Pre-Greek languages

[Sean Crist]

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Nikos Sarantakos wrote:

> My own personal unscientific gut feeling is that Greek is certainly
> not autochthonous, but possibly much older than generally
> acknowledged.

It depends on what you mean by that.  In a sense, all of the currently
living Indo-European languages are of the same 'age', in that they all
develop from the same prehistoric language which had its final unity at
some prehistoric date (i.e., before the split of Anatolian from what
became the other IE languages).

Or perhaps you mean that the Greek-speaking presence in what is now Greece
goes back further than e.g. 2100-1900 BCE.  The most widely accepted view
is that the destruction of sites which we find in that period represent
the invasion of speakers of an early form of Greek.  The preceding
cultural tradition in Greece is substantially different.  Given that the
latest date of PIE unity is around 4000 BCE (again, pace Renfrew), there's
only so much of a time range to play with; you might manage to make a case
that the Greeks were in Greece a little earlier, but not massively
earlier.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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