Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate?

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/31/00 2:08:11 PM Mountain Standard Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>If "the farming population of much of Europe switched language" to IE (by
>conquest or otherwise) from something other than IE, then of course there may
>be that "substratal influence" to find.

-- or may not; or -- more probably -- there were many local languages before
"Indo-Europeanization".  After all, the process continued down into historic
times, with the retreat of Basque, for example.

In the directly analagous but rather later Indo-Europeanization of the old
farming areas of Iran, Central Asia and India the pre-existing languages
sometimes left substratum influence, and sometimes didn't.

Eg., there are very old Dravidian loans in the Sanskrit of the Rig-Veda, but
little (IIRC) Elamite influence in Old Persian.

Although we know from the documentary sources that the whole of southwestern
Iran, at the least, spoke Elamite well into early Iron Age times and Elamite
remained as a chancery language into the first century of the Persian Empire;
_vide_ the inscriptions of Darius I.

Likewise, Germanic has a large vocabulary that isn't reduceable to PIE; the
Baltic languages have very little.  Conversely, the western Uralic languages
have many early loans from IE languages.

>It is perfectly possible that neolithic farmers brought early Indo-European
>languages not only to Europe but also to southern Russia, together with
>agriculture, and that their descendants, who developed nomadic pastoralism in
>the Kurgan steppes carried their languages, which was still of Indo-European
>origin but transformed from the original...

-- here Occam's injunction to avoid unnecessary multiplication of hypotheses
comes into play.  A theory originally designed to avoid "migrationist"
explanations is now piling migration upon re-migration!  One is reminded of
the cycles and epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy.

The early-Neolithic migration of agriculturalists into Europe undoubtedly
carried language(s) along with it.  The simplest explanation is that they
were irrecoverably lost with the subsequent spread of IE.