Re: Submerged Languages

Glen, Mark, Sabine and all, thank you for your help regrarding
"submerged"/substrate languages

A couple of points.

>
> >Does anyone know of some good research into submerged languages of
>the
> >ancient world.
>
> I don't think it's possible to find good research on "submerged

languages"

> at all since to prove that a language has loans from an invisible

language

> you have to first rule out that these supposed loans are not really

native

> words or loaned from another "visible" language (good luck). And

certainly

> these supposed loans can't say anything very accurate on its sounds

or

> grammar anyway.
>
> However I do remember a theory (not good research) that I chanced

upon

> concerning a "Proto-Euphratean" language whereupon this language was
> supposed to exist before the arrival of the Sumerians into the

Fertile

> Crescent. You must have chanced on that it seems, by your email.

This "theory" has been proposed by none other than the leading
Sumerologist of the Modern Age, Samual Noah Kramer. From an analysis
of Sumerian vocabulary he has found that most place names in the
Sumerian area do not have names that have any meaning in the Sumerian
language. When this is the case it is generally due to the fact that
the original inhabitants of an area spoke a different language than
those who have since occupied that area.

Kramer then did an anlysis of various aspects of Sumerian life. He
found non-Sumerian elements were concentrated in agriculure, pottery,
and metalworking; Sumerian elements were concentrated in government,
law making and administration. Thus it led him to propose "the
Sumerian problem" - that Sumerian languages only achieved pre-eminence
in Southern Iraq in the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr phase of cultures, and
that ealier Ubaid peoples were probably (given their wide distribution
well outside of the area occupied subsequently by Sumerian languages)
non Sumerian.

It would seem that as Southern Iraq was colonised south from the Halaf
and Samara cultures, via the indermediary of the Hadji Muhammed and
Ubaid "peoples" (keeping the proviso that material
culture-language-biological group are not co-determined). These were
the people who intoduced and pioneered the techniques of hydraulic
agriculture (to use Karl Whitfogel's term) in Southern Iraq. The
Sumerian "stratum", Kramer argued arrived later, from elsewhere.

Looking at the Sumerian Panthenon; Anu (Sky), Ki (Earth aka Ninhursag =
Lady of the Mountain), Enlil (En = Lord, Lil = Air), Enki (Ditto Lord
Earth), all have very transparent Sumerian names. Inanna, however, has
no meaning at all in Sumerian, and thus either comes from outside
later, or else she was a sunstrate divinity, later adopted into the
Sumerian Anunaki (Sky and Earth's, i.e. Pantheon). Some evidence
suggests she was a late comer to the Sumerian Patheon, as the story of
her being granted the dozen or so "me" (gifts of civilisation) by Enki,
suggests. Alternatively she may have been an indigenous, aboriginal
deity laterly accepted by the Sumerian rulers.

> Even though I theorize myself that Sumerians must have travelled from

the

> north at one time to their eventual location based on promising

linguistic

> connections and the fact that I like to fantasize in the shower that
> Proto-Euphratean was a magical language remotely related to

Burushaski

> (perhaps I've shared too much), I doubt that Proto-Euphratean or

other

> submerged languages can ever be reconstructed in a reasonable way

until we

> have a better grasp of how all these _visible_ languages evolved and

fully

> lay to rest from where they and their vocabularies all came from.

Kramer himself proposed a "mountainous origin for the Sumerians, based
on the fact that they located their holy places and shrines on the tops
of temple mounds. As Sumerian is an agglutinative tongue he suggested
an Altaic origin for Sumerian through Iran, but this part of his theory
has been least supported by the evidence. Certainly, the Sumerians
themselves had origin myths. They located their source on the island
of Dilmun (Bahrein), and there is some superficial evidence to support
this (John Croft) theory.

First of all, the Sumerian King List states that "when kingship was let
down from on high, the first city was Eridu". Eridu was the most
southerly of the Sumerian cities, and seems to have been the source of
those cultural features we associate as Sumerian. Enki, assuming
control of the Abzu (from where, via Greek, we get the word Abyss)
temple, proceeded to give the people the "me" of governance. Eridu was
the city closest to the coast, and Enki (a strange god, half goat, half
fish) was supposed to have swum out of the waters.

Now it would appear that the Early Sumerians high prowed reed ships
very often were decorated with figure heads of gazelle or goat horns,
or skulls. This would indicate that the Sumerians saw themselves, not
as coming from the north, but over the Persian gulf from the south!

