Proto-Pontic and The Caucasian Substrate Hypothesis Part One (Pre-Indo-European?)

Ready for another poorly edited journey into a language lumper's dreamland? Well, stay tuned because you’re sure to love today’s video.
In this video, we discuss how Colarusso took his knowledge of the Northwest Caucasian languages and managed to piece together a macrolanguage family hypothesis, which posits a potential relationship between Indo-European and the NWC languages, suggesting they may have shared a common ancestor termed 'proto-Pontic'- which he (partially) reconstructs. Despite initial skepticism, Colarusso's work reveals compelling parallels between the phonological systems, grammatical elements, and lexical correspondences of these language families. There is even a nice parallel from IE myth.
Of course, there are many weaknesses - some of the cognates seem far-fetched and minimal in number, and many of the grammatical similarities aren’t unique to NWC. Interesting, though, is how NWC might have influenced PIE phonology with regard to laryngeals and the stop system.
So is the Proto-Pontic hypothesis any better than say Blevins’ Proto-Indo-European Euskarian?
Maybe not, BUT!
Colarusso's hypothesis, I believe, was the catalyst for discussions within the linguistic community, drawing attention to the complex interplay between language families in the Caucasus region - particularly with regard to the proposed Indo-Uralic hypothesis. He often isn’t given enough credit for his work - and his proposals do seem to solve some of the nagging questions regarding the earliest forms of PIE and actually with the Indo-Uralic hypothesis too. Of course, he wasn’t the first person to point out similarities between the two language families, but he was the first to put together the real groundwork of correspondences.
We also explore the perspectives of linguists such as Eric Hamp and Allan Bomhard, the latter of the two offers alternative interpretations and expands upon Colarusso's ideas - and again doesn’t seem to get much credit for his work despite that fact that many scholars now seem to accept some form of Caucasian influence in Indo-European.
Part 2 of this series will explore the idea of Northwest Caucasian influence on Indo-European rather as a substrate - and not a sibling. Interesting stuff so stay tuned!
Also, for those who are interested, the very first person to notice similarities between PIE and the Caucasian languages was Uhlenbeck here:
Uhlenbeck, C. C. (1933). Eine Bemerkung zur Frage nach der Urverwandtschaft der uralischen und indogermanischen Sprachen. In Liber Semisaecularis Societatis Fenno-Ugrica. Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura.
Selected sources (additional sources will be in-screen)
Colarusso, J. (1988). The Northwest Caucasian Languages: A Phonological Survey. In J. Hankamer (Ed.), Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics. Garland Publishing.
Colarusso, J. (1992). Phyletic Links between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Northwest Caucasian. In H. I. Aronson (Ed.), The Non-Slavic Languages of the USSR, Linguistic Studies: University of Chicago, Chicago Linguistic Society.
Colarusso, J. (2003). More Pontic: Further Etymologies between Indo-European and Northwest Caucasian. In D. A. Holisky & K. Tuite (Eds.), Current Trends in Caucasian, East European and Inner Asian Linguistics: Papers in Honor of Howard Aronson (pp. 41-60). Amsterdam: E. J. Brill.
(1981, a) Typological Parallels between Proto-Indo-European and the Northwest Caucasian Languages. Bono Homini Donum: Essays in Historical Linguistics in Memory of J. Alexander Kerns, Y. Arbeitman and A. R. Bomhard (eds.), vol. 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Colarusso (2019), "Thoughts on Bomhard’s Work," Journal of Indo-European Studies.
Puhvel, J. (1987). Comparative mythology. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hamp, E. P. (1967). On Maya-Chipayan. International Journal of American Linguistics, 33(1).
Hamp, E. P. (1971). On Mayan-Araucanian Comparative Phonology.
Ruhlen, M. (1994). Is Proto-Indo-European Related to Proto-Northwest Caucasian?. Mother Tongue May, 11-12.
Bengtson, J.D. (1994). Comment on Colarusso 1994. Mother Tongue May, 11-12.
Bomhard, A.R. Comments on Colarusso's Paper "Phyletic Links between Proto-IndoEuropean and Proto-Northwest Caucasian. Mother Tongue May, 11-12.
Bomhard, A. R. (1994). Comments on Colarusso's Paper "Phyletic Links between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Northwest Caucasian." Mother Tongue: Newsletter of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory.
Bjørn, R. G. (2017). Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary: A Comparative Loanword Study. University of Copenhagen.
Bjørn, R. G. (2019). "Chapter 3 Pronouns and Particles: Indo-Uralic Heritage and Convergence". In The Precursors of Proto-Indo-European. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill
Starostin, S. A. (2009). Indo-European-North Caucasian Isoglosses (translated by R. W. Thornton). Mother Tongue, 14. (Original work published in Russian in 1988, that version is the one cited in-screen in the video).

