* I think that it is very likely that the Korean language family and the Japanese language family are related, even if it is challenging to find "smoking gun" evidence of it today. Japanese may have also have some Manchurian linguistic influence. The broader Altaic hypothesis has less strong support, but there may be something to it.
* I think that it is very likely that the Dravidian language family was influenced by an African language family, with the vectors of that transmission probably being people from the Horn of Africa who also brought some key African Sahel domesticates to Southern India around the time of the South Indian Neolithic ca. 2500 BCE.
* The Harappan language is almost surely not Indo-European, not Dravidian, and not Munda as a language family. It could conceivably have some connection to language isolates in the general region known as Indo-Pacific languages, or it might not. It is probably the main substrate influence on Sanskrit and through Sanskrit on the other Indo-European languages of India. The script associate with it was probably a proto-script, like a set of emojis or trademarks, and not a full written language. The same is true of the early Vinca script used in the Neolithic Balkans.
* I think that it is very likely that Indo-Aryans (Sanskrit speaking derived people) conquered almost all of India sometime in pre-history and imposing their language and the Hindu religion (although not as faithfully to some of its tenants like vegetarianism), except a small last stronghold, more or less in the vicinity of the modern city of Visakhapatnam, which then reconquered territory from the Indo-Aryans, restoring their dialect of the Dravidian language, but not effectively displacing the Hindu religion that the Indo-Aryan conquerors brought with them. This is why the Dravidian language family seems younger than it really is; it's historic linguistic diversity was wiped out at this point with most of its variants extinguished at this time. As I noted in a post at Wash Park Prophet:
[A]reas that are linguistically Indo-Aryan are more likely to be vegetarian than areas that are linguistically Dravidian, Munda or Tibeto-Burmese. Meat eating may reflect a thinner Indo-Aryan influence even in places that experienced a language shift to Indo-Aryan languages. Vegetarianism may alternatively reflect a stronger influence from the pre-Indo-Aryan Harappan society.
* Brahui, a Dravidian language pocket found far from the geographic range of the other Dravidian language, probably was not within the historic range of the Dravidian languages. Instead, it is probably a result of language shift through elite dominance around 1000 CE or so, by some foreign Dravidian warlord or king.
* Sometime around the Copper Age (a.k.a. the Eneolithic) in Anatolia, people from the eastern highlands brought the Hattic language (which preceded the Hittite language) to Anatolia. It is related to Kassite, other Iranian highland languages, and more remotely to most of the Caucasian languages (which are related to each other even if the connections are hard to establish), to Sumerian, and probably to Elamite. It is also probably related to Minoan. One of the litmus tests of all of these languages is that they were ergative.
Hattic probably replaced the Neolithic language(s) of Anatolia, including the Western Neolithic language which spread across Europe in two main branches, the Linear Pottery culture (LBK) to through the rivers of the north, and the Cardial Pottery culture to more or less along the Mediterranean coast, which was very different from Hattic. The Western Anatolian Neolithic languages were the substrate languages for the Indo-European language in most of Europe, but not in Anatolia where the Hattic language was the substrate. Hattic substrate influence is the reason that Anatolian Indo-European languages like Hittite seem so diverged from other Indo-European languages, because the Hattic society was much healthier when the Indo-Europeans arrived than in other places where the Indo-Europeans conquered Neolithic societies in a state of collapse. The most basil branch of Indo-European was probably that spoken in the Tarim Basin, which was on a frontier with almost no substrate influence.
* It is very likely that the languages of the European hunter-gatherers are completely lost. The Uralic languages arrived much later. In the Americas and Japan and Australia, we know that indigenous hunter-gather language substrates had very little impact on the food producing conquerer languages, even when indigenous peoples made a large genetic contribution to the people speaking the food producer languages.
* Basque, therefore, is very unlikely to be an indigenous European hunter-gatherer language. It could be the last survivor of the language family of the first farmers of Europe rooted in Western Anatolia frmo around 6000 BCE to 4000 BCE, or it could reflect a very distant outpost of a Copper Age language probably in the same language family as Hattic and Minoan. I probably lean towards the Neolithic hypothesis, as the corpus of Hattic (which remained a written liturgical language for a thousand years after the Hittites took over) and of Basque are both large enough that a connection would have been established by linguists by now if it was present, even though both are ergative languages, but the rarity of ergative languages outside the West Asian highlands, ancient Mesopotamia, and places to the east of that, favor a copper age origin for it. The Paleo-Hispanic languages may have all been a coherent group and Tartessos in Southwest Iberia was metal rich and a strong candidate for the source for Plato's Atlantis story. The "Tartessian culture was born around the 9th century B.C. as a result of hybridization between the Phoenician settlers and the local inhabitants. Scholars refer to the Tartessian culture as "a hybrid archaeological culture".