Secondly the Sumerian creation myth tells how in the beginning the
world was a chaotic mingling of waters - sweet and salt. Into this a
bubble of infant air (Enlil) appeared as the offspring, separating the
sweet waters of the father sky (Anu)(i.e. rain), from the salt waters
of the mother Earth (Ki)(i.e. oceans). Out of deeps (Taimat related to
the Biblical Tehomet) a marshy island emerged as the first land - the
Sumerian paradise of Dilmun.

Now it is not widely known but Bahrein has a number of fresh water
springs that come up in the ocean. In fact Bahrein gets its name from
the fact. Here we see the "mingling of waters" spoken of in the
Sumerian creation myth.

Finally, we see archaeologically that Bahrein had been occupied since
Late Paleolithic times, but it came within the Mesopotamian culture
orbit only from the Ubaid period. No doubt it was during this period
that the Dilmun/Sumerians adopted a farming based culture, with loaned
technology and loaned words from the substrait Ubaid people.
Archaeologically Dilmun seems to have been vacated for a short time
after Ubaid times, suggesting that the inhabitants went somewhere. It
would seem they went to Sumer.

One final pieces of evidence. Dilmun was the land of the dead, tens of
thousands of grave mounds cover the island, from Sumerian times
onwards. People from Sumer and Akkad went to significant expense to
get their remains transferred to Dilmun, and a large number of mortuary
mounds were constructed as a result.

Now, who were the substrait people? Roux in "Ancient Iraq" suggested
that the substrait language was related to Hurrian/Urartuean. This
would make sense. The Mitannite Hurrian kingdom covered almost the
exact same area as the much early Halaf culture, from which the lower
Mesopotamian cultures were clearly derived. Certainly there was a
family of languages stretching from Urartu around lakes Van and Urmiah,
through the Guti, Kassites and Lualabi down to Anshan and Susa. I have
not been able to find much on the Elamite language but I suspect that
they may have been related.

Alternatively some linguists have proposed that the language of Susa
was related to Dravidian. Certainly Elamite cultural cultural features
have been found at Sialk and Tepe Yayha in Iran, and the connection to
the Indus Valley civilisation via the lapis lazuli of Badakhshan was an
old one.

> >The Greek word for sea - Thalassa - is also supposedly derived from
>a
> >submerged language. Does not the presence of non-IndoEuropean
>submerged
> >languages in classical Greece (eg EteoCretian) disprove >the thesis

of

> >Colin Renfrew that Indo-European came from Anatolia?
>
> I would be careful basing anything on shakey submerged language

theories.

> But the Out-of-Anatolia idea bothers me severely concerning IE.
> Indo-European seems _completely_ absent in Anatolia until the arrival

of the

> "Anatolian" lgs by the third millenium BC. That's reality.

Glen, I have great difficulty with Renfrew's thesis too. The trouble
is, it seems to make archaeological sense. The European populations
seem genetically derived from the Anatolian and Middle Eastern (See
Carvalli Sforza's "History and Geography of Human Genetics"). He
supports Renfrew for this reason.

Personally, I feel Renfrew makes the old mistake of confusing language
spoken with the people using it. Thus, while clearly there was a
movement of pre-potery people from Anatolia into Greece circa 6-7,000
BCE, and the painted pottery cultures of Anatolia show connections with
the Sesklo, Cardial and Starcevo cultures (with Danubian and Tripolyte
cultures spreading the horizons still further) I feel that these are
non IE but rather a substrate language that exists in the 30% nonI-E
vocabulary found in classic Greek. I feel that these came from an
nonI-E Anatolian group related to EtoCretian and Lemnian/Etruscan.

> It is a dissatisfying theory as well for the fact that it ignores the

many

> similarities between Uralic and IE which are not a result of

FinnoUgric

> contacts with IndoIranian (ancestor of Sanskrit, Iranian, Avestan)

such as

> the quite apparent accusative *-m, terms like *mete "honey" or *wete
> "water", personal pronouns and question words like *ki "who?" and

other

> simple grammatical connections that certainly demonstrate a

connection of

> some kind to the northerly language. Uralic and IE are also

ultimately

> connected to Altaic for the same reasons, a language group which is

again a

> northerly and a quite eastward language group.
>
> I surmise that Renfrew's theory is insisted upon by some through some
> archaic need to feel that our IE-speakers were the centre of

everything,

> whether that be geographically, genetically, physically or by

innovations

> such as agriculture, etc. Look John, the IndoEuropeans were ordinary,
> imperfect, non-Aryan folk who were not even united under a single

leadership

> or a single camp of people like say Canadians are :) They more than

likely

> lived around the north and northeast shores of the Black Sea around

3500 BC.

> I don't find a need to lose that theory over a very radical one that

just

> invents even more problems for itself than it solves.
>
> Indo-European is undeniably and ultimately linked to the steppe lands

and so

> the only acceptable path that IE had made would be through the
> Pontic-Caspian region (north of the Black/Caspian Seas) INTO

