Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!uhog.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!sarima
From: sarima@netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Subject: Re: What are Scythians?
Message-ID: <sarimaCzr97q.4oI@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <rsavageCyt0CM.5L7@netcom.com> <3aen6l$g6b@pilot.njin.net> <sarimaCzJ9tp.n4C@netcom.com> <CzJsFu.9I4@inter.nl.net>
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 1994 04:45:24 GMT
Lines: 68

In article <CzJsFu.9I4@inter.nl.net>,
Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@inter.NL.net> wrote:
>In article <sarimaCzJ9tp.n4C@netcom.com>,
>
>It's always very hard to derive linguistic facts from pottery
>or building styles.  Troy II suggests a connection with the
>Balkans (Ezero culture), appr. 3000/2700 BC.

True, but the megalon building style is restricted to
IE speaking peoples in historical times, so I find it fairly
indicative.

My hypothesis is that the Ezero culture was the Proto-Anatolian
source area, and that it was the arrival of their distant kin,
the Greeks, from the northeast that pushed the proto-Hittites
into Anatolia.  [Note, the range of dates assigned to Troy II
are consistant with this model].

I suspect that the Greeks picked up some apsects of the culture,
perhaps including the megaron structure.  Certainly there have
been persistant suggestions that Greek contains an old layer
of borrowing from some unspecified IE dialect, to explain some
anomolous reflexes of PIE words.  In my model this would be
Proto-Anatolian.

>  Mallory tentatively
>puts the "coming of the Greeks" at Early Helladic III (2200 BC).
>Our earliest records are from say 1700 BC for Hittite, a millennium 
>later, but I just don't think 500+500 years are enough to account 
>for the vast differences between Hittite and Greek.

Well, maybe not quite - but very close, especially in conjunction
with radically differing cultural histories.  (Language change is
more closely related to cultural processes than to "errors" in
learning the language by the young, as has been shown by some
recent studies of changes in progress).

I would place the PIE origin in the Sredny Stog culture, some
600 or more years earlier.  And, as I said above, I place the
Proto-Anatolian/Proto-Hellenic split rather before the Early
Helladic III, though maybe not that much before the beginning
of the Ezero culture.
>
>I do not agree with Renfrew in deriving Anatolian directly from
>the C,atal-Hu"yu"k culture, but Greek toponyms like `Parnassos'
>certainly suggest a relationship between pre-Greek inhabitants
>of Greece and the Anatolians. 

Certainly - as I said above, the Greeks would have been in contact
with them while invading their Balkan homeland.

Personally, I strongly suspect that the C'atal-Hu"yu"k culture
was an early Caucasian culture - perhaps even the homeland of
one of the two main branches of Caucasian proper.  Certainly,
except for Hittite and its relatives, all of the languages of
Anatolia in the earliest times are Caucasian.


Note, this means that Renfrew may well have been *partly* right,
in that his spread of agriculture *did* spread a language family
across Europe - it was just that it was the Macro-Caucasian Family,
not the Indo-European one.  In this, admittedly speculative, model,
Basque is a long-surviving relic of this early spread of agriculture.
-- 
NAMES: sarima@netcom.com swf@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com

May the peace of God be with you.