* We know the Etruscan, Raetic, and Lemnian (together called the Tyrsenian languages, an areal designation, since while the connection of Etruscan and Raetic is pretty solid, the linguistic family connection to Lemnian is not, and possibly Camunic as well, although it could also be related to Celtic) are also not Indo-European languages and pre-date Indo-European:
- Etruscan: 13,000 inscriptions, the overwhelming majority of which have been found in Italy; the oldest Etruscan inscription dates back to the 8th century BC, and the most recent one is dated to the 1st century AD.
- Raetic: 300 inscriptions, the overwhelming majority of which have been found in the Central Alps; the oldest Raetic inscription dates back to the 6th century BC.
- Lemnian: 2 inscriptions plus a small number of extremely fragmentary inscriptions; the oldest Lemnian inscription dates back to the late 6th century BC.
- Camunic: may be related to Raetic; about 170 inscriptions found in the Central Alps; the oldest Camunic inscriptions dates back to the 5th century BC.
The ergative substrate influence probably explains its presence in Indo-European Pashto, Kurdish languages and Indo-Aryan languages, which was shared with Basque and is absent from most Indo-European languages. It suggest that Harappan was probably ergative. The Tyresnian languages apparently non-ergative character suggests that they aren't part of the same language family as Basque, and tends to favor a Copper Age origin for Basque rather than a Neolithic origin for it.
But we haven't deciphered them very well since the corpus of those writings has mostly been lost, and what we have left is mostly monolingual and short. We can't even say with completge confidence that they were all in the same language family, although ancient Rhaetic spoken to the north of Etruscan (not linguistically related to the similarly named modern Indo-European minority language of Switzerland) was probably in the same language family with Etruscan. somewhat conflicting historical evidence suggests that Lemnians were migrants from the Alps and/or northern Italy, probably during the Greek dark ages after Bronze Age collapse had run its course.
We also don't know much about the substrate language that influenced Mycenaean Greek.
12 comments:
Basal or basil?
Heaven (English) = Zephan (Ugarit) = Zion (Hebrew) = Tian (Chinese)
Recent article claims Irish from Iberia
Proto-Elamite close kin to Harappans?
Vegetarianism became popular only after dairy industry and grain farming.
My error, Ugarit zephan should be zaphon.
"Basal or basil?" Did I miss a copy edit? If so, my bad.
Could whatever tribal coalition that led to the Bell Beaker expansion have been multilingual? Lots of recent examples of that from the steppe.
@Ryan It could have been, although almost surely, all of their languages were from a shared language family that may have diversified a little as the culture expanded, given their shared patrilineal origins. If there were multiple languages, I'd expect that they would have been about as closely related as the Romance languages.
The boundary between Bell Beaker derived people and Corded Ware derived people held pretty steady for about a thousand years and had meaningful cultural distinctions (e.g. the Bell Beaker derived people made much greater use of archery), so I'd lean towards mutually intelligible dialects rather than truly different languages.
Also, the substate languages they encountered were probably likewise from one overarching West Anatolian first farmer Neolithic Old European language family, so the varied substrate influences in different places probably didn't cause a lot of varied language evolution (and substrate languages and language contact account for a much bigger share of language change than they are often given credit for).
The initial Bell Beaker spread was also pretty rapid (maybe two or three centuries), so it is probably more likely that language diversification came after the Bell Beaker conquest had largely run its course, rather than in the initial stage.
Of course, this all begs the question of the relationship of the Bell Beaker languages to the historically Indo-European languages of Western Europe. The Celtic and Italic languages probably derive from the language of the Urnfield people who in turn derive from the Bell Beaker people, but are only really well attested after Bronze Age collapse (ca. 1200 BCE) about a thousand years after the Bell Beaker people arrived. And, the modern Celtic languages and culture probably derive from a secondary wave of expansion (that was only partially demic rather than due to cultural transmission) in the early Iron Age (ca. 800 BCE). But given similarities between Tocharian physical archaeology, and some of the notable elements of both Italic culture (e.g. the stereotypical witch hats) and Celtic culture (e.g. primitive tartan style textiles), key elements of these culture probably have deeper proto-Indo-European roots.
Germanic languages and culture may have had a mix of Old European substrate, Corded Ware, and Bell Beaker influences, as te Nordic Bronze Age was in a Corded Ware area of influence in its earlier stages, but a Bell Beaker area of influence in its later stages. In contrast, Balto-Slavic languages, Greek, Illyrian-Albanian, and Armenian probably had no deep Bell Beaker linguistic influences.
