Re: [tied] Re: Hittites and others

----- Original Message -----

From: george knysh

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Friday, October 19, 2001 8:43 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Hittites and others

*****GK: But even if this population really did
originate on the Middle Danube etc. in what way is my
suggestion that they ought to have had a word for
"horse" before moving into Anatolia negated by what
you have just said? I have no difficulty in accepting
the notion that "somebody showed them domesticated
horses" prior to their move (that's what I mentioned
as an alternative to a Mitannian borrowing). I take it
you would be sceptical as to the meaning and identity
of the many "horse head" stone "scepters"  [we call
them "kosturs" but since you don't care for kos'kos' I
won't insist (:=))] found in the Danubian area in the
epoch prior to the proto-Hittite etc move. (Unless you
have a different time in mind: I'm still thinking late
3rd millennium BC).I like MCV's reading of the
Sumerogram as "donkey from foreign parts". This sounds
EXACTLY like the sort of thing locals might have
called this exotic beast. And there is little
difficulty in seeing the incoming proto-Hittites
adopting the established local term instead of their
own (if that was the same as or close to Luwian) as
part of their acculturation process.*****

 

My date for the Anatolian/non-Anatolian split is ca. 5500 BC, probably _long_ before the domestication of the horse. At that time, there were two or three subspecies of _Equus ferus_ in western Eurasia: steppe tarpans ranging perhaps as far to the soutwest as the Danube delta, forest horses living throughout Northern and Western Europe, and perhaps some lingering populations of the robust northern subspecies (_E. ferus remagensis_ [= _germanicus_]). But the Middle Danube was horseless, as far as I know, and the only equid in the Balkans was the now extinct European ass, _E. hydruntinus_. In the late third millennium BC there were already other peoples in the Danubian area -- non-Anatolian IEs migrating from North-Central and Eastern Europe. I regard it as possible that the Anatolians had never been familiar with horses until they met them as domesticates already in Asia Minor.

*****GK: Could this very different grammatical
structure have been the result of a contact process
between IE and another (non-IE) population in the
Danube, resulting in the emergence of
"proto-Anatolian" groups prior to the move across the
Bosporus (or whatever the old name)? Is there any way
of conclusively demonstrating that this is not what
happened?  I read some time ago (forgot the source
though) that the very early "French" texts (10th c.)
clearly demonstrate a "Germanic" sentence structure,
indicating that this was an effort by Franks to speak
the local Romance language by adapting it to their
grammatical rules. Now here we are talking "upper
classes" influencing a "subject" speech they are in
the process of adopting. But the other possibility
(subjects adapting an "upper class" speech to their
rules) is also available.*****

Let's say it's far easier to imagine that the Anatolian languages generally represent a more archaic stage of IE grammar than the non-Anatolian ones. One would have to discuss feature after feature (and the directionality of linguistic processes) to show why this seems to be the case, but I believe there is a nearly general consensus of historical linguists that there are numerous non-Anatolian innovations versus Anatolian retentions. The conservative character of Anatolian is visible in its sentence structure (especially the role of sentence particles), the animate/inanimate noun-class system (archaic traces of which underlie the three-gender system of non-Anatolian IE), the conjugational classes, the absence or near-absence of several paradigms which are extremely productive elsewhere, and the productivity of paradigms that are only residual elsewhere, etc.

 

Piotr