Thread

1. TFNA · 1789708775 · focus · HN ↗

   The title is super-clickbaity, as no Indo-Europeanist working today believes in a single Pre-Greek language; this was the idée fixe of the scholar Robert Beekes well over a decade ago now, and very flawed research as Beekes was succumbing to dementia then. In fact, within the field "Pre-Greek!" has become something of an inside joke.

   The article does eventually mention the current state-of-the-art, but only after perpetuating the misconception for some paragraphs, and that is poor form for a pop-sci article.

   1. kavalg · 1789720498 · focus · HN ↗

      Even for a non-linguist like myself, the article didn't feel right. I expected to find more information about the Thracians, who inhabited those lands for quite some time and left some extraordinary (albeit non-written) heritage.

      1. BigTTYGothGF · 1789734601 · focus · HN ↗

         I thought the Thracians spoke an IE language.

         1. TFNA · 1789738228 · focus · HN ↗

            Recent paper by Kassian in Transactions of the Philological Society makes formidable case that Thracian was not Indo-European.
   2. nephihaha · 1789727245 · focus · HN ↗

      The author does mention the possibility of more than one non-IE pre-Greek language, as well as the possibility of an Indo-European predecessor in the region.

      There are similar arguments over Pictish, but at least with Greek there is a substantial body of vocabulary, which Pictish lacks.

   3. lordleft · 1789728089 · focus · HN ↗

      I don’t agree with this characterization of the article at all. What you see as clickbaity I see as using a reductive idea to set the stage for a more complex one. I just think this is good, engaging writing.
   4. metalman · 1789734389 · focus · HN ↗

      Ya, barrrrmp! disagree, the main thesus is lingustic evolution as sort of hereditary characteristics whose exact origins are difficult to elucidate, kind of like apples and horses, that also share the same general geographic origins. Various lists of words show conclusivly how many words are conserved over very broad geographic, temporal, and cultural ranges, so it will always be a (low stakes) game of reverse engineering how words and full languages moved around. perhaps of interest was an early study of austrailian languages, where over time local languages became incomrehensable to distant tribes, but the ancestral origin songs, were recognisable from there melodic and rythmic structure, and the actaul storys were essentialy identical, so language drift, but cultural continuity, which is aparently what you get after 50 millenia hanging out with marsupials.
   5. empath75 · 1789734391 · focus · HN ↗

      Also, “not having a known etymology” is weak evidence for borrowing, full stop, let alone for borrowing from a substrate. There are lots of very common words in english (dog, pig, boy, girl) that have no known etymology which are incredibly unlikely to impossible to have come from a substrate language.

      Languages invent new words and sound patterns endogenously all the time.

      1. TFNA · 1789738376 · focus · HN ↗

         English dog has had an etymology for the last 20 years or so (Gasiorowski's) that many find convincing. But with regard to Greek lexicon, it is not just the lack of etymology that suggests substrate but the non-IE phonology of many of these words.

         1. yorwba · 1789739490 · focus · HN ↗

            Gąsiorowski&#x27;s etymology: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;290177844_The_etymology_of_Old_English_docga" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;290177844_The_etymo...
   6. theanonymousone · 1789758662 · focus · HN ↗

      So, the field was making a joke of someone&#x27;s dementia?

      1. TFNA · 1789800203 · focus · HN ↗

         Everyone knows about the weakness of the research and jokes about it, but much fewer people are aware of the dementia behind it.

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