[HN Gopher] Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient G...
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Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek
Author : axiologist
Score : 177 points
Date : 2026-09-18 03:04 UTC (1 days ago)
HTML web link (linguisticdiscovery.com)
TEXT w3m dump (linguisticdiscovery.com)
| noncoml wrote:
| > 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.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 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?
| klrefg wrote:
| > 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.)
| samus wrote:
| > 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.
| TFNA wrote:
| The title is super-clickbaity, as no Indo-Europeanist working
| today believes in a single Pre-Greek language; this was the idee
| 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.
| kavalg wrote:
| 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.
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| I thought the Thracians spoke an IE language.
| TFNA wrote:
| Recent paper by Kassian in _Transactions of the
| Philological Society_ makes formidable case that Thracian
| was not Indo-European.
| nephihaha wrote:
| The author does mention the possibility of more than one non-IE
| pre-Greek language, as well as the possibility of an Indo-
| European predecessor in the region.
|
| There are similar arguments over Pictish, but at least with
| Greek there is a substantial body of vocabulary, which Pictish
| lacks.
| lordleft wrote:
| I don't agree with this characterization of the article at all.
| What you see as clickbaity I see as using a reductive idea to
| set the stage for a more complex one. I just think this is
| good, engaging writing.
| metalman wrote:
| Ya, barrrrmp! disagree, the main thesus is lingustic evolution
| as sort of hereditary characteristics whose exact origins are
| difficult to elucidate, kind of like apples and horses, that
| also share the same general geographic origins. Various lists
| of words show conclusivly how many words are conserved over
| very broad geographic, temporal, and cultural ranges, so it
| will always be a (low stakes) game of reverse engineering how
| words and full languages moved around. perhaps of interest was
| an early study of austrailian languages, where over time local
| languages became incomrehensable to distant tribes, but the
| ancestral origin songs, were recognisable from there melodic
| and rythmic structure, and the actaul storys were essentialy
| identical, so language drift, but cultural continuity, which is
| aparently what you get after 50 millenia hanging out with
| marsupials.
| empath75 wrote:
| Also, "not having a known etymology" is weak evidence for
| borrowing, full stop, let alone for borrowing from a substrate.
| There are lots of very common words in english (dog, pig, boy,
| girl) that have no known etymology which are incredibly
| unlikely to impossible to have come from a substrate language.
|
| Languages invent new words and sound patterns endogenously all
| the time.
| TFNA wrote:
| English _dog_ has had an etymology for the last 20 years or
| so (Gasiorowski 's) that many find convincing. But with
| regard to Greek lexicon, it is not just the lack of etymology
| that suggests substrate but the non-IE phonology of many of
| these words.
| yorwba wrote:
| Gasiorowski's etymology: https://www.researchgate.net/publi
| cation/290177844_The_etymo...
| theanonymousone wrote:
| So, the field was making a joke of someone's dementia?
| TFNA wrote:
| Everyone knows about the weakness of the research and jokes
| about it, but much fewer people are aware of the dementia
| behind it.
| kleton wrote:
| > 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.
| schoen wrote:
| 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.
| pishpash wrote:
| 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.
| pests wrote:
| After growing up for decades in Michigan and seeing the
| surrounding Great Lakes regularly, the oceans were a bit
| disappointing. Besides the salt. I knew it was salty but I
| wasn't expecting pickle juice.
| schoen wrote:
| ... and the oceans aren't even that salty on the absolute
| scale of salty seas on Earth!
|
| 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.
| nephihaha wrote:
| There was one major distinction, which was "is it
| drinkable?" Someone crossing the North American Great Lakes
| (before pollution), didn't need to store water. But they
| would crossing an ocean, or the Caspian Sea. It's not like
| you can use seawater to irrigate most crops (except seaweed
| and a handful of others).
|
| "Mere" in English doesn't seem to refer to saltwater at
| all. Nearly always small lakes and mostly in certain
| locales of eastern England.