[@kidyomu89]

Proto-Pontic and the Caucasian Substrate Hypothesis was my LEAST favorite Harry Potter book tbh

[@frigaid]

lol

[@talideon]

Ubykh: because there has to be a language that made the reconstructed phonology of PIE look remotely plausible! 😁

[@sillysillyme8150]

im no professional linguist by any measure, but i suspect that many proto-languages of eurasia ultimately descend from the same ancestor. can we reconstruct what this ancestor was like? probably not.

[@LearnHittite]

I would agree with you

[@valentinaaugustina]

probably not yeah :( so much has been put into PIE and we can only sorta approximate what sounds it even had. for relative unknowns, that’s even rougher:/

[@Pherron]

I think we'll get there in the end, but it'll take a long time.

[@Teshub]

See Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time by Johanna Nichols, a masterpiece for insight into this question.

[@caimansaurus5564]

Given that the earliest homo sapiens would have already had full language capabilities (since we all inherited it), it seems like *all* languages can hypothetically be traced back to that original population's language, more than 100,000 years ago. Unfortunately there's no hope in hell of ever reconstructing that or getting anywhere close. That makes me sad

[@davissandefur5980]

Thanks for this. Any chance we could get a library tour of all the books you have in your library? I'd be super interested in it and I'm sure others would too.

[@LearnHittite]

Great idea, I've been thinking about it over the last few weeks. Anything in particular you'd like me to talk about?

[@LearnHittite]

Maybe not all of the books, but I've just uploaded a video covering a selection of my books. Let me know what you think!

[@Heavy-metaaal]

There was a kingdom in the North of actual Turkey called the Kingdom of Pontus. It was annexed by Nero in 62 AD according to Wikipedia.

[@kalacaptain4818]

This isn't relevant at all

[@ldubt4494]

This hypothetical language is called pontic because it lies in the pontic steppe. No one knows how its speakers called it back then. the kingdom of Pontus that you mention was a greek state that existed 8500 years later than the time this video is about.

[@Columbator]

These ancient relationships may prove useful to identify the true nature of the laryngeals.

[@ASAS-dn4ve]

The video is interesting and very much on time. There are newly published genetic studies connecting Caucasus hunter gatherers and Yamnaya culture: Allentoft, M.E., Sikora, M., Refoyo-Martínez, A. et al. Population genomics of post-glacial western Eurasia. Nature 625, 301-311 (2024).

[@LearnHittite]

Thanks for the heads up, I'm going to check out that article right away!

[@christopherellis2663]

Northern is favoured by genetic studies

[@stevenjlovelace]

Ubykh is pretty much the opposite of Polynesian.

[@tree0137]

algorithm comment

[@Rhadamistus5]

Abkhaz/Abkhazia is Kartvelian (South Caucasian). The word itself is Kartvelian. The Apsua are Adyghe or Circassian, like Abaza and other NW Caucasian languages. "Sokhumi" is from Tskhumi which comes from Svan.

[@blkgardner]

>Relatively simple vowel system >Just two vowels

[@CentipedeM]

well it's not ONE vowel

[@francisnopantses1108]

You have quickly become my favorite linguistics channel due to the way you present the state of the field and the research and your diffidence about seizing on a conclusion when the evidence is not there. I've read my share of linguistics papers myself but not as broadly or deeply as you have and I must say I truly appreciate you bringing them to me in an accessible form.

[@LearnHittite]

Thank you for your very supportive words, and you hit the nail on the head regarding the goal of these videos - to bring interesting linguistic research to KZbin in an accessible form 👍

[@jimbruner190]

Hear, hear!

[@minimodecimomeridio4534]

We should also consider that Proto-NWC might well be related to Proto-NEC, which to me seems like a much more plausible theory, or even to more language families like Urro-Hurartian and Hattic. Colarusso’s theory doesn’t take into account any of these scenarios. And if NWC is really related to NEC, that alone would probably invalidate the (few) correspondences found by Colarusso.

