Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek

Newsletter Around 1,000 Greek words can’t be traced to any Indo-European language. Where do they come from? Ἦσαν οἱ Πελασγοὶ βάρβαρον γλῶσσαν ἱέντες.Êsan hoi Pelasgoì bárbaron glôssan híentes.‘The Pelasgians spoke a language which was not Greek.’~ Herodotus (Histories 1.57)There are about 1,000 words in Ancient Greek that can’t be traced back to any Indo-European language or any other known language in the region. These lexical enigmas even include some words and names you might think of as quintessentially Greek:λαβύρινθος (labýrinthos) ‘labyrinth’ἐλαία (elaía) ‘olive (tree)’Ἀχιλλεύς (Akhilleús) ‘Achilles’Ὀδυσσεύς (Odysseús) ‘Odysseus’Κόρινθος (Kórinthos) ‘Corinth’Ἀθῆναι (Athênai) ‘Athens’ / Ἀθήνη (Athḗnē) ‘Athena’ (goddess of wisdom)Ἄρης (Árēs) ‘Ares’ (god of war)Despite centuries of effort, linguists have not been able to trace these words back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the parent language from which all the other Indo-European (IE) languages descend. Nor have they identified words in neighboring languages that Greek might have borrowed them from.Where, then, do these words come from? In this issue of the Linguistic Discovery newsletter, we’ll dig through layers of linguistic history to reveal the mystery language that influenced Ancient Greek.The approximate present-day distribution of native speakers of the eight branches of the Indo-European language family within Europe and Asia. (Wikipedia: Indo-European languages) Legend: dark blue = Indo-Iranian (Hindi, Urdu, etc.) brown = Italic (Spanish, French, Italian, etc.) red = Germanic (German, English, etc.) green = Balto-Slavic (Russian, Polish, etc.) yellow = Hellenic (Greek) light blue = Albanoid (Albanian) purple = Armenian orange = Celtic (Irish, Welsh, etc.) gray = non–Indo-European / outside EurasiaPaleo-European / Old European LanguagesAll languages contain a fossil record of their history.While Indo-European languages have been around for a long time, and Greek has likewise been spoken in Greece for several millennia, Indo-European languages haven’t always blanketed the majority of Europe like they do today. At one point the Indo-Europeans were pastoralist newcomers to a strange land, one that had been occupied by Neolithic farming societies for millennia.Early Indo-European migrations according to the prevailing Kurgan Hypothesis, which places the Indo-European homeland north of the Caucasus in the Pontic–Caspian Steppe. (Wikipedia: Proto-Indo-European language)The peoples who preceded the Indo-Europeans—called Early European Farmers—spoke any number of Paleo-European (a.k.a. Old European) languages. Very few of these left any written evidence (just Aquitanian, Etruscan, Iberian, and a handful of others), and only one survives today (Basque). Even so, these Old European languages left an indelible mark on the Indo-European languages that succeeded them.Map of known Paleo-European (Old European) languages, including ones that are directly attested with written evidence and those that are only indirectly attested. (Wikipedia: Paleo-European languages)Imagine you’re a band of early Hellenic (Greek) speakers whose ancestors had migrated over generations from the Pontic–Caspian Steppe into the eastern Mediterranean. Along the way, those ancestors encountered all sorts of novel foods, plants, animals, and terrain—things like olives, hyacinth, figs, and cypresses. Even the sea was unfamiliar at one point, migrating as your ancestors did from a landlocked steppe. What do you call all these things?One option is to recruit existing vocabulary for new purposes. For example, when the Greeks first described hippopotamuses in the mid-5th century BCE, they cleverly called them ‘river horses’ (ἵππος ὁ ποτάμιος [híppos ho potámios] ‘the horse of the river’ [lit. ‘the riverine horse’]; Herodotus, Histories 2.71, c. 440s BCE). This later gave rise to the compound ἱπποπόταμος (hippopótamos) ‘hippopotamus’ (Dioscorides, De materia medica 2.25, c. 50–70 CE). The Greeks even applied this strategy to the sea! One of the words the Ancient Greeks used for ‘sea’ was πόντος (póntos), which comes from PIE *póntoh₁s ‘path; road’. Every other branch of Indo-European kept the original ‘path/way’ meaning (e.g. Latin pōns ~ pontis ‘bridge’, from which English gets pontiff and pontificate), but Greek extended it to mean ‘sea’, apparently in the sense of ‘the water-way; the sea-crossing’. Another Ancient Greek word used poetically to refer to the ‘sea’ was ἅλς (háls), whose primary meaning was actually ‘salt’. The sea, then, was ‘the salt’.This strategy of coining new terms for novel experiences was, however, the minority one. Why invent new words for things the local Paleo-Europeans already had names for? Why not simply adopt the local name? That’s exactly what Indo-Europeans did as they settled across the continent, casually borrowing hundreds of words for plants, animals, types of terrain, places, and other natural phenomena. Thus it’s no