Paleo-European languages
Old European is a designation for the (mostly unknown) languages that were spoken in Europe prior to the spread of the Indo-European family which dominates the continent today. In this sense, Basque and the Caucasian languages are Old European languages (however, the languages spoken today are certainly not identical with the languages that were spoken before the spread of Indo-European - they certainly changed a lot over time). The term Old European, however, is often used more narrowly with reference to the unknown languages of the first Neolithic farmers in central Europe, who appear to have immigrated from the east around the year 6000 BC. Their original homeland probably no longer exists: it is drowned beneath the Black Sea, and was where now is the Bay of Odessa. (Before about 6000 BC, the Black Sea was a freshwater lake - the Euxine Lake - with a level much lower than the present day sea level. Then the rising sea burst through the Bosporus and flooded the Black Sea basin within a few years to almost the present day level. Or so, some geologists say, but others are not convinced by the evidence adduced so far.)
These Old European languages are not attested in writing (but see Old European script for a set of undeciphered signs that were used in the easternmost parts of the Old European area, which may or may not have been a writing system, but are at any rate undeciphered). The only access to it we have are place names and especially river names that are found all over central and western Europe, and possibly loanwords in the Indo-European languages now spoken there. The area across which these Old European river names occur largely coincides with the area where material remains of the central European Neolithic (the so-called Linear Pottery culture) and its daughter cultures, such as the Beaker culture, have been found.
There are many theories about these languages. The German linguist Theo Vennemann assumes that most languages of Neolithic Europe were related to Basque, and claims to have found evidence for this in the Old European hydronymy. Most of his colleagues, however, remain unconvinced. Jörg Rhiemeier speculates that some, but by far not all of the extinct Old European languages belonged to a lost family which he calls "Hesperic" and assumes to be related to the Indo-European languages.
If anything can be said about the lost Old European languages on the basis of what we find in the attested ones - Basque, the Caucasian languages and Etruscan -, we can say that the Old European were synthetic languages with rich inflectional morphology and diverse morphosyntactic alignments (Basque and most Caucasian languages are ergative, Georgian split between accusative and active/stative, Etruscan is accusative). The Caucasian languages have very rich phoneme inventories and seems to always have had, but Basque and Etruscan have more moderate phoneme inventories, perhaps reflecting an old east-west cline.
Old European conlangs
Naturally, this lost world has inspired some conlangers to come up with fictional re-creations of these languages. There are several conlangs which represent Old European languages. Some of these are:
- Albic by Jörg Rhiemeier
- Hairo by Christian Thalmann
- Maerik by Benct Philip Jonsson
- Thalassan by Rob Haden
- See also League of Lost Languages
