Pre-Indo-European languages

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A diagram showing pre-Indo-European languages. Red dots indicate populations before the Indo-European peoples migrated from the steppes. Pre-indo-european lang.png
A diagram showing pre-Indo-European languages. Red dots indicate populations before the Indo-European peoples migrated from the steppes.

The pre-Indo-European languages are any of several ancient languages, not necessarily related to one another, that existed in Prehistoric Europe, Asia Minor, Ancient Iran and Southern Asia before the arrival of speakers of Indo-European languages. The oldest Indo-European language texts are Hittite and date from the 19th century BC in Kültepe (modern eastern Turkey), and while estimates vary widely, the spoken Indo-European languages are believed to have developed at the latest by the 3rd millennium BC (see Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses). Thus, the pre-Indo-European languages must have developed earlier than or, in some cases, alongside the Indo-European languages that ultimately displaced almost all of them. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

A handful of the pre-Indo-European languages are still extant: in Europe, Basque retains a localised strength, with fewer than a million native speakers, but the Dravidian languages remain very widespread in the Indian subcontinent, with over 200 million native speakers (the four major languages being Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam). Northwest, Northeast, and Kartvelian languages are still intact, with the first having the least language security of the three pre-Indo-European Caucasian language groups. Some of the pre-Indo-European languages are attested only as linguistic substrates in Indo-European languages. In much of Western Asia (but not Iran and swathes of Turkey), the pre-Indo-European Semitic languages and language isolates were never supplanted by Indo-European languages.

Terminology

Before World War II, all the unclassified languages of Europe and the Near East were commonly referred to as Asianic languages, and the term encompassed several languages that were later found to be Indo-European (such as Lydian), and others (such as Hurro-Urartian, Hattic, Elamite, Kassite, Colchian and Sumerian) which were classified as distinct pre Indo-European language families or language isolates. In 1953, the linguist Johannes Hubschmid identified at least five pre-Indo-European language families in Western Europe: Eurafrican, which covered North Africa, Italy, Spain and France; Hispano-Caucasian, which replaced Eurafrican and stretched from Northern Spain to the Caucasus Mountains; Iberian, which was spoken by most of Spain prior to the Roman conquest of the Iberian peninsula; Libyan, which was spoken mostly in North Africa but encroached into Sardinia; and Etruscan, which was spoken in Northern Italy. [4]

The term pre-Indo-European is not universally accepted, as some linguists maintain the idea of the relatively late arrival of the speakers of the unclassified languages to Europe, possibly even after the Indo-European languages, and so prefer to speak about non-Indo-European languages. The newer term Paleo-European languages is proposed as a preferable description, but is not applicable to the languages that predated or coexisted with Indo-European outside Europe.

Surviving languages

These pre-Indo-European languages have survived to modern times: [5]

Languages that contributed substrates to Indo-European languages

Examples of suggested or known substrate influences on specific Indo-European languages include the following:[ citation needed ]

Other propositions are generally rejected by modern linguists:

Attested languages

Languages attested in inscriptions include the following:[ citation needed ]

Unattested but hypothesised languages

These languages are hypothesised to be related to pre-Indo-European:

Later Indo-European expansion

Further, there have been replacements of Indo-European languages by others, most prominently of most of the Celtic languages by Germanic or Romance varieties because of Roman rule and the invasions of Germanic tribes.

Also, however, languages replaced or engulfed by Indo-European in ancient times must be distinguished from languages replaced or engulfed by Indo-European languages in more recent times. In particular, the vast majority of the major languages spread by colonialism have been Indo-European (the major exceptions being Arabic, Turkish and Mandarin Chinese), which has in the last few centuries led to superficially similar linguistic islands being formed by, for example, indigenous languages of the Americas (now surrounded by English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French), as well as of several Uralic languages (such as Mordvin, Udmurt, Mari, Komi etc) and Caucasian languages (such as Circassian, Abkhaz, Nakh-Dagestanian languages etc) now surrounded by Russian. Many creole languages have also arisen based upon Indo-European colonial languages.[ citation needed ]

See also

Related Research Articles

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The Alarodian languages are a proposed language family that encompasses the Northeast Caucasian (Nakh–Dagestanian) languages and the extinct Hurro-Urartian languages.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Borean languages</span> Proposed language family

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tyrsenian languages</span> Hypothetical extinct pre-Indo-European language family

Tyrsenian, named after the Tyrrhenians is a proposed extinct family of closely related ancient languages put forward by linguist Helmut Rix (1998), which consists of the Etruscan language of northern, central and south-western Italy, and eastern Corsica (France); the Raetic language of the Alps, named after the Rhaetian people; and the Lemnian language of the Aegean Sea. Camunic in northern Lombardy, between Etruscan and Raetic, may belong to the family as well, but evidence of such is limited. The Tyrsenian languages are generally considered Pre-Indo-European and Paleo-European.

