Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek
linguisticdiscovery.com52 points by axiologist 4 hours ago
52 points by axiologist 4 hours 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.
For an analogous but completely unrelated example, Stoney [0] has a word for "ocean" (mînîtâga) [1], but it's also only spoken in a landlocked region. So maybe human languages have a tendency to preserve/invent the word for "ocean" for some reason?
(I actually remember asking the professor why they had a word for "ocean", but he wasn't sure either.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoney_language
[1]: https://dictionary.stoneynakoda.org/#/L/m%C3%AEn%C3%AEt%C3%A...
> (I actually remember asking the professor why they had a word for "ocean", but he wasn't sure either.)
Most likely a reference to Houses of the Holy.
There are decades of scholarship on those cognates, and a longstanding view that in Proto-Indo-European the word meant simply "large body of water" and not specifically "sea". Moreover, it may be a substrate word borrowed into European IE languages, as the affinity of that Sanskrit word to this cognate set is not very certain.
The cognate set is real, but jumping from that to "PIE had a word for the sea" assumes the original meaning was already maritime
Yep, it's the same in Māori, a Polynesian language, where "moana" refers to oceans and large lakes alike.
What's really interesting is that in Hawaiian, a close relative with some sound shifts (k/t, l/r, n/ng, so taboo is kapu in Hawaiian, in Māori, tapu, path is ala / ara, the God of the sea is Kanaloa/Tangaroa) they have more than one word for ocean, kai is coastal waters, moana is the deep ocean.
But it makes sense in the geographical context of both societies and how they evolved to their environment, the Hawaiian archipelago is made up of multiple smaller islands separated by waters exposed to the full force of the Pacific, while the archipelago of New Zealand is dominated by two large landmasses separated by a narrow strait that together are about the same area as Germany.
So the Hawaiians remained more tightly wedded to the sea to build their archipelagan societies than the Māori did.
In fact, the Māori lost the knowledge to build ocean-going vessels like the ones that had carried them to New Zealand within a few hundred years because there was no need for it. And their language lost the distinction between "coastal waters" and "ocean" while Hawaiian retained them.
While we have evidence of Māori traveling to Raoul in the Kermadecs early on, as classical Māori culture evolved on much much larger islands, their technology focus on boats switched from ocean going vessels to coastal travel and river travel.
In fact, while "Wai", water, is often considered the Māori word for "river", there's another word that also means river in Māori:
"Ara" - path.
(Of course, it still means a regular path)
You can see the same with the word "sea". Its German equivalent See still mainly means "lake", even though in some fixed expressions it can be translated as "sea" (e.g. Nordsee, Ostsee).
It is probably not a substrate word, but more likely coming from "dead" water, as in not a moving river.
This is a well-established field where you can read experts discussing the word in depth, including its derivational properties and ablaut behavior. This isn't something where an HN's armchair guess is worth anything, just like when laypeople use HN threads on quantum theory for their own inane ideas.
Carl Darling Buck (A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages) and Julius Pokorny (Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch) are just a few of the philologists who have posited this "dead water" hypothesis
Neither Buck nor Pokorny are regarded today as worth citing except for historiographical reasons. Their work is obsolete by many decades.
Wiktionary'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-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.
That 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.
What I find cool here is how much archaeology you can do without actually digging anything up
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.
> 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.
> 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.)
How 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?
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