Anatolia. A

> southward path through the Caucasus Mts is severely unlikely and
> unsupported. They certainly didn't enter Anatolia from the east by

going

> around the Caspian or Aral Sea until IE had fractured into dialects

like

> IndoIranian. Finally, it would be quite impossible that IE had been,

for

> thousands of years previous, within Anatolia and not have had an

effect on

> Semitic lgs and others in that area that are already almost certain

to have

> been there natively for a long period of time.
>
> If you examine through a simple diagram that shows the _demonstrable_
> linguistic interactions between IE, East Semitic and Kartvelian...
>
> Indo-European
> / \
> / \
> E Semitic ----- Kartvelian
>
> ...we see that the relative geographical positions are obvious.
> Indo-European lies to the north in the Pontic-Caspian region. The

dash

> between East Semitic and IE runs through the Black Sea and Kartvelian

is

> further south in the Caucasus. We don't find Hattic or HurroUrartean
> influence on IE as far as I know.

I agree. I think your arguments are basically sound.

<Snip>

I wrote

> >(perhaps it (i.e. my hypothesised Japethic) could be linked to

Basque).

>
> Alot has been linked to Basque without firm reason. I blaim the

Basque

> language for my dwindling bank account.

Hmmm.... Certainly there have been people who have claimed to find
links between Eskuda and the Caucasian languages.

> >David Rohl has recently suggested links between the Sumaerian kingdom
> >of Aratta, Ararat and the Armenian kingdom of Urartu. They spoke a
> >language akin to the Hurrian of the Mitanni (the Horite of the
>Bible).
>
> Are you speaking of Urartean? This is indeed related to Hurrian and

part of

> a family called HurroUrartean. There is some evidence that would

ultimately

> relate it to NorthEast Caucasian.

Yes I was. I was taking it one step further and proposing a link via
Lualabi, Kassiti, Guti, Urartu (earlier Aratta), Hurrian, South
Caucasian and Khatti, possibly extending as far as Carian?, Lin,
Etruscan/Lemnian, EtoCretian, and Pelasgian. Pelasgian was supposed
by the classic Greeks to extend into Magna Graecia (Southern Italy).
This chain of languages, if related, would have been the languages
spoken by those who invented cereal farming. The "Out of Anaolia
thesis" of Renfrew would still hold, but for a completely different
language family; a family which still has no name. It is interesting
that this area all had pre-pottery neolithic cultures.

> >Thus while all terms of the city, government, law etc are
> >clearly Sumerian in origin - the words for agriculture, for various
> >crafts, various place and city names, and the names of certain gods

(eg

> >Inanna) are non Sumerian.
>
> How could this possibly be proven? They could definitely just be

ancient

> words. What proof?

See Kramer's work, quoted above.

> >Another submerged language is that of the Guti or Kardu (the origins
>of
> >the Kurdish people).
>
> Yes, Gutian or Qutian I do remember. Don't know anything about that

one and

> I was unsuccesful at finding anything on it. Not knowing anything, I

have no

> clue what it could be related to.

It was one of a family of peoples who from an early date inhabited the
Zagros mountains. Ohters included the Subartu of the Diyala valley
(who were probably the pre-Semitic Assyrians), the Kassites, and
Lualabi. The Lualabi were the neighbours of Anshan, which spoke an
Elamite language.

> >I don't know if perhaps we can recognise a whole extinct (or nearly
> >extinct) ancient language phyllum, stretching through a
> >dialectical-language chain from Susianian in Khuzistan, through
>Anshan,
> >Kassite, Lualabi, Gutian, Urartuan, Hurrian, Caucasian, >Khattic,

Etruscan,

> >Minoan, EteoCretian, Pelasgian.
>
> Erh, that's quite a giant and dangerous leap of logic. First Etruscan

is

> probably very closely related to IndoEuropean. Minoan is often said

to be

> Semitic.

On what evidence? I have not seen anything that links Minoan to
Semetic, especially since EMI culture seems, like the ECI (Early
Cyclades) and EHI to have much more in common with the Anatolian area,
(in which there were no Semitic languages) than from the Middle East.
Unless I can have more evidence, I feel you are very likely to be wrong
here, unless you follow Greek Mythology, which speaks of the Rape of
Europa coming out of the Phoenecians.

