Pre-Greek languages

[Sean Crist]

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> 3. Many of the problematic words in Greek (though not all of them) must have
> been borrowed into Greek, *not* during the first Greek settlement of Greece,
> but much later, during the Bronze Age, when the Greeks came into contact wih
> the advanced Minoan civilization.  These words are thus not ancient substrate
> words in Greek, but late adstrate (or even superstrate) borrowings.

How does Renfrew claim to know this?  If we assume that the speakers of
Greek were somewhere in what is now Greece from a date as early as Renfrew
would like to claim, it would be very surprising if they didn't borrow
words for trade items, etc. from their neighbors to the south.  Cf. the
Latin loan words in Germanic (wine, cheese, street, etc.)

> Renfrew acknowledges some difficulties with this scenario, pointed out by
> John Chadwick and others.  In particular, the problematic words which are
> names for flora and fauna indigenous to Greece cannot readily be explained as
> late borrowings from Minoan, and are more likely to be substrate words of
> some kind.  But Renfrew does not see this as a serious obstacle to his
> scenario.

Not only that, but many of the place names in Greece (Corinth, Salamis,
Larisa, Samos, Olympus, Mycenae) are not of Greek origin, which is not
what we would expect if the speakers of Greek had been in the area for a
long time.

I ought to pull that article and take a look at it.  I had heard that
Renfrew had backed off from some of his claims, but if he published this
as late as 1998, it sounds like it is not so.

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