As a student of linguistics this is my kind of video. I always considered the apparent high diversity of IE and Pre-IE languages in Italy and Iberia to be a consequence of the fact they had an alphabet to write epigraphs that have survived to tell us what language they spoke.

@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714

23 күн бұрын

I always thought it was becaue those areas where more mauntainous and further away from the indo europian core on the Northern Europian plain.

cool video, deserves more views

@tidsdjupet-mr5ud

5 ай бұрын

I have been trying to share it on reddit, but the mods are very strict.

Great video! Concise, but a lot of interesting information. I hope that the algorithm will recommend you to more people soon.

How come that Early (proto) Balto-slavic and Germanic has replaced all other Indo-European languages/dialects that should have existed between them? And Between them and Celtic languages to the south? These two groups must have been very influential and dominating.

@tidsdjupet-mr5ud

4 ай бұрын

Probably due to large movements during the migration period, when Germanic and Slavic speakers moved westwards under pressure from the Huns. Continental Celtic speaking areas were also largely conquered and romanized at that time.

Probably even as late as the year zero AD there were more language families than today and more branches of so-called "Indo-European". Mass migrations of Kelts, Romans, Germanics and Slavs brought a high level of homogeneity and completely different languages, as all transitional dialects got eaten through conquest. Historical evidence shows a cultural continuity among most Aryan derived peoples up until 4 to 3 thousand years ago, fuelled by a massive dialect continuum

I think large areas being labeled balto-slavic is fine the lack of linguistic diversity in slavic can be explained by understanding proto slavic as having been south baltic so having at most 1/4 of the diversity of the balto slavic languages. West and east baltic languages are now extinct so even the remaining north baltic languages shouldnt be that diverse. The conservativeness and genetic relatedness of these people to the proto indo europians would also suggest that there couldnt have been many unknown unrelated groups there 2000 years ago. As for germanic languages, it seems to me that that early proto-germanic was the language spoken by the indo-europian ruling class of Scandinavia then the bronze age to iron age colapse of the social structures of Scandinavia. And it was at this point that as a lingua franka the commoners too learned the indo europian language that was spouken by some everywhere which is why common germanic looks a lot less like an indo-europian languge with 20% vocabulary of unknown etimology and now often conjugating words not by changing ending like place places but rather changing the word root itself like man men. So yea by the late bronze age age I think that the scandinavian substrate was being assimilated by proto-germanic and by the late iron age it was completely complete. Eddit: Also the Northern Europian plain is the core of indo-europian languages so unknown languages would likely be indo-europian, which also partly explains why their speakers learned the new indo-europian language we speak to this day so well with much conservativeness and little dialectal diversity. A latvietis will have a much easyer time learning english compared to a japanese person, relatedness of known language(s) to language youre trying to know helps a lot. Its quite ironic that writing spread to the area right after homogenization had wipped out most diversity.

@tidsdjupet-mr5ud

22 күн бұрын

It is highly unlikely that any Pre-IE languages survived for that long in southern Scandinavia, the area was settled by corded ware very early, there are no known pre-IE placenames in Sweden, and for example Norwegians carry some of the highest steppe ancestry in Europe like the balts. Also, the Germanic substrate theory is mostly been downplayed considerably in newer research. Structurally, early Germanic like Gothic were fairly conservative and the sound shift you describe like Umlaut did not happen until about 500ad, and similar changes also happened in for example celtic and romance dialects (metaphony). Most likely, Germanic was one dialect in larger IE-continuum that similarly to slavic became successful and spread in the migration period displacing related languages/dialects.

You make it sound as if there was only one Germanic language around 500AD, while East Germanic split off in the second half of the first millennium BC and West and North Germanic diverging only a few centuries later. Around 500AD, East Germanic already was a language family, and West Germanic has to have been a very large dialect continuum, that rapidly diverged in the following centuries into several languages, albeit still kinda existing on a continuum. The continental West Germanic continuum is still a thing, kinda, but if it wasn't for two major standardized languages (Standard German & Dutch), one of which more or less everyone on it will understand, people living more than 100 kilometers apart would be not far from actually speaking different languages. There's a reason for those dialects to be classed into at least 7 different languages (Frisian, Dutch, Low German, German, Luxembourgian, Swiss German and Bavarian). Sure, the Bavarian thing is debated and Luxembourgian is mostly political, but you're still left with 5 if you account for that.

