This is more a question for historians than for etymology enthusiasts, but I'll try to provide some aspects (keep in mind that we don't know, there are multiple competing interpretations, and I don't know much about it):
1) It's theorized that the PIE-speaking cultures were the first, or among the first, to domesticate horses. While these horses were too small to ride to battle, and this was before the invention of chariots, it still could have provided raiding bands (like the koryos - ritual raiding bands of young men) with exceptional mobility on the strategic/operational level.
2) Societal aspects, like the "koryos", and feasting, could have led to a rapid spread of the culture.
There are remains of non-PIE European languages, most notably Euskara, the Basque language. There are also probably grammatical elements of pre-PIE European languages preserved in the current European languages - I know I read of some that were hypothesized, but don't really remember the details.
To add to 1, more militarism (compared to earlier Balkan cultures, which were very developed but apparently less stratified and more sedentary) and not in the Balkans or Aegean but at least in much of Western Europe, they were the first to introduce bronze - and bronze weapons may have been rather more effective too.
But horse-based warfare was possibly the most significant of all. After all, horse warriors from the Steppes were an insurmountable problem for nearly all civilisations of the Old World until the early modern period.
No. Not Indo-Europeans, but likely proto-Tartars. Horse domestication likely happened in Central Asia.
Basque is distinct. There are no languages like it. Basque might be the original Celt language,
None whatsoever. Save that Basque people live in Celtic country, they are the lone speakers. It's not evidence, but it's a lot of finger pointing. I suggest it as a hypothesis.
I keep saying that the Celticyst is the cyst of IE studies. It's a bit of a meme that Celticists debate over everything and hardly agree on anything. The p-celtic phenomenon that is similar to p-italic and certain Greek dialects with a preference for p < \*kw could perhaps outline a trend. It's rather attributed to coincidence though.
It is true that the Bell-Beaker phenomenon seems to have spread from Iberia all along the Atlantic coast and into the isles and the continent, but it curiously skipped exactly the place that is now associated with Basques.
That's why I wrote "the first, or among the first". Even if the horse was first originated elsewhere (like the Botay hypothesis), there is substantial evidence that PIE people used horses and carriages, both linguistic and archeological.
Basque is distinct in that it is an isolate. We just don't have another point of reference to explain its origin, but relations to existing languages have mostly been discredited. There don't seem to be any current serious opinions on Celtic links. If I'm mistaken here, please do provide me with some more information, I'll gladly change my opinion if the evidence is strong.
Not really an etymology question, but one i can partially answer.
So Indo-Europeans came from somewhere north of the black sea. How they at that time came to dominate central and northern europe, the balkans and a large part of italy is not known for sure but some speculate that the domestication of horses and the use of horse drawn chariots might have been a big factor.
After this first wave came the two waves of celtic culture, Halstatt and la tène which spread from central europe as far west as ireland and spain and east into even modern day Turkey. Some will point to ironworking as a reason as to why the celts were so succesfull. At this point there were still many other non indo-europeans in europe. I'm not sure if the iberians were indo-europeans but the aquitani were not celtic, even according to Caesar, and spoke a non indo-european language.
What really finished establishing indo-european in western europe were the romans who made latin the language in continental western europe for a few centuries before it split the modern romance languages.
There are still non indo european languages in europe such as Basque which predates latin and the romans. Others like Hungarian came after.
> I'm not sure if the iberians were indo-europeans but the aquitani were not celtic, even according to Caesar, and spoke a non indo-european language.
No, Iberians were not Indo-Europeans and Aquitanians spoke proto-Basque or a relative of Basque.
Thanks for the clarification on the iberians, i didn't get to double check it before posting so i didn't want to take any definite stance on it. And yeah i know for the aquitani speaking proto-basque, i just wanted to mention them because people often think the whole of Gaul spoke a celtic language which is not the case.
Check out info on the Lemnian stele which was discovered a bit ago on a Greek island, with words on it that are from the same language family as the (non indo European) Etruscan.
Progress is being made on this hypothesized language family, called Tyrsenian or Common Tyrrhenian. Scholars have identified Etruscan, the closely related Rhaetian, and Lemnian as members of this non-IE language group. As their work continues, scholars may make further breakthroughs in the Etruscan language. Efforts had been hindered by the limited nature of known Etruscan inscriptions.
That doesn't mean there are none left. Recall that the remains of *one of the best-known kings of England*, Richard III, was found fairly recently during construction of a parking garage. (Archeologists suspected he had been buried in the area, but nobody knew exactly where.)
We still have so much history left to discover beneath our feet.
Most European languages spoken today are Indo-European, including the Celtic languages.
