Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek

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.

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.

>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.

> 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.

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.

From 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.

What I find cool here is how much archaeology you can do without actually digging anything up

> 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.

See also (hypothetical) Proto-Euphratean, "the lost language hidden within Sumerian": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Euphratean_language

First I read pre-geek.

Did we have Ancient geeks?

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