Pre-Greek languages

[Nikos Sarantakos]

At 17:58 27/09/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:

>It's too bad that nationalist sentiment muddies the waters so badly.  I
>hadn't heard before that some modern Greeks believe that Greek is
>indigenous to Greece and is the ancestor of all the IE languages, but I'm
>not surprised; similar claims have been made for Germanic, Lithuanian,
>etc.

The one follows from the other; if one believes that Greeks were autochthonous
(like many of the ancients themselves believed) then the only way
to interpret the evident similarities between the IE languages is
to consider Greek as mother-tongue. Proponents of this scenario
generally claim that Greeks circa 10000 BCE (or earlier) had civilized the
whole world but the ensuing cataclysm (several of them actually) had
the result that this civilization was lost. Or, a war against Atlantis.

Mind you, not all of them are Greeks. For instance, Hellenicum Pacificum,
a book that claims to have found some 700 Greek words in languages
spoken in the Pacific, is written by some Nors Josephson.

It goes without saying that all scripts found in what now is Greece
have been deciphered, at least once, and are obviously Greek.
Mind you, while these efforts are absurd, the one I wrote about
(by Tsikritsis) is certainly distinct, i.e. the man is not a charlatan.

My own personal unscientific gut feeling is that Greek is certainly
not autochthonous, but possibly much older than generally
acknowledged.

Nikos Sarantakos