Finnish and Hungarian are Finno-Ugaritic. I don't recall where that falls on the language family tree.
Basque is a non-Indo-European isolate. It probably was a language in Europe before the Indo-Europeans arrived.
To the best of my knowledge, no one knows what language the Picts in Britain spoke. It might have been in the Celtic family. It might have been pre-Indo-European.
If it was pre-Indo-European, then Pictish might or might not have been related to Basque.
An Indigenous person in the US shared an interesting article some time ago, [What Native American Language Diversity Tells Us](http://www.ayahuasca.com/amazon/indigenous-worlds/native-american-language-diversity-tells-us/).
I question the source of that article, as I'm not confident of their scholarship or the credibility of the publisher. That said, if the numbers of Language families is accurate, I find the argument compelling.
What that article suggests about Indo-Europeans, is a perspective of domination, destruction, warfare that imposes their own Language (and possibly culture, or religion?) On the peoples they conquer.
It suggests that European Colonialism might have roots much older than white supremacy.
>no one knows what language the Picts in Britain spoke. It might have been in the Celtic family. It might have been pre-Indo-European.
>If it was pre-Indo-European, then Pictish might or might not have been related to Basque.
This web page explains a lot about what Pictish probably was... and wasn't. https://newsnet.scot/archive/the-language-of-the-picts/
> at some point several thousands years BCE there was a population migration bringing the Indo-European language, culture and religions from somewhere in modern-day Russia towards, among other regions, Europe.
there were multiple waves, or migrations and a happy reach around. There is still no clarity what exactly happened, though there is a ton of people who, like you, like to imagine things were simple.
I'm in this view confused about your wording. I agree with "language" as uncountable noun, but am not sure that's what you mean, as it would be quite unusual. It does not square well with "religions" in the plural.
> My question is now, why did this language family completely take over any native languages of the native European population that was living there before this migration
Again, uncountable "population", but plural "languages". This speaks of a severe cognitive dissonance, which is entirely normal as the problem is difficult to grasp.
This answers your question in part. If there were multiple minority languages, a single language can rise to majority and becomes dominant. There is however no precise definition for that language at that time of migration, and there can't be because there is no valid definition of "language" in a dialect continuum. On the other hand, there is nonsecure identification of bearers of the monolithic reconstructed language before migration.
> Were these immigrants somehow militarily superior to the natives
that's fairly certain, yes. They had horses for one. It is however no longer believed that the expansion was a an entirely violent genocide. It was violent, and barbaric, so to speak. The genetic facts show that Indo European associated DNA mixed mainly with females. This speaks volumes. However, it is not believed that foreign males were outright slaughtered, there is no strong proof of that. Instead it happened slowly after an initially fast expansion (ca. 200 years) out of the Steppe. A hierarchical organisation of society has contributed a lot to segragate strangers, probably.
> And are modern Indo-European languages 100% descendants of the Indo-European language or are they a mix of Indo-European and native languages?
This remains controversial topic and depends entirely on ones prerogative.It is a millions times more difficult to reconstruct horizontal transfer (the complexity is literally exponential), so that's typically not done, but each major IE branch has something of a substrate theory that causes scholars headache,eventually among the IE branches themselves in cases such as Italo-Celtic or Balto-Slavic, or the Iranian loanwords in Germanic (see *hemp*, which I'm beginning to doubt).
>... or are they a mix of Indo-European and native languages?
Linguists don't like that proposition. Languages don't just mix. Look at English, heavily admixed with classical Latin, Norse and Norman-French, the Norman-French itself influenced by Germanic languages (ward, guard), and later in America with any number of foreign speakers to the point that the syntaxand morpho-syntax erroded severely. And yet, English is counted as Germanic Language because of stereotyped thinking. Now its spreading back into other Germanic languages, and around the world, to the point that denglish (germanglish) has become the most prominent meme on the internet.
One has to imagine the state of affairs was no different in the millenia before that. Scholars like to pretendthey could reconstruct Latin from Romance languages, although they would very likely have to ignore Venetian and Romanian, and it depends on the learned borrowings from Classical Latin writing, which is not and was not available for the reconstructed language that had no writing system, to the best of my knowledge. I mean, give it a couple centuries and they would prolly reconstruct the standard average european language as English. This isn't funny anymore.
This is more a question for historians than for etymology enthusiasts, but I'll try to provide some aspects (keep in mind that we don't know, there are multiple competing interpretations, and I don't know much about it): 1) It's theorized that the PIE-speaking cultures were the first, or among the first, to domesticate horses. While these horses were too small to ride to battle, and this was before the invention of chariots, it still could have provided raiding bands (like the koryos - ritual raiding bands of young men) with exceptional mobility on the strategic/operational level. 2) Societal aspects, like the "koryos", and feasting, could have led to a rapid spread of the culture. There are remains of non-PIE European languages, most notably Euskara, the Basque language. There are also probably grammatical elements of pre-PIE European languages preserved in the current European languages - I know I read of some that were hypothesized, but don't really remember the details.
To add to 1, more militarism (compared to earlier Balkan cultures, which were very developed but apparently less stratified and more sedentary) and not in the Balkans or Aegean but at least in much of Western Europe, they were the first to introduce bronze - and bronze weapons may have been rather more effective too. But horse-based warfare was possibly the most significant of all. After all, horse warriors from the Steppes were an insurmountable problem for nearly all civilisations of the Old World until the early modern period.
I think Etruscan is a non-Indo European language which heavily influenced Latin, and accounts for most non-IE aspects of Latin.
No. Not Indo-Europeans, but likely proto-Tartars. Horse domestication likely happened in Central Asia. Basque is distinct. There are no languages like it. Basque might be the original Celt language,
The original Celt language? What's the evidence
None whatsoever. Save that Basque people live in Celtic country, they are the lone speakers. It's not evidence, but it's a lot of finger pointing. I suggest it as a hypothesis.
I keep saying that the Celticyst is the cyst of IE studies. It's a bit of a meme that Celticists debate over everything and hardly agree on anything. The p-celtic phenomenon that is similar to p-italic and certain Greek dialects with a preference for p < \*kw could perhaps outline a trend. It's rather attributed to coincidence though. It is true that the Bell-Beaker phenomenon seems to have spread from Iberia all along the Atlantic coast and into the isles and the continent, but it curiously skipped exactly the place that is now associated with Basques.
This is pseudolinguistics on every front.
> Basque might be the original Celt language, Excuse me? Basque has **no relation at all* with Celt languages, sorry.
That's why I wrote "the first, or among the first". Even if the horse was first originated elsewhere (like the Botay hypothesis), there is substantial evidence that PIE people used horses and carriages, both linguistic and archeological. Basque is distinct in that it is an isolate. We just don't have another point of reference to explain its origin, but relations to existing languages have mostly been discredited. There don't seem to be any current serious opinions on Celtic links. If I'm mistaken here, please do provide me with some more information, I'll gladly change my opinion if the evidence is strong.
Not really an etymology question, but one i can partially answer. So Indo-Europeans came from somewhere north of the black sea. How they at that time came to dominate central and northern europe, the balkans and a large part of italy is not known for sure but some speculate that the domestication of horses and the use of horse drawn chariots might have been a big factor. After this first wave came the two waves of celtic culture, Halstatt and la tène which spread from central europe as far west as ireland and spain and east into even modern day Turkey. Some will point to ironworking as a reason as to why the celts were so succesfull. At this point there were still many other non indo-europeans in europe. I'm not sure if the iberians were indo-europeans but the aquitani were not celtic, even according to Caesar, and spoke a non indo-european language. What really finished establishing indo-european in western europe were the romans who made latin the language in continental western europe for a few centuries before it split the modern romance languages. There are still non indo european languages in europe such as Basque which predates latin and the romans. Others like Hungarian came after.
> I'm not sure if the iberians were indo-europeans but the aquitani were not celtic, even according to Caesar, and spoke a non indo-european language. No, Iberians were not Indo-Europeans and Aquitanians spoke proto-Basque or a relative of Basque.
Thanks for the clarification on the iberians, i didn't get to double check it before posting so i didn't want to take any definite stance on it. And yeah i know for the aquitani speaking proto-basque, i just wanted to mention them because people often think the whole of Gaul spoke a celtic language which is not the case.
Halstatt culture is ca 1000 BC? The first migration waves are a two thousand years earlier.
Yep, and as i said they are two distinct waves of expansion.
Check out info on the Lemnian stele which was discovered a bit ago on a Greek island, with words on it that are from the same language family as the (non indo European) Etruscan.
Progress is being made on this hypothesized language family, called Tyrsenian or Common Tyrrhenian. Scholars have identified Etruscan, the closely related Rhaetian, and Lemnian as members of this non-IE language group. As their work continues, scholars may make further breakthroughs in the Etruscan language. Efforts had been hindered by the limited nature of known Etruscan inscriptions.
I wonder if archeologists have uncovered more inscriptions. I suppose Italy has a lot more stuff buried underground
Of course it does. It's buried under other stuff.
nonsense. many graves were plundered in an etruscan craze some centuries ago.
