be Eteonoric or as you proposed before, possibly Basque and other relatives.

- Do you think that a branch of Afro-Asiatic languages could have developed in Europe as in this theory: [4]? I think at least two, one from the Balkans and the Middle East and another from the Iberian Peninsula.

--Spinovenator (talk) 15:26, 24 January 2018 (PST)

As for Etruscan, it may indeed be related to Kartvelian, which may be a Macro-Mitian offshoot, though I am sceptical of that, it is just one pronoun that seems to match, as I consider the most likely place for Proto-Mitian somewhere near Lake Baykal.

The Danubian page you ask me about needs to be rewritten! I shall do that within the next few days. The way it is, it dates back to the time when I entertained the Europic hypothesis, according to which the languages of the LBK and Vinča cultures were related to PIE, and which I have abandoned again because it was untenable in light of archaeological and genetic evidence against it. Also, I no longer think that the Vinča symbols were writing. The only items that look like early writing are the Tartaria tablets, and these are utterly atypical and probably spurious.

TaylorS's Alpic conlang is in turn based on the assumption that Etruscan was a Europic language, which I already had abandoned back then. Taylor was inspired by Glen Gordon's ideas, which I consider misguided.

I don't see why Iberian shouldn't be a single language or group of closely related languages. The inscriptions seem linguistically quite homogenous, though details are not known as nobody understands them.

What regards Basque, one would guess that it descends from the language of those Neolithic farmers from which the Basques seem to descend. I.e., it is the last surviving Cardial-Impresso language. But other scenarios are possible, for instance, a neighbouring hunter-gatherer tribe may have established themselves as rulers over the ancestors of the Basques and imposed their language. There is not a long way from a hunter to a warrior, indeed a shorter one then from a farmer to a warrior. At least, a hunter knows how to kill living things. And it is of course well-known that genes and languages do not always travel together.

As long as we don't understand the Iberian inscriptions, we cannot say whether Basque and Iberian are related or not. There seem to be a few similarities between Iberian and Old Basque, but these may be due to contact, or entirely spurious, and have not proven helpful in understanding Iberian. After all, the same word shape may occur in unrelated languages, especially if one disregards meanings, which are unknown on the Iberian side.

The idea that Afro-Asiatic languages were spoken on the European Atlantic coast, perhaps by the "megalith culture" (put in quotes because these do not really constitute a coherent archaeological culture!), is old; it dates back to the theories of a Semitic substratum in Insular Celtic, but that one is based solely on the fact that both Insular Celtic and Semitic are VSO, and hardly any linguist takes it seriously anymore. It is now championed by Theo Vennemann, but his evidence is shotty.

--WeepingElf (talk) 06:52, 25 January 2018 (PST)

I see that his theory of Europic could be favorable, except for his relationship with the Etruscans, but it is also true that there is no proof in favor...

I see with more certainty that the Cardium pottery transmission is due to a wave of innovation in the techniques that affected the epipaleolithic autochthonous population rather than to a generalized demographic migration, which does not imply that some groups may have arrived as T1a and G2a haplogroups. The Cardium Pottery is not related to the expansion of R1b (majoritary haplogroup in Basques, Iberians and all Western Europe), I see it more related to the bell-beaker culture and Unetice culture. Possibly they spoke a "Macro-Basque" (Paleo-Atlantic) language, that would arrive to Spain on 2900 BC and 2500 BC, replacing linguistic and genetic groups above all to the north, this first wave would be the Proto-Basque, then later the Proto-Iberians who had settled in the central massif of France would arrive with the expansion of the Urnfield culture, since all Iberians follow this tradition, and would have arrived together with sorothaptic, since this culture is mostly Indo-European. I believe that this is the only logical relationship that I can give regarding the expansion of the haplogroup R1b.

The Iberians could be a family of closely related languages, related in a distant way to the Basque language, but there is evidence both in the toponymy and anthroponymy of some areas that look different, so I think that what you consider today is Iberian (I am referring to a member of an Iberian family as such), it existed only in areas of the Catalan Pyrenees and south of the Spanish Levant, later it would be extended as a lingua franca thanks to trade, and the rest of the peoples would end up adopting it in greater or lesser extent, while others do not, such as tartessian, bastetani ... the oretani at first not, but finally if they count the chronicles of their capitan Orisos, among other peoples, I say these for noticing them important. I do not know, it's my interpretation.

In LLL, I believe that Paleo-Atlantic could spread throughout the West Europe, which would explain the high frequency of this haplogroup here.

The megalithic culture really does not know where to fit, because its majority halogroup is K and U5, the relationship with the first farmers, they may be related with Pre-Sami. In LLL could be Hairo and Maerik

--Spinovenator (talk) 11:43, 25 January 2018 (PST)

I haven't given up the Europic hypothesis (it was mine, not Taylor's or Glen's) without good reasons. The idea was that both the Proto-Indo-Europeans and the Danubian Neolithic cultures (Starčevo-Körös, Vinča and LBK) were both Black Sea Flood refugees from where now the Bay of Odessa is, and therefore spoke related languages. The problem with this is that they have very different genetic profiles, and their ceramics and other material expressions are not particularly similar. Also, it seems as if the Black Sea Flood did either not happen at all, or much too early for such a scenario. So there is simply no reason to assume that the languages were related! Taylor used the Europic hypothesis and combined it with Glen Gordon's idea that Etruscan was the closest known kin of IE, but that is an idea which I once considered but abandoned even earlier than the Europic hypothesis itself.