[@LearnHittite]

This is very true

[@andyblake9978]

Colarusso did hold that NWC and NEC are related, just a bit less closely than NWC is to IE. In other words, Pontic is a branch of 'Indo-Caucasian'.

[@LuisAldamiz]

Prove it. I'm not so sure of that connection, although there must be of course areal interaction (sprachbund). Mythologically the Narts are the good guys for Iranics (Ossetians) and NW Caucasians but the bad guys for the NE Caucasians, which I find a very interesting bit of legendary "proto-history".

[@mzleveli]

@@LuisAldamiz What is your source that the NE Causasian folklore displays Narts as the bad guys? I thought I had read Chechen folklore with tales of Sosruko/Soslan being a hero. But that was such a long time ago, I would love to read the 'bad guys' version.

[@xochevnitsa_717]

Additionally, we should consider the time depth required for Colarusso's hypothesis (if turns out to be right) would be comparable to Dené-Yeniseian, which Vajda himself said is so ancient (possibly first spoken 12,000 years ago) that there's no point into trying to seriously reconstruct its phonetic inventory. I don't see any reason to assume that Proto-Pontic is any more accurate than Proto-Indo-European-Euskarian, because Blevins seems to have more evidence that holds up to more scrutiny than Colarusso.

[@bork2345]

Have you done a review yet of 'Basque and it's Closest Relatives' by John Bengston?

[@LearnHittite]

Not yet, but I've just done one on Blevins' work on Basque and PIE.

[@ludomian]

I hope to present proofs for Indo-Uralic kinship aleady this year, so you'll have sth to talk about 😁

[@LearnHittite]

Wow! I'm looking forward to it

[@ludomian]

@@LearnHittite thanks! Although it'll be the amateur's attempt 😄

[@valentinaaugustina]

@@ludomianwhere can we find this!

[@ludomian]

@@valentinaaugustina it's not out yet. and I'm not sure where I will publish it as an amateur😅

[@valentinaaugustina]

@@ludomian alright! but you should bc i’d love to read more

[@alangivre2474]

Archeogenetics suggests us that PIE (WSH) were a mix of caucasian hunter-gatherers (CHG) and eastern hunter-gatherers (EHG). And this is as recent as 4500BC.

[@LearnHittite]

So proto-pontic/caucasian substrate hypothesis is plausible in terms of the genetics then in your opinion?

[@LuisAldamiz]

Yes but I'd go for Iran-Neolithic rather than CHG: they're very similar but CHG has a lot of "Basal Eurasian" that Iran-Neolithic and early Indoeuropeans lack. Also it seems it was farmers/herders and not hunter-gatherers who conquered the North Caucasus and Lower Volga area where the PIE ethnicity coalesced (Khvalynsk culture, later East Yamna).

[@Ario-yt8ou]

@@LuisAldamiz So female farmers conquered the Ehg hunter-gatherers and formed the patriarchal nomadic PIE culture?

[@LuisAldamiz]

@@Ario-yt8ou - I didn't say so. Why would you think it was specificially "female farmers" and not male ones or generally populations (both genders) migrating north in search of new lands? My overall impression anyhow would be that Vasconic farmers (EEF) were more female-centric if anything in terms "ideological" (religious or cultural), while the various "Zagrosian" nations, not just the proto-PIEs but also the proto-Tyrsenians and proto-Sumerians, were probably more male-centric. A major exception may be the proto-Elamo-Dravidians of Southern Iran, unsure about pre-Semict peoples of Levant Neolithic. But in any case the early Neolithic migrations do not seem gender-biased but whole peoples (men and women) migrating and coquering/displacing (some times entering complex relations of long term admixture maybe) less numerous hunter-gatherers. The proto-Tyrsenian (or Pelasgo-Tyrsenian) expansion of c. 5000 BCE into Anatolia and parts of the Balcans (from the Halafian culture of Upper Mesopotamia) was probably the first strongly warrying (and thus maybe male-biased or tending to patriarchal, as some cultural indications suggest) expansion I can detect in West Eurasia. The Semitic and Indoeuropean expansions only happened at least 1000 years later.

[@Teshub]

@@Ario-yt8ou Haha!! o

[@LearnHittite]

Any typos or mistakes please blame on the fact that I did a lot of the edit on the train. You can see some content with John Colarusso here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/nqCncqurp8SfeNE

[@menegopiovan7943]

That's very interesting. I was thinking that maybe PIE arose as a creole language from the contact of caucasian H-G and the so called eastern H-G. Genetic data show that the Yamnaya were a mix (25-75%) of these two populations. On the contrary, at the moment genetics doesn't seem to support the proto-indouralic hypothesis, even though I find it more convincing. We have to remember that genes and languages travel together but not always at the same pace. Also, we tend to focus on Ydna haplogroups to guess ancient languages, but people learn to speak from their mothers, so imho we should take into account mtdna too. Fascinating stuff!

[@publicslum6495]

i do not agree with the mother thing, the majority of Hispano Americans descend from White Men pairing up with Indigenous Women, and the majority of them do not speak the language of their indigenous forebearers

[@alangivre2474]

In fact, usually the fathers: father toungue hypothesis.

[@LuisAldamiz]

I'm totally for that with the caveat that IMO the proto-PIE element is rather Iran-Neolithic type and thus from further south (probably historical Armenia or NE Anatolia) than strictly CHG (very similar but with much stronger "basal Eurasian" element). This could explain whatever Tyrsenian-PIE connections exist (proto-Tyrsenian would be from Upper Mesopotamia, bordering my presumed proto-PIE by the south and having also Iran-Neolithic genetics but with Y-DNA J2 as most clear genetic marker, absent in known ancient Indoeuropeans or other European peoples of old) and also the spooky Basque-PIE connections, which to me are just sprachbund and not phylogeny from that area of the "highlands" Neolithic (proto-Vasconic should be the language of earliest EEFs in Asia Minor and later the Aegean region). To me "Indo-Uralic" is not a true phylogenetic root but rather a signature of PIE being a creole language, probably mostly based on the migrant "Iran-Neolithic" farmers/herders but incorporating a lot of Volga Uralic substrate (and also maybe adstrate from Uralics living all the time just north of the PIE homeland, all the way to modern times). Proto-Uralic (incl. Nganassan as main Siberian descendant) should be much older, based on archaeology and genetics it represents the westwards expansion through Siberia of an East Asian population since c. 20,000 BP, reaching Europe maybe 12-10,000 BP, when ice was already retreating, and bringing the very concept of pottery with them all the way from China (where it was first invented, long before the Neolithic).

[@LuisAldamiz]

@@publicslum6495 - The context is somewhat different, notably a consolidated imperial structure and a religious "party" (brainwashing and repressive organization) and lots of effective racism (maybe not as extreme as in the Germanic sphere but still notorious). Whatever the case it's clear that there are LOTS of Native vocabulary in modern Spanish, especially in places like Mexico, and not just into Spanish but also into English and other European languages (avocado, atlatl, potato, tomato, maize, and a very long etcetera). The toponimy of countries like Mexico is largely pre-Spanish or pre-Indoeuropean, etc. To me it resembles much more like the lots of Vasconic vocabulary (vide for example Venneman but his is a limited exploration anyhow) that exist in all Western Indoeuropean languages from Germanic to Greek, from Latin to Celtic and even Slavic (never mind branches like Sardinian or Spanish, where the influence is huge) and that, oddly enough are "invisible" to most just because of ignorance and disinterest on Basque and overall Vasconic, which was the language family of mainline European Neolithic with Anatolian roots. If the Uralics (EHG) influenced PIE so much "from below" in terms genetic, they must have also influenced it in terms linguistic (substrate), never mind the almost perennial adstrate as steppe Indoeuropeans and Uralics were all the time neighbors, mostly each one on their preferred niche (steppe for the IEs, taiga for the Uralics).

[@mzleveli]

@@publicslum6495 Spanish colonists battling the native languages and culture by assimilating their wives into a Hispanic culture is an imperial, orchestrated endeavor; while one tribe mixing with another wouldn't have had the same incentive for the husbands to suppress their wives native cultures.

[@katakana1]

Of all these hypothetical proto-languages, this one seems the most likely. Also, maybe as a joke video (2025 Apr 1?), you could review Indo-Tsimshianic

[@LearnHittite]

Nice suggestion!

[@RobertL.Peters007]

Oooooh! Do the supposed relationship between PIE and Burushaski next!