@tidsdjupet-mr5ud

Күн бұрын

Doubtful that Gothic split of that early. Also, modern dialectal diversity rarely maps well onto the medieval languages. For example, much of the dialectal splitting in Swedish happened around the 14-1600s

Interesting. Unfortunately, the linguistic scholars were heavily biased towards trying to find links between ancient Greek and Latin, heavily influenced by their studies at school in Latin and Greek, where all serious learned and scientific texts had to be in Latin or Greek. IMHO, there is a closer link between Slavonic and Latin than between ancient Greek and Latin, or even Latin and Celtic.

@tidsdjupet-mr5ud

4 ай бұрын

Greek feels like an outlier in many ways, with distinct outcomes of laryngeals for example. Celtic and Italic are very close, with the distinct treatment of PIE aspirates being the biggest difference at a glance.

As opposed to southern europe, the pre-indo-european peopels of northern europe were replaced almost in entirely (some places in entirety, as in britain with the arrival of the bell beakers), which we know from genetic evidence. It is therefore very unlikely that non-indo-european languages survived in northern europe until the roman period. Southern europe, where we do know that pre-indo-european languages survived, had much smaller and mainly male-mediated genetic shifts during indo-european expansion.

@Rowbotftw

5 ай бұрын

As far as i know, the idea of a germanic contains a large pre-indo-european substrate has also been discarded by mainstream linguists in the past two decades

@tidsdjupet-mr5ud

4 ай бұрын

Germanic mostly looks different due to the consonant shift and later phonetic reduction in the daughter languages. Pgmc itself was a fairly ordinary IE-language for its time, and in some ways conservative and not as progressive/changed as it is often made out to be. @@Rowbotftw

@tidsdjupet-mr5ud

4 ай бұрын

The "big three" branches in Europe have developed quite far from each other in prehistory though, meaning that they were not a part of a dialect continuum for a very long time. There must have been other IE-branches such as "Temematic" or "Belgic" spoken in between them. Germanic for example seems to have developed on its own for a very long time, almost straight from PIE without much intermediate shared innovations with other branches.

@Rowbotftw

4 ай бұрын

@@tidsdjupet-mr5ud sure, true and i agree. But you were implying in your first video that there is likely to have been surviving non-indo-european speakers as in southern europe, which is very unlikely.

0:50 Your map dated 500 BC in regard to Slavic languages is based on a presumption that Slavs migrated from Pripyat river region into Central Europe in 6th AD., this is a false, undocumented presumption on which a respective preposterous paradigm got created. In fact Slavs or pre-Slavs covered at least 2/3 European continent and Slavic or if some want to call it proto-Slavic language is what they call PIE.

@Rowbotftw

5 ай бұрын

Lmao insane take

The term "British Isles" is one that isnt used as even the UK government agreed not to use it, it is just an incorrect term, just say the isles. The vast majority of Scots also dont identify as British (80%) according to the 2011 census and likely more now. Just don't use the term British, stick to Scottish, Irish, Welsh, English and The isles.

@maltrho

4 ай бұрын

Out of curiosity, are you aware that they have been called so since classical antiquity, before england existed and even before the romans came there?

@thevis5465

4 ай бұрын

@@maltrho I'm well aware. It is however not currently antiquity...

@maltrho

4 ай бұрын

maybe some people today have wrong ideas about what the term really means (and meant for 2000 years) rather than the term being - as you say - 'simply an incorrect term'?

@thevis5465

4 ай бұрын

@@maltrho terms change, we don't use it because people conflate Britain and England, they will not stop. The only solution is to stop using it. EVEN ENGLISH PEOPLE conflate britain and england. It really is simply an incorrect term today.

@maltrho

4 ай бұрын

​@@thevis5465 'They will not stop", you say. But you think those people will stop who say the british isles, because its the name, as it always was, and with 'british' hinting only at those same celting tribes which gave the name also to 'bretagne' across the channel?

Just because Slavic is still relatively homogeneous language does not mean it is young. Quite opposite, Slavic is the oldest Indo-European language of Europe, at least of Europe, some researchers say it predates Sanskrit.

@antonyreyn

4 ай бұрын

Scholars say Lithuanian is the closest to PIE. Cheers

@Lechoslaw8546

4 ай бұрын

@@antonyreyn They are at same level, but Lit. nouns often have suffix "as", similar to Latin which makes them look ancient. PIE is artificial construct, it never existed. Real PIE means proto-Slavic, before it split into Slavic and BaltoSlavic.

@joshuaadkisson6170

22 күн бұрын

The age of a language family is based on when its common ancestor began to diverge into different languages, not based on how conservative the language itself is or on the cultural continuity of its primary speakers. Another way of looking at this: Slavic family is therefore considered young because as a *family* it is young. Even if the Slavs spoke Slavic before the Greeks were speaking Greek or the Indians were speaking Sanskrit, the fact remains that it only started to become a family in the middle ages. Before that, it was one language, not a family.