| TFNA wrote:
| 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.
| kleton wrote:
| It is probably not a substrate word, but more likely coming
| from "dead" water, as in not a moving river.
| TFNA wrote:
| 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.
| kleton wrote:
| Carl Darling Buck (A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in
| the Principal Indo-European Languages) and Julius Pokorny
| (Indogermanisches Etymologisches Worterbuch) are just a
| few of the philologists who have posited this "dead
| water" hypothesis
| TFNA wrote:
| Neither Buck nor Pokorny are regarded today as worth
| citing except for historiographical reasons. Their work
| is obsolete by many decades.
| derriz wrote:
| Could you recommend a book or reading material that
| reflects recent developments in PIE research? I have a
| few books but they're quite old.
| medvidek wrote:
| 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).
| Lutzb wrote:
| Der See - the lake
|
| Die See - the ocean
| Basje wrote:
| 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.
| samus wrote:
| "die See" refers to the sea in general, not to a specific
| body of water, unless it is part of a name, like
| "Nordsee".
|
| 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)
| niemandhier wrote:
| I remember reading that, in middlelow German the meanings
| were swapped "See" meaning the ocean and "Meer" meaning
| large body of standing water.
|
| That's probably why the lake is called "Steinhuder Meer".
|
| In low German the word for ocean still is "See".
| nephihaha wrote:
| The word "mere" in English is pretty uncommon but tends
| to refer to small bodies of water.
| mr_toad wrote:
| There are dozens of lakes in England, and a few in other
| english speaking countries with the word mere in their
| name.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Hence I said "pretty uncommon'. Windermere is the most
| prominent example but is often called Lake Windermere.
| There is also Fowlmere nature reserve.
|
| Definitely not the most common name for inland bodies of
| water by a country mile though. "Pond", "pool", and
| "lake" are more common.
| saispas wrote:
| I read your post, and it got me thinking because, round
| here in Cheshire,v'mere' is a very common name for a
| bigger stretch of water ('pool' is generally reserved for
| smaller stretches of water).
|
| 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...
| nephihaha wrote:
| I don't know of a single "mere" in Scotland or Ireland. I
| doubt there are any in Wales... Maybe in the eastern bits
| that are less Welsh speaking. I'm surprised about
| Cheshire. Maybe it is more widespread than I thought it
| was! But it isn't a word I hear used in spoken in English
| outside of place names.
|
| 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.
| saispas wrote:
| You wouldn't really expect many in Wales itself, because
| 'mere' is from the Old English. There are a few in
| Shropshire (including Ellesmere - the other end of the
| never-built Ellesmere canal on its way to Ellesmere Port)
| and there are some in the Fens and elsewhere. Apparently,
| there are a couple in Wales - near Wrexham and in
| Pembrokeshire. (I got this from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_(lake)...).
|
| I suspect there's a Mercian link here somewhere...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yeah, my mother tongue is similar, "sea" and "ocean" has
| the exact same word, so of course when I speak English I
| accidentally call a bunch of seas for oceans instead.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Yep, it's the same in Maori, 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 Maori, 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 Maori did.
|
| In fact, the Maori 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 Maori traveling to Raoul in the
| Kermadecs early on, as classical Maori 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 Maori
| word for "river", there's another word that also means river
| in Maori:
|
| "Ara" - path.
|
| (Of course, it still means a regular path)
| dmurray wrote:
| _Are_ there any large lakes in Polynesia? The Maori,
| Hawaiians, etc are one group of people I would expect to
| make a distinction between lakes (puddles, really) and open
| ocean.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Yes, there are many substantial ones in New Zealand. Lake
| Taupo is an obvious one, and there are some large ones in
| Otago and Southland which are not abutting the sea.
|
| 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.]
