Pre-Greek languages

[Larry Trask]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Sean Crist writes:

[LT on Colin Renfrew's recent article]

>> 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's argument is that a number of the troublesome words in Greek appear to
reflect a sophisticated urban civilization of a type which is not known to have
existed anywhere in the Aegean area until the rise of the palace civilization
in Minoan Crete in the second millennium BC.  Since the referents of these
words could not have existed earlier, he concludes, the words could not have
been present in Pre-Greek or in Greece before the Greeks, but must have been
borrowed into Greek later, after contact with the Minoan civilization.

[LT]

>> 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.

In the same article, Renfrew suggests that these place names are indeed
pre-Greek but not pre-IE.  He sees them as reflecting an IE presence in Greece
and the Aegean at a time before the Greek language had crystallized out.  He is
also inclined to see them as probably Anatolian.

> 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.

Oh, I know Colin fairly well, and I can assure you that he has not backed off
from his major claims, though he has modified his views on some of the details.
Last August he gave a talk at the Cambridge symposium on time-depth in
languages in which, among other things, he addressed the problem of the
horse-and-wagon words in IE.  This will appear in the proceedings, to be
published early next year.  I'm one of the editors, so it's partly down to me
how fast we can get the volume out.

Almost at this very moment, Colin is in the States giving a talk on his
Anatolian homeland for PIE.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk