Hieber’s Pre-Greek.
Our take
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The quiet thrill of linguistic archaeology—that’s what Danny Hieber’s “Pre-Greek” post delivers, and it’s a thrill we here at Spoot are particularly attuned to. Hieber's deep dive into the potential remnants of Paleo-European languages lurking within Ancient Greek isn't just academic; it's a window into a prehistory we barely glimpse. It’s a reminder that language, like sediment, layers upon layers, burying older stories beneath the narratives we think are foundational. We’ve been thinking a lot about the layering of narratives lately, spurred by our own explorations of how film and language intertwine, as explored in [Languages of A City of Sadness]. And, of course, the visual language of film owes so much to the deliberate choices of its creators, as we discussed in [Godard, Typographer]. To consider that Greek itself might be a palimpsest, a surface overwritten with traces of a far older tongue—well, that's enough to make you want to grab a shovel and start digging. It’s a concept that resonates with the core Spoot ethos: always looking for the hidden, the oblique, the thing that's just *there*, waiting to be noticed.
The sheer difficulty of this endeavor is almost as fascinating as the possibility itself. The scant evidence—Aquitanian, Etruscan, Iberian—represents a tiny fraction of the languages spoken across Europe before the Indo-European expansion. These weren’t languages that left grand epics or elaborate inscriptions. They were languages spoken in villages, around hearths, in the spaces between the monumental constructions of history. Hieber’s work isn't about discovering a Rosetta Stone; it’s about painstakingly piecing together fragments, teasing out patterns in the declensions, the verb conjugations, the very *sound* of Greek, to see if something else—something older—is echoing through it. It’s akin to trying to reconstruct a forest from a handful of fallen leaves, knowing the wind has scattered the rest across continents. The idea that the substrate of Greek might contain echoes of languages utterly lost, languages that shaped the cultural landscape of Europe for millennia before Indo-European migrations, is a profoundly humbling thought. And it begs the question: what else are we missing? What other linguistic ghosts haunt our current languages?
What makes Hieber’s approach so compelling is his grounding in contemporary linguistic practice. He’s not just a dusty academic poring over ancient texts. He’s actively working with indigenous communities to revitalize endangered languages—a crucial, often overlooked, aspect of linguistic preservation. This experience informs his work on Pre-Greek, giving him a sensitivity to the nuances of language contact and the subtle ways in which languages can influence one another over time. The process of revitalizing a language is, in its own way, an act of linguistic archaeology, bringing a lost voice back into being. It’s a powerful reminder that languages aren’t static entities; they’re dynamic, evolving systems, constantly shaped by their interactions with other languages and cultures. We've certainly seen the value of revisiting established narratives, as we discussed in [A Good Review], and Hieber's work does just that for our understanding of European linguistic history.
Ultimately, Hieber's work challenges the conventional narrative of language history—the neat, linear progression from Proto-Indo-European to the various Indo-European languages. It suggests a far more complex and tangled history, one in which older languages left their mark on later ones, shaping their grammar, their vocabulary, and even their sound systems. This isn’t just about uncovering a lost language; it's about rethinking our understanding of European prehistory and the deep, often invisible, connections between cultures. It’s a tantalizing glimpse into a linguistic underworld, a subterranean network of languages that shaped the world we know. The question now is: if we can find traces of Pre-Greek, what other linguistic strata lie buried beneath our languages, waiting to be unearthed? And what stories will they tell when they finally surface?
Danny Hieber, “a Ph.D. in linguistics who works with indigenous communities to help them document and revitalize their languages,” has a long post called Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek. Here are some excerpts:
The peoples who preceded the Indo-Europeans—called Early European Farmers—spoke any number of Paleo-European (a.k.a. Old European) languages. Very few of these left any written evidence (just Aquitanian, Etruscan, Iberian, and a handful of others), and only one survives today (Basque). Even so, these Old European languages left an indelible mark on the Indo-European languages that succeeded them.
Imagine you’re a band of early Hellenic (Greek) speakers whose ancestors had migrated over generations from the Pontic–Caspian Steppe into the eastern Mediterranean. Along the way, those ancestors encountered all sorts of novel foods, plants, animals, and terrain—things like olives, hyacinth, figs, and cypresses. Even the sea was unfamiliar at one point, migrating as your ancestors did from a landlocked steppe. What do you call all these things?
One option is to recruit existing vocabulary for new purposes. […] This strategy of coining new terms for novel experiences was, however, the minority one. Why invent new words for things the local Paleo-Europeans already had names for? Why not simply adopt the local name? That’s exactly what Indo-Europeans did as they settled across the continent, casually borrowing hundreds of words for plants, animals, types of terrain, places, and other natural phenomena. […]
Because the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived outside the native range of these plants, their language lacked words for them. They only borrowed the words upon arriving in the eastern Mediterranean. Speakers coin or borrow new words as they need them, and migration events often trigger such a need, leaving a trace of that migration in the language’s lexicon (and grammar, but that’s a point for another article). In this way, all languages contain a fossil record of their history. They are a catalog of what the population lacked when they arrived in an area or came into contact with new peoples. In this article, we’ll use that linguistic fossil record to discover what the language that existed in the Aegean prior to the Greeks—which we’ll call Pre-Greek—was like.
He defines superstrate and substrate languages, then continues:
At this point you might reasonably be asking, “How do we know that some substrate language influenced Ancient Greek? How do we know that the mystery words were borrowed? Can’t they just be random exceptions?” This exact problem has vexed historical linguists working on the Pre-Greek problem for over a century. Nonetheless, we not only have good reasons for thinking a word might be borrowed, but we can even be highly certain when a word can’t come from Indo-European. Sometimes, the answer is obvious because there’s a similar word with a clear etymology sitting right in a nearby language. The Ancient Greek word ἔβενος (ébenos) ‘ebony’, for example, has no Indo-European etymology, but just across the Mediterranean Sea was the Egyptian word 𓍁 𓈖 𓏭 𓆱 hb‑n‑j‑WOOD (hebni) ‘ebony’, and we know that the Ancient Greeks traded extensively with the Egyptians. But the evidence for a loanword is often more subtle. Below are some of the different types of evidence (or non-evidence) linguists use to determine which words are borrowed (in Ancient Greek in particular). As a fun bonus, at the end of this article I’ve also provided a big list of words in English that are thought to ultimately derive from a Pre-Greek language.
He lists a bunch of examples and goes the evidence of borrowing, going into some detail:
That’s all to say: mere variation is not sufficient evidence of borrowing. The variation must not be attributable to regular sound changes in the language; it must be largely random instead. In fact, part of the evidence that thálassa ‘sea’ is borrowed is that it also shows random variation in addition to the regular dialectal variation. […]
In other cases we see variation in the presence of an initial /w/ sound, which is especially neat because Greek originally had a /w/ sound but then lost it! In Mycenaean Greek (c. 1400–1200 BCE), the /w/ was still present, as shown in words like 𐀷𐀙𐀏 (wa‑na‑ka) ‘king; lord’. Many dialects (Aeolic, Doric [including Cretan], Elean, Boeotian, etc.) retained that /w/ and wrote it with the letter digamma ⟨ϝ⟩ as ϝάναξ (wánax) well into the Classical period (5th–4th C BCE). But the Attic and Ionic dialects lost /w/ before the emergence of alphabetic writing (8th C BCE), so they wrote the word as ᾰ̓́νᾰξ (ánax). But even though Homer never writes a digamma, the meter of his poems often behaves as though the /w/ were still there, because they were originally composed when it was!
In any case, notice how the /w/ was simply deleted from wánax to yield ánax. But for many Pre-Greek loanwords, we see attempts to render a /w/ sound even in the dialects that lost it! The city of Axos on Crete, for example, is written as ϝαξός (Waxós) in the Cretan dialect but Ὀαξός (Oaxós) outside Crete. If this word had already existed in Greek, the /w/ would have simply disappeared in the non‑/w/ dialects, like it did for ánax. Instead, those dialects attempted to write the /w/ sound they heard when they adopted the name of the place from the Pre‑Greeks. Since the /w/ sound and ⟨ϝ⟩ letter were already lost to them by that point, they approximated it with ⟨Ὀ⟩ /o/ instead. This shows that the Greeks adopted the Pre-Greek place name after /w/ had disappeared in most dialects.
There are sections “Words in certain semantic categories,” “Pairs of words that mean the same thing,” and so on; eventually he gets into more contentious territory (“What was the Pre-Greek language like?” “Was Pre-Greek one language or several?”), but on the whole it’s sensible and informative — not the vibe-based guess-fest I feared when I saw the title. Thanks, Dmitry!
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