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| > Polynesian languages would distinguish between fresh
| water bodies and salt water ones
|
| Maori distinguished water _quality_ without reference to
| whether or not it was a lake or sea or river.
|
| Wai tai: Salt water
|
| Wai maori: 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 Maori 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 Maori
| would continue harvesting tuna/eels or birds on "their"
| land that they'd "purchased".
| nephihaha wrote:
| I am not sure what you mean by "Eurocentric" here. These
| distinctions exist in most Asian languages and probably
| in other continental landmasses.
|
| 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.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Lake Taupo, the largest lake in New Zealand, is about the
| size of Singapore.
|
| 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 Maori 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.
| Utilera wrote:
| The cognate set is real, but jumping from that to "PIE had a
| word for the sea" assumes the original meaning was already
| maritime
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| For an analogous but _completely_ unrelated example, Stoney [0]
| has a word for "ocean" (minitaga) [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...
| smitty1e wrote:
| > (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.
| jltsiren wrote:
| 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.
| Utilera wrote:
| I think this is mostly a disagreement over semantics.
| Utilera wrote:
| What I find cool here is how much archaeology you can do without
| actually digging anything up
| samus wrote:
| One still has to do field work to gather all the linguistic
| data. It's rather easy with settled societies only. Researchers
| studying indigenous languages had to travel to hard to reach
| places and often live with the tribes for a quite long time.
|
| 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.
| mmooss wrote:
| Yes, etymology is amazing. You carry tens of thousands of
| artifacts in your head.
| whythismatters wrote:
| See also (hypothetical) Proto-Euphratean, "the lost language
| hidden within Sumerian": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-
| Euphratean_language
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| svobodamartin wrote:
| First I read pre-geek.
|
| Did we have Ancient geeks?
| red_admiral wrote:
| Archimedes comes to mind.
| baruz wrote:
| Ktesibios and Heron of Alexandria
|
| Anthemios of Tralles, quite the prankster
| kgeist wrote:
| >Words borrowed from a Pre-Indo-European language into
| Mediterranean languages
|
| > [...] Greek murmex myrmex 'ant', Latin formica
|
| Must be an error: Proto-Celtic *morwos
| Proto-Balto-Slavic: *marwis Proto-Indo-Iranian: *marwis
| Proto-Germanic: *mauraz Old Armenian: mrjimn
|
| Greek murmex 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 also has vamra "ant", which makes it look like the whole
| thing is a tabooistic distortion of *wrmis "worm".
|
| 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.
| kgeist wrote:
| >wine
|
| It could be an original Proto-Indoeuropean word as well,
| because Greek has uien "grapewine" (< *wih1-en), which follows
| PIE ablaut (weyh1-o ~ wih1-en), 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.
| el1s7 wrote:
| One aspect the article seems to overlook 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.
| asimpletune wrote:
| Plato wrote about a lot of these kinds of words in the dialogue
| Cratylus. The dialogue is about more than just etymology, of
| course, but it's worth looking at if the subject is interesting
| to you.
| drhagen wrote:
| I get that the article was already super long, but I really
| wanted to hear how they got all the body-parts words from the
| Pre-Greeks. That seems like such a random corpus to lift from
| another language. Pre-Greeks way more into divination?
| drhagen wrote:
| Or, we have multiple anatomy textbooks [0] from before the Late
| Bronze Age Collapse.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_textbooks
| empath75 wrote:
| Yeah I think to calibrate you should probably look to Native
| American words that made it into English -- place names, local
| foods and wildlife, cultural items. Those are going to be your
| substrate borrowings for most languages.
| leoc wrote:
| IIRC there's a common cultural tendency to put a lot of stock
| in the magical powers of exotic foreign wizards, so divination
| might not be such a bad explanation at all.
| canjobear wrote:
| > such a random corpus
|
| I see what you did there
| icodar wrote:
| Herodotus states that the Pelasgians spoke a language different
| from Greek. However, some words from the Pelasgian language may
| have become incorporated into the Greek language.
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| For a more detailed analysis from an Indo-Europeanist with a
| Greek background:
| https://consultingphilologist.wordpress.com/2025/08/13/how-m...
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