1,000 Ancient Greek Words Have No Indo-European Origin—Where Did They Come From?
Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek
About 1,000 Ancient Greek words—including 'labyrinth,' 'olive,' 'Achilles,' 'Odysseus,' and 'Athens'—cannot be traced to Proto-Indo-European or any known neighboring language. Linguist Danny Hieber explores the Pre-Greek substrate, the lost language of the Aegean's early farmers, and explains how linguists identify borrowed words through patterns of social stratification.
All languages contain a fossil record of their history.
- TFNA
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.
- kleton
> because the Proto-Indo-European language arose in the landlocked steppes, it had no need for—and has no securely reconstructable word for—‘sea’.
No, it is mori, attested in marine, muir, maryadah, mal, morje, etc in farflung IE tongues today.
- kgeist
>Words borrowed from a Pre–Indo-European language into Mediterranean languages
> [...] Greek μύρμηξ mýrmēx ‘ant’, Latin formica
Must be an error:
Proto-Celtic *morwos
Proto-Balto-Slavic: *marwis
Proto-Indo-Iranian: *marwiš
Proto-Germanic: *mauraz
Old Armenian: mrǰimn
Greek murmēx could be an assimilation murw- => murm-, and Latin had dissimilation morm- => form- (although not clear what came first, maybe morm- was the original and morw- came later). Sanskrit also has vamra "ant", which makes it look like the whole thing is a tabooistic distortion of *wr̥mis "worm".
In any way, it doesn't look like it must be borrowed. Historically, some words once labeled Pre-Indoeuropean turned out to have pretty mundane PIE origins.
- el1s7
One aspect the article seems to overlook is Albanian. Since Albanian is a unique branch of Indo-European, descending from the Paleo-Balkan linguistic world and developed in the same broader region, it would be interesting to see whether the non-Greek substrate vocabulary found in Ancient Greek has been systematically compared with Proto-Albanian and other reconstructed Paleo-Balkan material.
- asimpletune
Plato wrote about a lot of these kinds of words in the dialogue Cratylus. The dialogue is about more than just etymology, of course, but it’s worth looking at if the subject is interesting to you.