I don't know what languages the Danubian cultures would have spoken, but a possibility is that they were related to Kartvelian. I chose that possibility for Tommian, but mainly because it is such a cool idea to explore in a conlang - Kartvelian languages have interesting features and just ROCK. The few morphological similarities Etruscan shares with IE it also shares with Kartvelian, so a relationship between Etruscan and Kartvelian appears to be a possibility, especially if Etruscan originated in NW Anatolia and the people there in turn have south Caucasian roots as you suggested.

The Urnfield culture probably already was Indo-European; I think it was some kind of "Macro-Celtic" that had not yet lost PIE */p/, and a residue of this is attested in Lusitanian. Indeed, it may simply have been an earlier stage of Celtic: the loss of */p/ may have propagated through the area as a shibboleth of the more sophisticated and iron-using Hallstatt culture; likewise, the */kw/ > */p/ shift in Gaulish and British may have spread as a shibboleth of the yet more sophisticated La Tène culture which failed to reach Ireland and the Iberian Peninsula. Such things do sometimes happen in dialect continua; an example is the High German sound shift which propagated through Germany from the south, petering out in the Rhinelands and never reaching the Low German dialects.

I used to think that the Old European Hydronymy reflected the language of the Bell Beaker people, but there are two problems with that:

1. The Bell Beaker people seem to have originated in the Iberian Peninsula, which makes it unlikely that they spoke a language related to IE, as the OEH language seems to have been. (Though the latter is not certain! Vennemann believes the language in question to be Vasconic, and while his evidence is poor, that idea cannot be dismissed out of hand.)

2. The Bell Beaker people seem to have been a mobile diaspora rather than an autochthonous population; there are no Bell Beaker settlements. As they often travelled far (strontium isotope analysis has shown that many of them were interred far from their birthplace; the Amesbury Archer, for instance, found near Stonehenge, had grown up somewhere in what is now Switzerland) and their finds are often associated with sites of either commercial (such as prehistoric salt works or copper mines) or cultural significance (e. g., Stonehenge), they probably were a class of travelling merchants. Such a group would have left as much impact on the river names of western Europe as the Roma did on those of eastern and central Europe, namely none.

I now think that the Bell Beaker people spoke a language that originated in the Iberian Peninsula and may have been related to Basque, and contributed at most a few cultural terms (mainly names of commodities, such as metals) to the Aquan languages.

The "megalithic culture" is not a thing. It is just that various Neolithic groups in western Europe used big stones for their monuments. A "megalithic language" never existed.

Maerik could be a remnant of Pre-Saami. Hairo is an entity which I don't know where to put it. There has been confusion about where it was to be spoken (the Alps? the Hochrhein? Rügen?), and it looks WEIRD with its lack of verbs as we know them (it has only something like participles and a single auxiliary verb Christian Thalmann calls the "vector"). So it is perhaps best to ignore it, as I tend to ignore Taylor's Alpic, and some other languages listed on the LLL page which are IMHO just crap - and apparently abandoned by their authors years ago.

Indeed, I am considering forsaking the whole edifice of the LLL as the project seems to have died, and I am the only of the original members who still works on the languages he contributed. The lostlangs mailing list has seen no traffic from other members than me for over a year.

--WeepingElf (talk) 14:20, 25 January 2018 (PST)

I do not think that the language of Cardium pottery culture is Vasconic, Basque is too divergent to be so relatively new in Europe, and many words in Basque are related to the Paleolithic, such as Aitz (Stone), Aitzur/Aiztur (Hoe), Aizterko (Scissors), Aizto (Knife), and more show relationship with tools made with stone, I at least give it an antiquity of 20,000 years, possibly Solutrean, with the first Cromagnon.

I agree that Urnfield culture mostly speaking a Proto-Italo-Celtic language more or less that would lead to the Lusitanian and Belgian, among others and that influence other languages ​​around. But the Iberians used the same ritual of burial in urns with ashes, which is precisely what characterizes the culture, something that the ancient Basques did not. Perfectly they could have spread together as part of the same culture, this has already happened several times in history as the Berbers next to the Arabs or Turks together with the Mongols. As you propose, it could have been a great Sprachbuch with different degrees of mutual intelligibility, of what Italic and Celtic would later be born, in regards to the already said Indo-European language.

I like the idea that Bell-Beaker is an itinerant culture with Vasconic roots, it is curious for the Neolithic about the importance of trade and how he could reach the British islands that were already islands.

If a megalithic language never existed is rather the dispersion of a cultural phenomenon, would not it be the same with respect to the Cardial-Impressed?

The Almagra pottery could have spoken an Afro-Asiatic language, I see it feasible.

