> 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.)
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.
Even 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.
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.
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.
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
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).
As a Dutch person, we were taught German in secondary school and Meer/See were the textbook example of false friends:
het meer - der See - the lake
de zee - das Meer - the sea
I don't remember being taught "die See" but I also dropped my German course after one year (which I now regret). Anyway, I always thought this was an interesting development in our languages.
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:
Are there any large lakes in Polynesia? The Māori, Hawaiians, etc are one group of people I would expect to make a distinction between lakes (puddles, really) and open ocean.
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.)
Finnish language doesn't have an actual word for "ocean". We use "valtameri", which means something like main sea or great sea. And both "valta" and "meri" are Indo-European loans.
But in Livonian (an almost extinct Finnic language spoken in Latvia), Valdamer is one of the names for the Baltic Sea. So maybe that's the origin of the Finnish term as well.
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.
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 valmīka "ant-hill" has a similar looking suffix.
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.
One comparison I think is missing here 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.
noncoml | 3 hours ago
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.
dr_dshiv | 2 hours ago
“Solon, oh Solon!” — are Greeks truly ancient or relative newcomers in a seafaring land?
klrefg | 2 hours ago
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.)
TFNA | 3 hours ago
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 | 34 minutes ago
kleton | 3 hours ago
No, it is mori, attested in marine, muir, maryadah, mal, morje, etc in farflung IE tongues today.
schoen | 3 hours ago
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 | 2 hours ago
TFNA | 3 hours ago
kleton | 3 hours ago
TFNA | 3 hours ago
kleton | 2 hours ago
TFNA | 2 hours ago
derriz | an hour ago
medvidek | 3 hours ago
Lutzb | 2 hours ago
Die See - the ocean
Basje | an hour ago
het meer - der See - the lake
de zee - das Meer - the sea
I don't remember being taught "die See" but I also dropped my German course after one year (which I now regret). Anyway, I always thought this was an interesting development in our languages.
niemandhier | an hour ago
That’s probably why the lake is called “Steinhuder Meer”.
In low German the word for ocean still is “See”.
EdwardDiego | 2 hours ago
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)
dmurray | 8 minutes ago
Utilera | an hour ago
gucci-on-fleek | 2 hours ago
(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...
smitty1e | 2 hours ago
Most likely a reference to Houses of the Holy.
jltsiren | an hour ago
But in Livonian (an almost extinct Finnic language spoken in Latvia), Valdamer is one of the names for the Baltic Sea. So maybe that's the origin of the Finnish term as well.
Utilera | an hour ago
Utilera | an hour ago
whythismatters | an hour ago
keiferski | an hour ago
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 | 41 minutes ago
Did we have Ancient geeks?
kgeist | 15 minutes ago
> [...] Greek μύρμηξ mýrmēx ‘ant’, Latin formica
Must be an error:
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 valmīka "ant-hill" has a similar looking suffix.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.
el1s7 | 6 minutes ago