User:Talskubilos
Hi all, my name is Octavià Alexandre and I'm an amateur linguist, although not a conlanger. My own specialty is paleo-linguistics, that is, the study of extinct languages, especially those poorly attested in writing or not attested at all, only surviving in loanwords to other better known languages.
In addition to their native lexicon (i.e. the one inherited from its ancestor), all languages have loanwords from other languages, either resulting from language replacement (substrates) or contact (adstrates) processes. Thus they aren't actually monolythic but multi-layer entities (a term which I myself borrowed from the Bulgarian linguist Vladimir Georgiev, who first used it for describing Lycian, an Anatolian language).
Unfortunately, most comparative linguists have chosen a monolythic approach when reconstructing proto-languages (which to some extent are conlangs), so they implicit assume all the lexicon is inherited from a single source. In the case of the IE (macro)family, the "PIE" reconstructed by specialists doesn't represent a real language spoken by real people but rather a cross-section of the last stages of IE (which IMHO is the result of a complex series of replacement and contact processes). This can be exemplified by the huge gap between Anatolian and the rest of IE languages (cfr. Sturtervant's "Indo-Hittite"), which has lead to scholars such as the Spanish Francisco Rodríguez Adrados to propose a more refined model than the traditional one (coined by Neogrammarians in the 19th century), with several splits and intermediate stages.
By studying the ancient toponymy and hydronymy (including Krahe's "Alteuropäische" or Old European Hydronymy) of Europe and SW Asia, the Spanish IE-ist Francisco Villar (a former disciple of R. Adrados) has identified several Paleo-IE roots such as *akᵂā, *ap-/*ab-, *ub-/*up- 'water' representative of the languages spoken there by the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and the Neolithic farmers. IMHO these Paleo-IE layers (in plural) represent a very large amount of the IE lexicon, the rest coming from Kurganic, i.e. the language of the Steppe People (who in the Mallory-Gimbutas theory of the IE homeland are the speakers of PIE), which is mostly eflected in the Indo-Greek group (we shouldn't forget that Neogrammarians' reconstruction was based on Greek and Sanskrit), specially Indo-Iranian itself.
Apparently, Kurgan people were nomadic agro-pastoralists of the Pontic-Caspian Steppes acquainted with the domestic horse and wheeled vehicles like the oxen-driven wagon. In the Chalcolithic and the early Bronze Age, they underwent a rapid ("explosive" in Villar's words) expansion, imposing his language to other peoples in a series of elite dominance processes, thus contributing to the shaping of the later emerging historical IE languages, except Anatolian and possibly also Tocharian. As pointed out by Sergei Starostin, Kurganic has Vasco-Caucasian loanwords such as 'horse' and 'wheel'.
However, here and there traces of the languages spoken prior to Kurganic (i.e. pre-Kurganic) survived, especially in Germanic, whose stop system is different from the rest of IE (except Armenian) and comparable to the one of Kartvelian. Rather than considering it to be the result of a "shift" (Grimm's Law) as Neogrammarians did, I think it's a remnant of the languages spoken in Neolithic Central Europe (LBK culture), which in Renfrew's theory descend from the ones spoken by the first farmers who came to SE Europe from Anatolia and linguistic evidence make them close to the Afrasian macrofamily (and especially to Semitic). For example, the word *H₂arH₃-tr-o- 'plough' found in some IE languages is cognate to Semitic *ʕVruθ- 'to till, to plough; arable land'. Other Neolithic Paleo-IE words can be found in Germanic-Semitic isoglosses such as crab ~ Semitic *ʕa-k'rab- 'scorpion', investigated by the German IE-ist Theo Vennemann.
According to Villar, the Mesolithic Paleo-IE languages would have a common ancestor, presumably spoken in the Gravettian period according to genetic data (which precludes large-scale migrations until the Neolithic). This Gravettian Paleo-IE would be part of a larger phylum in which I'd include Altaic and possibly other language (macro)families.