Do not give up LLL!! I think it's amazing and maybe it just needs a remodeling, but you do not abandon it, I find it interesting.

--Spinovenator (talk) 15:15, 26 January 2018 (PST)

As for the Basque "stone tools" words - this argument is highly problematic. Did they ever have scissors made of stone? Those exist only in Flintstones-type cartoons! Scissors simply weren't invented before the Bronze Age. Also, in the Neolithic, knives, axes and the like were still made of stone. This is still "stone age" after all. If you are going to do anything with Basque, you should definitely read The History of Basque by the late, lamented R. L. Trask, who dispells all the myths surrounding the Basque language! Yet, the possibility of a connection between the stone-word and the tool-words is not out of the question, but then, the words for the tools were derived from a word related to 'stone' that had acquired the meaning 'tool' long ago and no longer meant 'stone' when the tool words were coined.

Here is another thought: the western IE word *h₂ayes 'metal' could be related to these words - a shift from 'stone' to 'metal' does not cause much difficulty, as both have been materials for hard, edgy tools and weapons, first stone, then metal. This could be a Wanderwort spread by the Bell Beaker merchants.

We know so little about the languages of Neolithic western Europe that we can't say whether Basque is from the Neolithic or an older layer. That we assume that some of the Neolithic languages were related to Kartvelian in our conlangs means nothing: those Para-Kartvelian languages are just our conlangs. When doing both research into real prehistoric languages and making up fictional ones, one has to carefully restrict the information flow to one direction: from the research on natlangs to the conlanging. NOT the other way, because that would mean becoming a crackpot!

But I can put up with the working assumption for the LLL that Basque is of Paleolithic or Mesolithic origin, even if the Basques are genetically Neolithic. As I have said, a tribe of hunters can quite easily become warriors and conquer neighbouring farmers and impose their language on them.

As for the Urnfield culture: Not all parts of it must have spoken the same language. Just like genes and languages do not always travel together, cultures and languages do not always travel together, either. Consider the Finns. Linguistically closer to the Saami than the Swedes, but culturally (and genetically) closer to the Swedes than the Saami.

BTW: The influence of the Urnfield culture is also quite clear on the British Isles. While we do not know what kind of languages they spoke there, I have used the hypothesis that they spoke Aquan languages throughout the entire Bronze Age there in my Albic conlang project, and that is one of my dearest creations which I do not want to give up (and the very point around which the LLL crystallized!). Yet, if someone could prove that Bronze Age Britain already spoke an IE language, Celtic or otherwise, I would have to abandon it...

Whether a Cardial-Impresso language family ever existed (and if yes, what it was related to) is indeed uncertain. But it seems that this cultural complex was mostly spread by Neolithic farmers moving in from the east, making a spread of a language family at least plausible.

I am not going to give up the LLL. I may be the only person left to contribute to it, but the projects I had and still have in that framework are alive and well, and I will definitely not drop them, no matter whether the thing will continue to be a group or turn into a personal project. At least, you are interested in it. Also, I no longer would say that Hairo should be "ignored". It may be a Paleo-Mediterranean language that moved north in the Mesolithic, or whatever. Some of the contributions to the LLL may not be among the finest conlangs ever made, and many of them seem to have been given up by their authors, but they are there and they do not hurt anyone.

--WeepingElf (talk) 06:47, 27 January 2018 (PST)

Thank you for recommending the book, I will try to read it for when I have a little more time. :)

I already know that reality should not be mixed with conlangs! XD, But as you say, we have so little information about the linguistics of the Neolithic ... and much less about the paleolithic, after all, studying prehistory is like: "try to read a book in another language and other alphabet, which has been under water and mud for 50 years, which is missing pages and pieces, illegible letters and of which we only have a little information that we can consider as probable, which surely is not, we would be 10% worthy to be interpreted, of which we have not interpreted well or 0.1% to be drastic". Everything will be a speculation!

I personally believe that Basque is Neolithic because it has different names for crops, but there is no possibility that it exists in the large number of place-names throughout Europe that some sources relate to Vasco, so for a time I no longer consider it likely and I considered him a greater seniority.

Although in fact it is known that the haplogroup R1b is neolithic and comes from the Middle East with the expansion of agriculture. As you said "a tribe of hunters can become warriors and conquer neighboring farmers and impose their language on them", it is logical and has already happened several times in Europe, as for example the expansion of the Germanic peoples, I believe that their languages ​​would have been preserved in the south of Europe until today if it had not been for the strong pressure of Latin and Christianity. But I don't know, if this is an Indoeuropean or relative language.

I see an incoherence. You relate the culture of the Printed Cardium with Basque for the expansion of farmers, but if you relate to Basque with genetics, the haplogroup R1b arrived from the Alps (Presumably Urnfield, as the first culture with the majority R1b), not from the Mediterranean, In addition, the Printed Cardium form is characterized by G2a or I2. I propose in any case (if Basque is not prior to agriculture), that a supposed "cardium language" would suppose a substrate for Basque, hence I thought in Huamish, like a Para-Kartvelian.

--Spinovenator (talk) 07:20, 30 January 2018 (PST)