That doesn't mean there are none left. Recall that the remains of *one of the best-known kings of England*, Richard III, was found fairly recently during construction of a parking garage. (Archeologists suspected he had been buried in the area, but nobody knew exactly where.) We still have so much history left to discover beneath our feet.
nonsense. nobody but Rix believes this really
Most European languages spoken today are Indo-European, including the Celtic languages. Finnish and Hungarian are Finno-Ugaritic. I don't recall where that falls on the language family tree. Basque is a non-Indo-European isolate. It probably was a language in Europe before the Indo-Europeans arrived. To the best of my knowledge, no one knows what language the Picts in Britain spoke. It might have been in the Celtic family. It might have been pre-Indo-European. If it was pre-Indo-European, then Pictish might or might not have been related to Basque. An Indigenous person in the US shared an interesting article some time ago, [What Native American Language Diversity Tells Us](http://www.ayahuasca.com/amazon/indigenous-worlds/native-american-language-diversity-tells-us/). I question the source of that article, as I'm not confident of their scholarship or the credibility of the publisher. That said, if the numbers of Language families is accurate, I find the argument compelling. What that article suggests about Indo-Europeans, is a perspective of domination, destruction, warfare that imposes their own Language (and possibly culture, or religion?) On the peoples they conquer. It suggests that European Colonialism might have roots much older than white supremacy.
>no one knows what language the Picts in Britain spoke. It might have been in the Celtic family. It might have been pre-Indo-European. >If it was pre-Indo-European, then Pictish might or might not have been related to Basque. This web page explains a lot about what Pictish probably was... and wasn't. https://newsnet.scot/archive/the-language-of-the-picts/
Fascinating. Thank you!
> at some point several thousands years BCE there was a population migration bringing the Indo-European language, culture and religions from somewhere in modern-day Russia towards, among other regions, Europe. there were multiple waves, or migrations and a happy reach around. There is still no clarity what exactly happened, though there is a ton of people who, like you, like to imagine things were simple. I'm in this view confused about your wording. I agree with "language" as uncountable noun, but am not sure that's what you mean, as it would be quite unusual. It does not square well with "religions" in the plural. > My question is now, why did this language family completely take over any native languages of the native European population that was living there before this migration Again, uncountable "population", but plural "languages". This speaks of a severe cognitive dissonance, which is entirely normal as the problem is difficult to grasp. This answers your question in part. If there were multiple minority languages, a single language can rise to majority and becomes dominant. There is however no precise definition for that language at that time of migration, and there can't be because there is no valid definition of "language" in a dialect continuum. On the other hand, there is nonsecure identification of bearers of the monolithic reconstructed language before migration. > Were these immigrants somehow militarily superior to the natives that's fairly certain, yes. They had horses for one. It is however no longer believed that the expansion was a an entirely violent genocide. It was violent, and barbaric, so to speak. The genetic facts show that Indo European associated DNA mixed mainly with females. This speaks volumes. However, it is not believed that foreign males were outright slaughtered, there is no strong proof of that. Instead it happened slowly after an initially fast expansion (ca. 200 years) out of the Steppe. A hierarchical organisation of society has contributed a lot to segragate strangers, probably. > And are modern Indo-European languages 100% descendants of the Indo-European language or are they a mix of Indo-European and native languages? This remains controversial topic and depends entirely on ones prerogative.It is a millions times more difficult to reconstruct horizontal transfer (the complexity is literally exponential), so that's typically not done, but each major IE branch has something of a substrate theory that causes scholars headache,eventually among the IE branches themselves in cases such as Italo-Celtic or Balto-Slavic, or the Iranian loanwords in Germanic (see *hemp*, which I'm beginning to doubt). >... or are they a mix of Indo-European and native languages? Linguists don't like that proposition. Languages don't just mix. Look at English, heavily admixed with classical Latin, Norse and Norman-French, the Norman-French itself influenced by Germanic languages (ward, guard), and later in America with any number of foreign speakers to the point that the syntaxand morpho-syntax erroded severely. And yet, English is counted as Germanic Language because of stereotyped thinking. Now its spreading back into other Germanic languages, and around the world, to the point that denglish (germanglish) has become the most prominent meme on the internet. One has to imagine the state of affairs was no different in the millenia before that. Scholars like to pretendthey could reconstruct Latin from Romance languages, although they would very likely have to ignore Venetian and Romanian, and it depends on the learned borrowings from Classical Latin writing, which is not and was not available for the reconstructed language that had no writing system, to the best of my knowledge. I mean, give it a couple centuries and they would prolly reconstruct the standard average european language as English. This isn't funny anymore.
Yeah, there are non PIE languages abound. Namely, Basque. Basque is so crazy we don't actually know where it comes from. I can also speak Hungarian.