[@LearnHittite]

I probably will. I think I'll end up covering all proposed relationships to PIE at some point... I've developed somewhat of an addiction to researching them 😳

[@xochevnitsa_717]

​@@LearnHittite Nice, but have you heard of the Karasuk language hypothesis? It links Burushaski and Yeniseian, with a suspiciously large amount of proposed cognates and tentative Y-DNA haplogroup connection. I think you'd find it interesting to weigh against Indo-Burushaski, if you get around to it)

[@KC-vq2ot]

Great and informative video! My personal bone to pick with all the proposed "proto-world" languages, let's call them, is that it is in many ways an endeavor with no prospects. These theories aren't baseless. Bizarrely similar pronoun systems of IE, Uralic and Turkic languages alone imply the connection is far deeper than simple aerial proximity and resulting borrowings, and then there is that dental suffix that has something to do with past tense or perfect aspect that you regularly bump into, and that's just surface level observations However, consider this. Our PIE reconstructions are based largely around the written record. It supplies us not only with the oldest forms of languages of Europe, but also with languages long since dead to fill in the gaps in our understanding. When you remove that written record and look at modern Europe, all you have is a bunch of languages that share some interesting similarities that can't be coincidental, but also can't be connected in a way that is more or less straightforward. Language contact happened. Words were lost, replaced, borrowed, changed meaning, grammar eroded and replaced. Out of all the Celtic and Italic languages spoken throughout the entirety of Western Europe only Insular Celtic and Latin descendants remained. And then you have all those creoles spoken all around the world that have clear connection to Dutch, Spanish/Portuguese and French, but what that connection is and how they relate is unknown, both in real world and in our hypothetic scenario of forgotten history. At this point, does it really even make sense to try and reconstruct a proto-language?

[@Heavy-metaaal]

I think we may never find a single original language. Mankind spread around the world. So language families may evolve at the same time. Researchers could find some cousin families around the same region. Many people want to be the finders of a new language or a new breakthrough finding. But It must be analysed very very carefully. What I distrust is some people seems to follow scientific approach, but some mix it with folklore abd miths.

[@NecroGangster]

So could it be that PIE (or possibly PIA) is a creole language created by the mix of PU and PNWC? We know that genetically the Indo-Europeans were a mix of Eastern Hunter-Gatherers and Caucasian Hunter-Gatherers so it's possible the when they came together their languages could also have mixed instead of one replacing the other. A relation between PIE and PNWC would also explain any similarities to Proto-Basque as the early Anatolian farmers that spread into Neolithic Europe probably spoke a language related to the Caucasian Hunter-Gatherers.

[@kalacaptain4818]

Creole and pidgin languages are only known to result from very specific circumstances (almost all from European colonialism) and i sorta doubt those circumstances would've happened in an interaction between two chalcolithic tribal peoples

[@jomolhari]

Seems like Colarusso knew where he was heading and used only the evidence for that, which is not how you investigate something

[@RazvanMihaeanu]

Pre-Indo-European = Carpathian 5508 BCE

[@SacajaweaSastre]

I remember reading somewhere about PIE supposedly being related to the Caucasian languages (all lumped together as a single group) with one bit of support being that negatives begin with "n-" in PIE and with "m-" in Caucasian. That alone is not enough support for anything of course, but it was one bit of evidence among other things that I remember.

[@LearnHittite]

Interesting, I'd be curious to see what the other correspondences were.

[@kalacaptain4818]

Crowns didn't exist during the time of PIE tho?

[@xizuq6416]

Thank you for always listing your references! 😺

[@LearnHittite]

If I ever miss any just drop a comment and I'll add it to the video description or a pinned comment.

[@jakr9303]

Great stuff, I rather leaned toward this idea myself already, and, now even more.

[@zipora-nong-fu]

The Latvian Myth more unconvinced me then convinced me, it felt like grasping at straws. Like yes the Black-Caspian seas fit the ordeal but, so does Baltic and the Gulf of Riga? If the story was in any other language it would be more convincing but Latvian is probably the least convincing one it could be one Besides like Danish.

[@marjae2767]

Anthony says somewhere that many Hittite ritual texts put the sea to the east. He assumes that these reflect a time when proto-Anatolian was spoken in the Balkans. If the dawn-sea-story is even older, pre-Indo-European, I don't think it helps resolve whether pre-Indo-European was spoken in the Balkans before spreading to the north Pontic area, or if it was spoken in the north Caucasus before spreading to the north Pontic area.

