Thread

Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek

196 points · 74 comments · axiologist

drhagen · 1789730040 · focus · HN ↗
I get that the article was already super long, but I really wanted to hear how they got all the body-parts words from the Pre-Greeks. That seems like such a random corpus to lift from another language. Pre-Greeks way more into divination?
1. drhagen · 1789730847 · focus · HN ↗
  Or, we have multiple anatomy textbooks [0] from before the Late Bronze Age Collapse.
  [0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_textbooks" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_textbooks
2. empath75 · 1789735002 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah I think to calibrate you should probably look to Native American words that made it into English — place names, local foods and wildlife, cultural items. Those are going to be your substrate borrowings for most languages.
3. leoc · 1789739526 · focus · HN ↗
  IIRC there's a common cultural tendency to put a lot of stock in the magical powers of exotic foreign wizards, so divination might not be such a bad explanation at all.
4. canjobear · 1789748577 · focus · HN ↗
  > such a random corpus
  I see what you did there

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