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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.
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?
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.
I thought the Thracians spoke an IE language.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, it is mori, attested in marine, muir, maryadah, mal, morje, etc in farflung IE tongues today.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Der See - the lake
Die See - the ocean
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.
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”.
The word "mere" in English is pretty uncommon but tends to refer to small bodies of water.
There are dozens of lakes in England, and a few in other english speaking countries with the word mere in their name.
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.
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)
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.
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.]
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".
Lake Taupō, 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 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.
The cognate set is real, but jumping from that to "PIE had a word for the sea" assumes the original meaning was already maritime
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...
Most likely a reference to Houses of the Holy.
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.
I think this is mostly a disagreement over semantics.
What I find cool here is how much archaeology you can do without actually digging anything up
See also (hypothetical) Proto-Euphratean, "the lost language hidden within Sumerian": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Euphratean_language
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.
First I read pre-geek.
Did we have Ancient geeks?
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 also has vamra "ant", which makes it look like the whole thing is a tabooistic distortion of *wr̥mis "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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Or, we have multiple anatomy textbooks [0] from before the Late Bronze Age Collapse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_textbooks
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.
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.
For a more detailed analysis from an Indo-Europeanist with a Greek background: https://consultingphilologist.wordpress.com/2025/08/13/how-m...