GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE

[Stanley Friesen]

At 02:40 AM 10/18/99 -0400, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 10/15/99 1:18:35 AM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote:

><<The arrival of the Greeks may not have disrupted the local culture
>in any great way e.g. ... or.... a continuous arrival of technologically less
>advanced people whose language was adopted by the elite>>

>Good point.  One archaeologist who was active in the area has described to me
>what he would dig for to test what he calls the Greeks as "migrant workers"
>hypothesis.  He's mentioned it on a list and got a consensus answer that a
>truly transient population probably would leave no material remains that
>could be correctly identified as separate from the culture that was "hosting"
>them.

I doubt, however, that "migrant workers" could impose their language on an
area.  A language must be prestigious for a native population to abandon
their old language for a new one.  It was the prestige of Latin that led to
Gauls abandoning Gaulic in favor of Latin.  The bottom line is that there
must be a perceived advantage to speaking the new language to justify the
trouble of learning it, and of speaking it enough at home to make it a
birth language for ones children.

>With regard to your peaceful influx scenario - like the Lefkandi I migration
>starting about 2500BC that seems to be the only clearly identifiable one of
>the EH/early MH period - Herodotus says that the inhabitants of Attica were
>all originally "Pelagasians" who voluntarily adopted the Greek language
>because it was to their mercantile advantage (which is consistent with one of
>Mallory's formulas for the spread of IE.)

Actually, I suspect that *most* "Greeks" were originally "Pelasgians".

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