> You need to catch up on Nostratic and Dene-Caucasian language studies

but

> ironically, you may be making sense for all the WRONG reasons.
> Dene-Caucasian usually is thought to be comprised of Basque,

NECaucasian,

> NWCaucasian, Hattic, Hurro-Urartean, Burushaski-Yeneseian,

Sino-Tibetan and

> Na-Dene. The range is quite extensive geographically and if the

theory is

> true, the group must be exceedingly ancient (we're talking some

10,000 to

> 20,000 years ago). The centre of gravity would seem to lie somewhere

between

> Anatolia and Central Asia. Whether the above list of "imagined" and

real

> languages you are listing are part of this group or not is full of

unknowns

> let alone this Dene-Caucasian theory itself that I mention.

I am aware of these theories, and in fact my "Japethic" group would be
a subgroup of the Dene-Caucasian grouping, found only in the Middle
East, Anatolia and Aegean. The Na Dene-Caucasian grouping that you are
talking of is hypothesised to have been an Upper Paleolithic language
family that spread East and South post Aurignancian. Nostratic
languages also are supposed to have been Upper Paleolithic in origin
too, but to have spread a little later.

> Japhetic, btw, is the old name given to a horribly misguided theory a
> hundred or more years ago originating from the reliance on the Bible

as a

> source of undeniable historic and pre-historic fact _over and above_

common

> sense. There is no support anymore (or perhaps there never was) of

there

> existing three main branches of human language which were named after

the 3

> sons of Noah: Japhetic (Indo-European), Shemitic (or rather Semitic)

and

> Hamitic (the languages of the blacks). As you can see John, the

theory was

> based on outright racism of the time such that the language groups

were

> conveniently patterned on race as well as Bible and not on proper

language

> research: (Japhetic) Whites, (Shemitic) Jews, (Hamitic) Blacks.

I am aware of the abuse made of that name. But a proposed
sub-Dene-Caucasian language phyllum needs a name. But I am proposing a
nonI-E language family here. There are a couple of advantages to this.

1. If one was to look at the Biblical "distribution of the Nations"
from Genesis, the proposed substrate language phyllum I am proposing
covers the area that Japethic peoples are supposed to have dwelt in.
2. Etymologically Japeth (Hebrew) and Iapetus (Greek) have been
suggested to be the same name.
3. Can you think of a better one (some people have suggested
Anatolio-Iranian but that confuses us with I-E Indo-Iranian)?

> I know this crap because I was once a Jehovah's Witness and they

still

> insist on these lies out of radical conservatism and distrust for

science

> (as well as logic in general).

Sorry for your JW past! But we still use the terms Semetic languages
(from the sons of Noah), so why not a scientific Japethic??!!

> >If there is any reality to the extinct Japethic language phyllum
> >underlying the Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European and Uralo-Altaic language
> >families of this region,
>
> Japhetic does not exist. Stop assuming that it does just because the

Bible

> says so. I don't think God would mind if you questioned it with the
> functioning brain he gave you nor should he mind if you found out

that the

> Tower of Babel was simply a story without historical basis.

I don't assume that Japethic exists because of the Bible. What the
Bible suggests is anyones guess. I could even suggest another name
that could set a cat amongst the pigeons by calling it Albanian!
Certainly there was a Caucasian kingdom of Albania, etymologically it
has been shown to lie behind place names like Elburz Mountains, the
Alps, Appenines, and even Albany (the pre-celtic people of Scotland).
But to call these people Albanians would just confuse the issue, and so
in the absence of a better name I prefer Japethic.

> Nostratic, however is the language group said to be ancestral to
> Afro-Asiatic, IE, Etruscan, Uralic, Altaic, Chuckchi-Kamchatkan,
> Eskimo-Aleut, Dravidian, Sumerian, Elamite and Kartvelian (South

Caucasian)

> and is often viewed as seperate from Dene-Caucasian. But again,

Nostratic

> and Dene-Caucasian are not the languages of Noah either. The Tower of

Babel

> is simply a cute story to show children that they shouldn't make very

high

> towers with leggo blocks or else they'll fall down on them and

permanently

> damage their ability to speak properly.

This is the first time I have seen Etruscan included in Nostratic. On
what grounds do you include it?

> Get yourself acquainted with modern linguistic research. It's fun!

Your

> views are out of date by a 100 years and you had better get on to

that Y2K

> problem soon :P

I am acquainted with modern linguistic research. I am also familiar
with the controversy that underlies Nostratic and Na Dene-Caucasian
theories (or the even bigger SCAN group i.e. Sino-Tibetan, Caucasian,
Amerind, Nostratic theory that would be between 60-90,000 years old,
and which is supposed to have colonised Interior Eurasia. What I am
suggesting is a sub-sub-sub grouping of these.)

Hope this helps

John