Pre-Greek languages

[Stanley Friesen]

At 11:44 PM 10/3/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>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).

I question the assumption that the Anatolian languages necessarily split
off earlier than the others.  Given the linguistic and archaeological
facts, I suspect that the northern European languages, and probably
Proto-Tocharian, split off at least as early as Anatolian.  Thus I see an
original three or four-way split, not a simple bidding off of Anatolian

[The northern group would be ancestral to Germanic, Celtic, and Italic, at
least, and perhaps Balto-Slavis as well],

>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.

And given that, again pace Renfrew, Anatolian almost certainly had to move
through the Balkans prior to Greek arrival *there*, let alone their arrival
in Greece proper, and that there is some evidence for a non-Greek IE
language in Greece in place names, the time scale is further constrained.

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May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com