Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples?

[Sean Crist]

On Wed, 4 Aug 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

> 	What is the current consensus re Phrygian, Armenian, Thracian,
> Macedonian, Albanian and Greek?
> 	Are they considered as part of an Indo-Balkan subfamily along with
> Indo-Iranian?
> 	Is Albanian considered more likely to be Illyrian than Thracian?
> 	Is Phrygian still considered as a possible ancestor or close
> relative of Armenian?
> 	Is Macedonian considered closer to Greek or Thracian?

Here is a partial answer; I'll explain below why it can only be partial.

In the last few years, Don Ringe, Tandy Warnow, and Ann Taylor
collaborated to produce a phylogeny of the Indo-European languages. Don
and Ann are historical linguists specializing in Indo-European, and Tandy
is a computer scientist who works on computational biology.  They used an
algorithm developed to produce optimal phylogenies of biological species
(e.g.  you might code "vertebrate" as "1" and "non-vertebrate" as "2",
etc.  The computational problem, which is quite difficult, is to compute
the correct phylogeny, or family tree, for the species being considered).
What was new in their approach was to use this methodology to produce a
phylogeny of a family of languages (e.g. perhaps you would code
Indo-Iranian with a "1" to mean "undergoes the RUKI rule", and Italic with
a "2" to mean "doesn't undergo RUKI").

The phylogeny they produced is as follows (at least, this is a version of
their phylogeny which comes from a fairly mature stage of their work, and
it's the one that Don was assuming in his classes in the 1997-1998
academic year; but there may be some slight adjustments in their
forthcoming monograph):

                                    PIE
                                   /   \
                                  /   Anatolian
                                 /\
                                /  \
                               /   Tocharian
                              /\
                             /  \
                            /    \
                           /     /\
                          /     /  \
                         /   Celtic Italic
                        /\
                       /  \
                      /    \
                     /     /\
                    /     /  \
                   /   Greek Armenian
                  /\
                 /  \
                /    \
               /      \
              /        \
             /         /\
            /         /  \
           /         /    \
          /         /      \
        Indo-   Balto-    Germanic
       Iranian  Slavic

A few notes:

-The position of Germanic in the tree is somewhat indeterminate.  If you
run the analysis strictly on the basis of _morphological_ characters,
Germanic appears as in the tree above above.  If you run it on the basis
of _lexical_ characters, it groups with Italo-Celtic.  The team
hypothesize that Germanic started out in life as a sister of Balto-Slavic,
but that the pre-Germanic speakers came into the political orbit of the
prehistoric Italo-Celtic peoples and absorbed loan words from them at some
date prior to Grimm's Law.
	Also, the whole part of the tree including Germanic, BS, and IIr
is somewhat indeterminate; some innovations, such as the satem consonant
change, are shared by IIr and BS but not Germanic.  Probably, these three
branches originally formed a dialect continuum which cannot be perfectly
modelled in a Stammbaum.

-The team originally included Albanian in the analysis, but its position
in the tree is wildly indeterminate, which is not surprising considering
the very late attestation of Albanian.  Albanian has undergone such a
great amount of innovation that it's hard to group it with anything.

-The team did not include Phrygian, Illyrian, Venetic, etc., because these
languages are so poorly attested that in many cases, we don't have even a
single token of a particular character to be able to code it for analysis.

So, to return to your questions:

> 	What is the current consensus re Phrygian, Armenian, Thracian,
> Macedonian, Albanian and Greek?
> 	Are they considered as part of an Indo-Balkan subfamily along with
> Indo-Iranian?

You're correct that Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian are in a single
sub-branch of the IE family together, but Balto-Slavic and Germanic are in
this branch as well.  We can't say anything about Phrygian, Thracian, and
Albanian on the basis of this kind of analysis; there are not enough data
to do so.

> 	Is Albanian considered more likely to be Illyrian than Thracian?

We can't tell.  Illyrian and Thracian are so poorly attested that we just
can't tell.

> 	Is Phrygian still considered as a possible ancestor or close
> relative of Armenian?

Once again, we can't tell.

Who knows; maybe someday we'll find a huge cave full of Illyrian,
Thracian, and Phrygian writings which will clear up much for us.  It's not
altogether hopeless; after all, Hittite and the two Tocharian languages
were discovered in this century.  Until then, we have to say that we don't
know.

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