Pre-Greek languages

[Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>]

On 13 Oct 99 at 17:50, Larry Trask wrote:

> Why did Anatolian have to move through the Balkans?

> Even if you don't buy Anatolia as the PIE homeland, why
> couldn't Anatolian have entered Anatolia across the Caucasus or
> from east of the Caspian Sea, through Iran?

> And why did Greek have to move through the Balkans?

I think most of us here are ignorant of geography, i.e, the easy way
to get where they got.

My own current view is that Anatolian moved from what is now SE
Bulgaria into Anatolia via the Black Sea (yeah, boats). I can't
provide a citation, but there are scholarly mutterings about a
sea-level rise ca. 3100 BCE or somewhat before that pushed Sumer and
Egypt upwards from the then-seashore into history with the clear
conclusion that their beginnings as well as the archaeological
evidence that goes with it is now inundated.

What you have are 'civilized' IEs, Tripolye culture acculturated IEs,
down by the sea. Presumably, it's a gradual sea-level rise, but a
definite one. Every year, a few inches, maybe a few feet -- a whole
meter -- of seashore disappears. The did not go over the mountains
into Thessaly and thence into nothern or central Greece. They went to
Troy! An easier route when you have boats.

So. As a seat-of-the pants theory that cannot be proved, the
Anatolians were, oh, 3100, 3200 BCE while the other group of
IE-speakers, the group that was ancestral to all the other IE
languages, were still hopelessly land-lubbers up where the steppe
merged into forest. Anatolian can be seen as a happenstance offshoot
that got lucky and left us written records 2500 years later. The rest
of us, of course, were still chasing aurochesen somewhere rather
north of the Black Sea.
--
Mark Odegard   mailto:odegard at means.net