Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek(linguisticdiscovery.com) |
Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek(linguisticdiscovery.com) |
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.
There are similar arguments over Pictish, but at least with Greek there is a substantial body of vocabulary, which Pictish lacks.
Languages invent new words and sound patterns endogenously all the time.
> [...] 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
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.
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.
No, it is mori, attested in marine, muir, maryadah, mal, morje, etc in farflung IE tongues today.
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.
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.
I see what you did there
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.
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 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.
“Solon, oh Solon!” — are Greeks truly ancient or relative newcomers in a seafaring land?
Did we have Ancient geeks?
Anthemios of Tralles, quite the prankster
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)
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.
(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...
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.
Most likely a reference to Houses of the Holy.
That’s probably why the lake is called “Steinhuder Meer”.
In low German the word for ocean still is “See”.
Die See - the ocean
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.
The English word "sea" is also sometimes used in this sense, but it's less apparent since "the" carries no gender: "He liked living close to the sea." - doesn't really refer to a specific sea or ocean even though the definite article has been used. (I'm happy to be corrected if this is an ungrammatical sentence since I'm not a native English speaker)
The Hawaiians distinguished between coastal waters and open waters because in their archipelago of far smaller and more numerous islands, the distinction between the two was important. Think currents, waves, depth.
And I guess I failed to adequately make my point, but I'll try again - when the Polynesians who would become the Māori reached New Zealand, the far larger islands they now inhabited lead them to focus far less on oceanic travel as they pivoted to a focus on the land and rivers they now inhabited.
So a big lake was effectively the same as the ocean for them - a big body of water.
I would imagine Polynesian languages would distinguish between fresh water bodies and salt water ones, since they need to be able to drink. Even small islands can have pools.
[Edit to add: much of Polynesia is of volcanic origin, so freshwater crater lakes are a feature of these landscapes.]
Māori distinguished water _quality_ without reference to whether or not it was a lake or sea or river.
Wai tai: Salt water
Wai māori: Fresh water, water for regular daily usage
Waiora: Pure water that restored/healed a person
Waikino: Dangerous / polluted water
Waitapu: Sacred water
Which makes sense right? You can have a river that is significantly salty and hence unpotable some distance from the sea, depending on the strength of the tides - likewise you can have a lake near the sea that intermingles with seawater to the extent that it's brackish.
So Māori naming was more based on utility than the geographical distinctions than we're used to in the Eurocentric worldview.
And this also extended to their view on land ownership, which caused so many issues when Europeans turned up and wanted to "buy" "land" from the local iwi/tribes - a chief would grant a European the exclusive rights to grazing in an area, and the European would interpret it as exclusive ownership, and then get angry when the Māori would continue harvesting tuna/eels or birds on "their" land that they'd "purchased".
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.
"Mere" in English doesn't seem to refer to saltwater at all. Nearly always small lakes and mostly in certain locales of eastern England.
Peoples living on remote oceanic islands are the exception rather than the rule, and lost the words for larger freshwater bodies because they didn't tend to encounter them, just as some inland peoples had no words for oceans. You've even mentioned a distinction... "brackish". It is pretty important to know if one can drink water or not.
By the way, in some parts of Europe these distinctions don't quite happen either. "Loch" is used for branches of the sea as much as freshwater. In some places "lake" and "lago" are used for both. In fact, without looking it up, "lagoon" is probably related to the Romance word for "lake". River isn't reserved for freshwater in European languages. The Menai Straits are Afon Menai (Menai River) in Welsh. In tradition, the ocean was described as a river encircling the continents.
"Which makes sense right?"
Most of them do, except waitapu. Taboos often make little sense, and the reasons can be long forgotten. Sometimes they are just dangerous stretches of water. We used to have notions of taboo here too.
Definitely not the most common name for inland bodies of water by a country mile though. "Pond", "pool", and "lake" are more common.
So I did a quick search to check, both from memory and by looking at the map – not because I doubted you being right in general across the UK, but because locally 'mere' is so common.
Anyway, towns or bodies of water with 'Mere' in Cheshire: Mere, Mere Heath, Ellesmere Port, Blakemere, Delamere, Oakmere, Tatton Mere, Comber Mere, Pickmere, Manley Mere, Shakerly Mere, Marbury (means 'Fortified town by the lake'), Marbury Big Mere, the Quoisley Meres, Flaxmere, Hatchmere, Radnor Mere, Astbury Mere, Rossmere, Rostherne Mere, Nunsmere, The Mere, Little Mere… and then I got bored, so I may have missed a couple. Anyway, that's at least 23, and Cheshire is not a noticeably watery place, compared to some other counties.
In contrast, there are very few lakes: I could find Oulton Park Lake (man-made in the late 18th Century), and Acre Nook Lake, Lapwing Hall Lake, and another unnamed one – a series of quarry pits turned into a watersports centre in the 2010s.
So it looks like that in Cheshire at least, the normal name for a 'larger than a pond' body of water or nearby town is 'mere'.
Thanks for sending me down this interesting (well, to me, anyway) rabbit hole…
Some of it is regional. "Tarn" turns up in the Danelaw. "Lough" turns up in the far north of England for about twenty place names, which is a variant of "loch", but is pronounced "luff". You can find some "loughs" near Hadrian's Wall.
I suspect there’s a Mercian link here somewhere…