The Corded Ware culture probably did have a different language than the Bell Beaker people within the Indo-European language family. They are mostly patrilineally distinct, with Bell Beaker closer to Yamnaya (R1b) and Corded Ware with a sister clade of Y-DNA (R1a), although some minor patrilineal contributors to both branches from not long before the main Indo-European expansion around 2000 BCE, like my own clade of Y-DNA E, were probably present in both sister branches of Indo-Europeans.
@Andrew - Keep in mind that Iberian Bell Beakers did not share patrilineal origins with the Steppe for the most part. Nor were they rich in Steppe ancestry.
https://content.csbs.utah.edu/~rogers/tch/ant3234/lectures/bellbeaker-2x3.pdf
@Ryan You aren't wrong. I'm pretty sure that I've written posts on that myself. And, the Bell Beaker phenomena is by all means a more complicated one than the Corded Ware culture.
Outside of Iberia, the Bell Beaker people did bring steppe ancestry (to the point of effecting a near total replacement of the population of Britain), with very significant steppe ancestry (although not as much as most other Europeans) even in the Basque people that culturally and linguistically managed to escape conversion to Indo-European languages and culture. And, the path of the steppe ancestry in those Bell Beaker people who had it, revealed by genetic phylogeny and ancient DNA, appears to have been more or less through central Europe, rather the originating where the earliest examples of Bell Beaker culture are found in Southeastern Europe.
For a long time I held open the possibility that the Bell Beaker people may have been Vasconic with the linguistic shift only arriving much later, perhaps around the time of Bronze Age collapse. And, since the Bell Beaker people weren't literate, and were very ill-attested historically by other populations in their era that were literate, we can't know for sure. And, the very earliest Bell Beaker people of Southeastern Europe may indeed have been Vasconic linguistically.
Ultimately, though, I've come around to the belief that the Bell Beaker people were predominantly steppe migrants from Ukraine via central Europe who spoke a language from the Indo-European language family.
Probably the most plausible narrative to reconcile this with the fact that Bell Beaker physical culture first appeared in Southeastern Europe, and that early Bell Beaker people from Iberia did not have much steppe ancestry, is that the Bell Beaker culture was originally an autochthonous cultural/religious movement of non-Indo-Europeans in Southeastern Europe that was expanding at just the right time to encounter Indo-European immigrants to Western Europe from the steppe, and that the steppe migrants co-opted and converted culturally to this movement. Bell Beaker culture was ultimately a culture (named after a particular style of pots) that can be transmitted non-genetically. Pots are not people, even though pots are a pretty good marker of demic migrations most of time.
Whether the early Indo-European migrants to Western Europe adopted the originally Old European Bell Beaker culture/religion because they liked its style and thought it had good ideas, or merely out of political expediency, we may never know.
Continued . . .
There are historical precedents for this kind of thing. The Great Awakening in the American South that turned the most secular region in the U.S. into the Bible belt. The mass conversion of most of the Roman Empire to Christianity, a religion with its roots in the Levant and Greek speaking parts of Western Anatolia, over a period from about the 200s CE to 400s CE, peaking with the conversion of Emperor Constantine (indeed, the Western Christian church whose successor is now called the Roman Catholic Church, was Latin speaking, even though the early Christians who founded the religion and wrote its scriptures spoke mostly Greek and Aramaic and Hebrew). Even earlier, one could look at how the Indo-European ruling class of Hittites in Anatolia came to adopt many of the cultural practices of the Hattic people that preceded them, or later, to the Catholic church's co-optation of pagan festivals as Christian ones, and notable pagan figures in the guise of saints, or how the Magyar rulers of Hungary converted to Christianity while converted their subjects to their Uralic language (the last example is a particularly good one).
These are more analogous than the mass conversions to Islam as the Islamic empire expanded, or the expansion of Buddhism, or the expansion of Christianity during the Middle Ages, all of which were accomplished by force of arms.
More recently, although not quite as analogously, one could look at the wide spread of Western musical genres like classical music, then jazz, then rock, and then rap, across the world to countries with no ethnic connections to them. Or, to the adoption of Arabic numerals by non-Arab societies. Or, to the global adoption of hot peppers, potatoes, and tomatoes after the Columbian exchange, by countries far from the New World.
I was thinking they could even have been politically united. The Huns were multilingual. The Hungarians managed to integrate the Jasz into their kingdom in response to external pressure. Maybe the ancient ancestors of the Basque were farmers in the Balkans (or somewhere else) that decided to join with the Yamnaya migrants rather than fight them.
@Ryan While nothing can be definitively ruled out, if there was such a scenario it would involve a separate initial migration of Vasconic people to Iberia, and then a later alliance with Indo-European migrants.
Why is that?
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