Re: [tied] Re: Will East and West ever meet?

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

From: george knysh

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2001 2:59 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Will East and West ever meet?

[GK] Hydronyms and toponyms are excellent indicators all right. Do you include those assumed to be IE but which cannot be linked to any known IE language?

 

[PG] Names linked to recent IE languages are of course less interesting. What _is_ interesting is the so-called "Old European" stratum of hydronyms, which are remarkably uniform despite their wide geographical distribution and are evidently older than the linguistic configuration found in historical times. For example, western and northern Poland has many hydronyms that can be easily etymologised in PIE terms (but not within Slavic or Germanic) and are related to river-names found, e.g., in South-Central Europe. Some characteristic hydronyms recur throughout Europe, e.g. *dru[w]-nt-j-ah2 'the Running (River)' (cf. Skt. dravat- < *drew-nt- 'running, swift'), thought the root they are based on is no longer found in the local branches. These old names probably belong to more than one chronological layer; what's remarkable is the absence of evidently non-IE names.

 

[GK] Plus one more "awful" possibility: in Ukraine there are areas where the hydronyms although clearly Slavic in form today are in fact Slavicized. Much of south Ukraine was populated for centuries by people of Turkic speech and the residue of their erstwhile presence is still there. This is so because when Ukrainians colonized the area there were still Turkis around and so the river names were taken over from them to a large extent. But there is very little that survives beneath the Turkic layer. About 5 or 6 "Thracian" hydronyms on the Right Bank (probably "Scythian" rather than Thracian actually), some 4 or 5 "Germanic" ones attesting to the once massive presence of the Goths. But Gothic remnants were absorbed by the Slavs in the 5-7th cs. so that is no surprise. (And there are Baltic and Iranic ones too but no need to go into that in detail now). How confident are you that the 100% IE character of the LBK area hydronyms does not reflect a prehistoric "ethnic cleansing" posterior to the emergence of LBK?

 

[PG] Something classifiable as ethnic cleansing took place in Britain as the Anglo-Saxons drove the Brittonic population away, but Celtic hydronyms survived very well. Turkic-speakers seem to have been particularly fond of imposing their own toponymy (see what happened in Asia Minor), but at least Iranian ("Scytho-Sarmatian") river-names are relatively well attested throughout the Pontic region. As regards the absence of "Old European" river-names in southern Ukraine (as opposed to their abundance in the west) -- well, maybe the first IE speakers there were the (Proto-)Indo-Iranians and (Proto-)Thracians.

[GK] If Trypilja was IE why would you think that it could not have provided the "satem" impulse, and prefer Globular Amphorae for the role? GA originated much further West. (Just thinking out loud in the context of your theory).

 

[PG] Tripolye (including Cucuteni) is too old in the context of my theory. Connecting "satemisation" with the eastern GA culture has the following merits: the Proto-Balto-Slavs are dispatched directly to their Pripyat'/Dnieper homeland in the forest zone, and the origin of the Satem group can be dated at 3000-2900 BC. Just a few centuries later (ca. 2600 BC) Indo-Iranian is already a separate branch (which explains why there are relatively few "synapomorphic" innovations in the satem group), with enough time to consolidate its linguistic unity before further splits (after 2000 BC). I am not sure at all if the Tripoleans were IE-speakers. The culture may have absorbed some early IEs (I mentioned the Proto-Hellenes), and one can speculate endlessly about its original ethnic composition (a Proto-Anatolian admixture?). It's an open question, as far as I'm concerned.

[GK] Working with the GA c. in Ukraine is tricky since they left practically no evidence of their settlements here (unlike Poland and Germany). Ukr. archaeologists are working almost exclusively on the basis of graves and grave goods ... .

 

[PG] It's almost exclusively graves in the Podolye/Moldova subgroup (on the upper Dniester, Prut and Seret), but there is some evidence of GA settlements, camps, workshops etc. in the Volhynia subgroup (where, BTW, Yamna influence on GA burial rites is remarkably strong). What we see in Poland is dense, permanent and long-lived GA settlement in Kujavia, and there are stable territorial groups of exceptionally large GA villages in the Sandomierz Upland, but there is only sparse settlement in selected places elsewhere. If the GA-carriers practised a flexible mixed economy, with transhumant livestock-breeding or agriculture becoming dominant depending on the local ecological conditions, that would explain their economic evolution towards semi-nomadic pastoralism in the forest-steppe zone and more .

[GK] But the problem here is that [the IE infiltration into Yamna] cannot be detected in the archaeology at all ... Unlike, for instance, the emergence of the proto-Slavic Zarubynets'ka culture [230 BC-150 AD], whose many integrating components can be traced (Pomorians [ethnicity unknown],  Latenized Yastorf and Pszeworsk [Germanics], Milohrad [Balts] and the middle Dnipro Scythians). In the case of Yamna there is nothing which can be postulated as "infiltrating IE". That is why the dominant view remains that Yamna was IE on its own. I believe the view that it incorporated non IE elements as it spread eastwards is gaining ground though.

[PG] Much depends on the dating, of course. If one accepts shallower dates for Yamna (say, 3000-2600 BC), the Yamna phenomenon itself could be regarded as connected with the "linguistic hybridisation" of the autochthonous pre-Yamna cultures. But other scenarios are possible as well (what about the formation of post-Yamna units such as the Catacomb culture, with its militaristic tendencies?). "Upper-class infiltration" may leave few material traces in the archaeological record if the penetrating group is successfully acculturated. Especially if we have a multilingual situation in which the language of a small but mobile elite is adopted as convenient lingua franca, a language shift may take place without dramatic cultural transformations or massive migrations.

 

Piotr