Pre-Greek languages

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:
<<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 with
the advanced Minoan civilization.>>

Sean Crist wrote (dated 10/19/99 1:51:17 AM) :
<<How does Renfrew claim to know this?>>

Well it's hardly a wild guess.  Starting in the early Middle Helladic, around
Middle Minoan IA, Cretan imports are not only found on the Greek mainland,
but are also manufactured there in a few very discrete colonies.  The
Mycenaean culture will shows many obvious debts to Minoan influences many
centuries later.  But this Minoan influence is not really apparent BEFORE
this time.  In fact, conversely, there is even evidence earlier of Korakou
(Greek mainland EH II-III culture) making its way to Crete.

Sean Crist also wrote:
<<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.)>>

Well, what trade goods would you be talking about in 6000-4000BC? Minoan
innovations might be quite different from neolithic ones, simply because
Crete was relatively undeveloped at the time.  And it is not clear that Crete
represented the language group that may represent the most ancient substrate
- Semitic.

First of all, the MAJOR misunderstanding is that we are talking about
"speakers of Greek" at this point.  Renfrew's premise is that an IE ancestral
language is in Greece at the time.  And that it might be a linear ancestor of
Greek.

Just as importantly, Greece is Renfrew's second or third step in his
hypothetical IE diffusion, so we would in theory be finding ourselves dealing
with dialects much closer in time to PIE than to documented Greek.

And that's where there IS EVIDENCE of word commonalities between very early
Greece ("narrow PIE" or something like it) and "southern" neighbors.

In a message on this list dated 2/4/99 12:49:05 AM, we learned the following:
<<In Gamq.relidze--Ivanov, you can find (e.g.)

IE *tauro- + Sem. *t_awr- "bull"

IE *ghait.- + Sem. *gadj- "goat"

IE *agwno- "lamb" + Sem. *`igl- "young animal"

IR *qe/op- + Sem., comp. Akkad. uk.u:pu, OHebr. k.ôp_, Aram. k.o:p_a:

"monkey"

IE *bhar(s)- "grain, cereals" + Sem. *burr-/*barr-

IE *dhoHna:- "cereals, grain" + Sem. *duh,n- "millet"

IE *Handh- "edible plants" + Sem. *h.int.(at-) "wheat"

etc. See also V.M. Illic^-Svityc^'s article (1964) and other IE-Sem articles.

Alemko Gluhak
...Linguistic Research Institute of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
gluhak at hazu.hr>>

When I read "IE *bhar(s)- "grain, cereals" + Sem. *burr-/*barr-", it stopped
me.

"Melie^dea puron..." the Illiad (8.180), "kata puron alessan" - grind wheat.
Pu_ros in Homeric Greek is wheat.  Or sometimes just grain.

Larry Trask also wrote:
<<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.>>

And the Greeks themselves had a memory of non-Greeks living among them from
earliest times.  There is NO QUESTION that Greece was populated BEFORE the
coming of agriculture and that those settlements persisted well into the
neolithic.  In northern Europe, pre-agriculturalist cultures persisted right
into the Bronze age without evident discontinuity.  Indigenous plant names
(see "squash") even when they sound not very tasty, are known to persist in
this way.

Sean Crist wrote:
<<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 believe that this question has been encountered before on this list and
that it has been suggested that these names may be from an IE language,
specifically Anatolian.  If they were in fact not IE, then that suggests only
that IE was not the first language group to be spoken in Greece - which is
NOT INCONSISTENT in any way with Renfrew's scenario.  What qualifies as a
"long time" is not really an operational term in these 1000 years time-bite
scenarios.

BTW, what was the story with "Knossos" again?  What kind of a word is it?

Regards,
Steve Long