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Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- noncoml 16d ago> early Greeks, and especially the Mycenaeans (c. 1750–1050 BCE), are associated with major advances in technology (including writing) I’ve been doing a bit of reading on the Bronze Age Collapse recently. It was such an apocalyptic event that Greeks forgot how to write and read. Before the collapse, Greeks were using Linear A and Linear B. It took them a few hundred years after the Bronze Age Collapse to learn how to write again, this time borrowing the Phoenician alphabet. Imagine what an event would look like today that would take us back 200-400 years technologically.
- atmosx 16d ago[dead]
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- dr_dshiv 16d agoHow long ago before the Myceneneans does there remain a coherent concept of Greek-ness? “Solon, oh Solon!” — are Greeks truly ancient or relative newcomers in a seafaring land?
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- klrefg 16d ago> would look like today that would take us back 200-400 years technologically. If those technologies were concentrated amongst the elite and only a handful of palace scribes could write most people would have no or little contact with writing. Same with most people living outside of the palaces (overwhelming majority) and who had no access to the amenities. It’s hard to say what happened but these collapses sometimes have paradoxical outcomes e.g. we have evidence that the quality of life and health improved for Western Europeans at least in some places after the Roman Empire collapsed (less population pressure, no crippling taxes etc.)
- samus 15d ago> It’s hard to say what happened but these collapses sometimes have paradoxical outcomes e.g. we have evidence that the quality of life and health improved for Western Europeans at least in some places after the Roman Empire collapsed (less population pressure, no crippling taxes etc.) The collapse of the Western Roman Empire was not an instantaneous collapse of civilization altogether, just of Rome's control over the empire being snuffed out for good. Already long before the final collapse the people in charge (which were not necessarily the Emperor) had only very tenuous control over large parts of the empire. Full civilizational breakdown happened in a few places only, like Britain or southern Germany. Italy was widely depopulated because of the various wars between the Goths and the Eastern Roman Empire trying to recover the western half.
- fr2029 16d ago[dead]
- TFNA 16d agoThe 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.
- kavalg 16d agoEven 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.
- BigTTYGothGF 16d agoI thought the Thracians spoke an IE language.
- TFNA 16d agoRecent paper by Kassian in Transactions of the Philological Society makes formidable case that Thracian was not Indo-European.
- nephihaha 16d agoThe 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.
- lordleft 16d agoI 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.
- kleton 16d ago> 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.
- schoen 16d agoWiktionary's note says some people think this root may originally have referred to freshwater/inland seas, not oceans. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/m%C3%B3ri https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur... In many of the daughter languages it does regularly include saltwater connected to the world ocean (certainly the Latin "Mare Nostrum" for the Mediterranean!); it just seems uncertain from this description whether it necessarily had that sense in PIE. That doesn't seem like "had no ... word for ... 'sea'" is a very clear or helpful description of the situation, though.
- pishpash 16d agoThat doesn't mean no word for sea. It means sea refers to any large body of water that you dnn't see the other side of, like in some (all?) other language families. There is no discernible distinction from the perspective of the ancient observer. The Great Lakes look like oceans. Saltiness isn't of great relevance since there are salt lakes, too.
- pests 16d agoAfter growing up for decades in Michigan and seeing the surrounding Great Lakes regularly, the oceans were a bit disappointing. Besides the salt. I knew it was salty but I wasn't expecting pickle juice.
- schoen 15d ago... and the oceans aren't even that salty on the absolute scale of salty seas on Earth! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bodies_of_water_by_salinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bodies_of_water_by_sal... "This water is so dense that you can't even sink in it" is a pretty weird experience.
- Utilera 16d agoWhat I find cool here is how much archaeology you can do without actually digging anything up
- samus 15d agoOne still has to do field work to gather all the linguistic data. It's rather easy with settled societies only. Researchers studying indigenous languages had to travel to hard to reach places and often live with the tribes for a quite long time. It's a lot easier nowadays, but ease of transportation also correlates quite well with a levelling of linguistic distinctions. That's a problem because the comparative method of reconstructing older stages of a language relies on the assumption that different dialects maintain aspects of the older language.
- mmooss 15d agoYes, etymology is amazing. You carry tens of thousands of artifacts in your head.
- whythismatters 16d agoSee also (hypothetical) Proto-Euphratean, "the lost language hidden within Sumerian": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Euphratean_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Euphratean_language
- keiferski 16d agoFrom what I understand, and I might be oversimplifying here; many of the differences between Indo-European languages today are a result of the languages that were there before. So the reason Proto-German and Latin were different is in part because of the pre-IE languages in each of those regions. But we don’t have a ton of information on those languages, so scholars are not sure. Of course there were other reasons languages changed, and the inheritance is only one factor. But in some sense there are many lost languages hiding inside contemporary ones.
- svobodamartin 16d agoFirst I read pre-geek. Did we have Ancient geeks?
- red_admiral 15d agoArchimedes comes to mind.
- baruz 15d agoKtesibios and Heron of Alexandria Anthemios of Tralles, quite the prankster
- kgeist 16d ago>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.
- kgeist 16d ago>wine It could be an original Proto-Indoeuropean word as well, because Greek has ὑιήν "grapewine" (< *wih₁-ēn), which follows PIE ablaut (weyh₁-ō ~ wih₁-ēn), which doesn't usually happen if it's just a borrowing of a foreign word. And the same root is found in Latin vitis "vine", Russian vit'sa "to twist (often about vines)" etc.
- el1s7 16d agoOne 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 16d agoPlato 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.
- drhagen 16d agoI 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?
- drhagen 16d agoOr, we have multiple anatomy textbooks [0] from before the Late Bronze Age Collapse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_textbooks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_textbooks
- empath75 16d agoYeah 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.
- leoc 16d agoIIRC 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.
- canjobear 15d ago> such a random corpus I see what you did there
- icodar 16d agoHerodotus states that the Pelasgians spoke a language different from Greek. However, some words from the Pelasgian language may have become incorporated into the Greek language.
- BigTTYGothGF 16d agoFor a more detailed analysis from an Indo-Europeanist with a Greek background: https://consultingphilologist.wordpress.com/2025/08/13/how-much-pre-greek-is-there-in-the-greek-lexicon-proportionally/ https://consultingphilologist.wordpress.com/2025/08/13/how-m...