surprise that the primary Greek word for ‘sea’ is actually θάλασσα (thálassa → English thalassocracy ‘rule of the sea’, used for maritime empires), which, unlike póntos and háls, has no firm Indo-European etymology. Linguists have long tried to connect this word to Indo-European, but no proposal has won wide acceptance. This is exactly what we’d expect: because the Proto-Indo-European language arose in the landlocked steppes, it had no need for—and has no securely reconstructable word for—‘sea’. (Linguists have, however, reconstructed terms for snow, cold, wolves, bears, and honey—all consistent with the temperate, continental interior.) Its daughter branches only acquired sea vocabulary later. As they reached the coasts, each language innovated or borrowed its own word for ‘sea’: English sea, Latin mare, Greek thálassa, etc.The same process happened for all the other items I mentioned earlier:olive: ἐλαία (elaía) ‘olive (tree)’: A very early borrowing which existed in Proto-Hellenic as *elaíwā and Mycenaean Greek (in Linear B) as 𐀁𐀨𐀷 (e‑ra‑wa), but has no clear Indo-European etymology. This same Pre-Greek word was also the source of the Etruscan word *𐌄𐌋𐌄𐌉𐌅𐌀 (*eleiva) ‘olive’, where it was borrowed by the Romans as olīva (the source of the English words olive and oil).hyacinth: ὑάκινθος (hyákinthos) ‘hyacinth’: Again, no clear Indo-European etymology exists. English borrowed the word hyacinth from Greek. Hyacinthus was probably a Pre-Greek god who was superseded by Apollo, and was portrayed as his lover in Greek mythology.fig: Greek borrowed several words for ‘fig’, including ἐρῑνεός (erīneós) ‘wild fig-tree’, ὄλυνθος (ólynthos) ‘wild fig’, and σῦκον (sŷkon) ‘fig’. These too have no Indo-European precedent.cypress: Appears in Mycenaean Greek (in Linear B) as 𐀒𐀠𐀫 (ku‑pa‑ro) and Ancient Greek as κυπάρισσος (kypárissos). Lacks an Indo-European etymology. English borrowed the word cypress from Greek.Because the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived outside the native range of these plants, their language lacked words for them. They only borrowed the words upon arriving in the eastern Mediterranean. Speakers coin or borrow new words as they need them, and migration events often trigger such a need, leaving a trace of that migration in the language’s lexicon (and grammar, but that’s a point for another article). In this way, all languages contain a fossil record of their history. They are a catalog of what the population lacked when they arrived in an area or came into contact with new peoples. In this article, we’ll use that linguistic fossil record to discover what the language that existed in the Aegean prior to the Greeks—which we’ll call Pre-Greek—was like.Substrates, Superstrates, & AdstratesMigration is just one piece of the puzzle, however. When one language disappears and leaves only traces of existence in other languages in the region, this is typically the result of social stratification: one more socially dominant community (militarily, economically, technologically, politically, etc.) imposes its language on another less dominant one. Linguists refer to this situation as linguistic stratification: the socially dominant language is called the superstrate language, while the less dominant variety is called the substrate language. This metaphor likens languages and population movements to geological strata, where each new population to enter an area adds another layer to the linguistic history of the region.Languages as geological strataIn the course of linguistic stratification, both languages naturally influence one another, but the substrate language is often lost entirely, leaving only traces within the superstrate language. So when we have indirect evidence of a historically unknown language that influenced a historically known language—like the way the Pre-Greeks influenced Ancient Greek—we are usually looking at a case of linguistic stratification. Indeed, the early Greeks, and especially the Mycenaeans (c. 1750–1050 BCE), are associated with major advances in technology (including writing), economy, and social organization in the Aegean. Another example of linguistic strata can be seen in the diversification of Latin into its descendant Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and several dozen others). While the dominance of Roman culture gradually erased many of the local languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, each of those local languages nonetheless influenced the Latin spoken in their respective regions. Over time, those various flavors of Latin became distinct languages.One other type of linguistic “stratum” (which breaks the geological layering metaphor somewhat) is an adstrate language—a language which influences a neighboring population. Like substrates, this often happens in cases of social stratification, where the adstrate community is considered socially superior or dominant to the surrounding communities (but it can also occur due to simple geographic proximity). Due to the cultural