Theo Vennemann genannt Nierfeld is a German historical linguist known for his controversial theories of a "Vasconic" and an "Atlantic" stratum in European languages, published since the 1990s.

The origin of the Basques and the Basque language is a controversial topic that has given rise to numerous hypotheses. Modern Basque, a descendant or close relative of Aquitanian and Proto-Basque, is the only pre-Indo-European language that is extant in western Europe. The Basques have therefore long been supposed to be a remnant of a pre-Indo-European population of Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Old European hydronymy</span> Oldest reconstructed stratum of European hydronymy

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kalevi Wiik</span> Finnish linguist (1932–2015)

Kaino Kalevi Wiik was a professor of phonetics at the University of Turku, Finland. He was best known for his controversial hypothesis about the effect of the Uralic contact influence on the creation of various Indo-European protolanguages in Northern Europe such as Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic. He also based much of his hypothetical structures on results of genetics of his time. Ludomir R. Lozny states, "Wiik's controversial ideas are rejected by the majority of the scholarly community, but they have attracted the enormous interest of a wider audience."

The Atlantic languages of Semitic or "Semitidic" (para-Semitic) origin are a disputed concept in historical linguistics put forward by Theo Vennemann. He proposed that Semitic-language-speakers occupied regions in Europe thousands of years ago and influenced the later European languages that are not part of the Semitic family. The theory has found no notable acceptance among linguists or other relevant scholars and is criticised as being based on sparse and often-misinterpreted data.

The Vasconic substrate hypothesis is a proposal that several Western European languages contain remnants of an old language family of Vasconic languages, of which Basque is the only surviving member. The proposal was made by the German linguist Theo Vennemann, but has been rejected by other linguists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paleohispanic languages</span> Pre-Roman indigenous languages of Iberia

The paleo-Hispanic languages are the languages of the Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula, excluding languages of foreign colonies, such as Greek in Emporion and Phoenician in Qart Hadast. After the Roman conquest of Hispania the Paleohispanic languages, with the exception of Proto-Basque, were replaced by Latin, the ancestor of the modern Iberian Romance languages.

Late Basquisation is a minority hypothesis that dates the arrival of the first speakers of the Basque language in northeastern Iberia from Aquitaine to the 5th or 6th century AD – as opposed to the mainstream view of it being the last remaining descendant of one of the pre-Indo-European languages of Prehistoric Europe.

The Goidelic substrate hypothesis refers to the hypothesized language or languages spoken in Ireland before the arrival of the Goidelic languages.

John T. Koch is an American academic, historian, and linguist who specializes in Celtic studies, especially prehistory, and the early Middle Ages. He is the editor of the five-volume Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. He is perhaps best known as the leading proponent of the Celtic from the West hypothesis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paleo-Sardinian language</span> Extinct language isolate indigenous to the island of Sardinia

Paleo-Sardinian, also known as Proto-Sardinian or Nuragic, is an extinct language, or perhaps set of languages, spoken on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia by the ancient Sardinian population during the Nuragic era. Starting from the Roman conquest with the establishment of a specific province, a process of language shift took place, wherein Latin came slowly to be the only language spoken by the islanders. Paleo-Sardinian is thought to have left traces in the island's onomastics as well as toponyms, which appear to preserve grammatical suffixes, and a number of words in the modern Sardinian language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paleo-European languages</span> European languages prior to the Bronze Age

The Paleo-European languages, or Old European languages, are the mostly unknown languages that were spoken in Europe prior to the spread of the Indo-European and Uralic families caused by the Bronze Age invasion from the Eurasian steppe of pastoralists whose descendant languages dominate the continent today. Today, the vast majority of European populations speak Indo-European languages, but until the Bronze Age, it was the opposite, with Paleo-European languages of non-Indo-European affiliation dominating the linguistic landscape of Europe.

References

  1. David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Oxford, 2010)
  2. Haarmann, Harald. Pre-Indo-European Writing in Old Europe as a Challenge to the Indo-European Intruders Indogermanische Forschungen; Strassburg Vol. 96, (Jan 1, 1991): 1
  3. Roger Blench, Matthew Spriggs (eds.) Archaeology and Language III: Artefacts, Languages and Texts, (2012, Routledge)
  4. Craddock, Jerry Russell (1967). The unstressed suffixes in the western Mediterranean with special regard to Hispano-Romance (Thesis). University of California, Berkeley. p. 40.
  5. Peter R. Kitson, "Reconstruction, typology and the original home of the Indo-Europeans", in (ed.) Jacek Fisiak, Linguistic Reconstruction and Typology, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1997, p. 191.

Bibliography

Archaeology and culture

Linguistic reconstructions