[@LuisAldamiz]

Sounds more like the Caspian Sea or even the wider, somewhat distant, concept of the Indian Ocean. Anatolian IE probably follows the line Maykop (NW Caucasus) > Kura-Araxes (Upper Mesopotamia) > historical Luwians, Hittites and such. I don't see them in the Balcans ever.

[@marjae2767]

@@LuisAldamiz Anthony suggests the Suvorovo Culture.

[@LuisAldamiz]

@@marjae2767 - For the Anatolian Indoeuropeans? Yet another reason to strongly dislike Anthony. I'm rather Gimbutist almost senso stricto (updated but not by Anthony, whose theories I rather dislike). AFAIK that culture is just a leftover of Sredny-Stog, which is not even a "culture" but rather a "complex" of admixed Indoeuropean and Dniepr-Don (SHG, native hunter-farmer culture of much of Ukraine and the Don basin), a transitional thing, which may be related to Ezero culture (Bulgaria) and thus to the latter historical Thracians. I mention this because, unlike other early Indoeuropean/Kurgan cultures, Ezero practiced burials in extended position (not foetal) and with ochre, a Paleoeuropean tradition that persisted in Dniepr-Don, hence I withhold my judgement about Thracians being "truly Indoeuropean" even, although most people claim so (they must be related anyhow, especially to Dacians, who descend apparently from West Yamna, but there can be also some other complexity that is hard to understand). In any case there's no evidence for any Indoeuropean migration from the Balcans to Asia Minor (neither archaeological nor genetic) before the Phrygians, excepted the Mycenaean Greeks in some islands and the key fortress of Miletus/Milawanda. The Inodeuropean Anatolians are clearly documented as expanding westwards in the Hittite era and also there's a lot of indications for Western Anatolia being largely if not fully pre-Indoeuropean (Tyrsenian surely) before thise Hittite-related expansion of the likes of Kupanta Kurunta. Even then lands first conquered by the Hittites around Hattussa were not Indoeuropean but Hattic (arguably of NW Caucasian affinity), hence the name, as they were the Neshili rulers of the Hatti country, whose language they also used officially. Now, I'm unsure about how complex the Kura-Araxes likely stepping stone of the Anatolian Indoeuropeans was: were the Hurrians also involved in that migration-conquest or were they native living there beforehand? I don't have an answer but the Khvalynsk > Maykop > Kura-Araxes > early historical Anatolian IEs is coherent in terms archaeological and also in terms of Anatolian being the first branch to diverge from PIE (all the rest seem to derive from Yamna one way or another, even Tocharian) but the Anatolian branch is almost certainly from Maykop instead.

[@merrymerryjerry6736]

I don't find Colarusso's theory of Indo-NWC convincing but I do think there is a strong possibility that Pre-PIE existed in a Sprachbund area with Pre-PNWC

[@sunrise6496]

cope

[@johanngaiusisinwingazuluah2116]

Wasn't this basically confirmed by the most recent genetic study about the Indo-Europeans by Iosif Lazaridis? The Proto-Indo-Anatolians from the study were shown to have had extensive contact with the inhabitants of Northwest Caucasus as well.

[@LearnHittite]

That's my basic understanding of the situation yes, although I'm no expert in the field of genetics.

[@kalacaptain4818]

Genetics aren't language.

[@johanngaiusisinwingazuluah2116]

@@kalacaptain4818 True, but archaeology also confirms what is said in this video.

[@sagetmaster4]

"We have to go deeper!"

[@Teshub]

Thank you! One of the most intriguing hypotheses - is that PIE was what you get when you cross NW Caucasian and language with "trans-Eurasian"-(Robeets)-like characteristics.

[@LudwigWhitby]

The theory of proto-NWC language and PIE (or proto-indo-uralic) being spoken side-by-side and influencing each other sounds really interesting. 'Substrate' sounds a bit too hard, maybe it was a simple sprachbund? Could the proto-semitic have been a part of this sprachbund as well? I lean towards a PIE (or proto-indo-uralic) homeland in Anatolia which puts proto-semitic right there in the south and proto-NWC to the east. This could also give room for proto-Uralic to be less influenced by proto-NWC if they were on the outskirts of the sprachbund (say, the very west of Anatolia) and left the region quite early, possibly through the Balkans up north to the great Russian rivers. Edit: Add proto-Kartvelian into the mix and I think we're onto something!

[@LuisAldamiz]

The probable origin of Semitic (which is generally accepted to be part of Afroasiatic, otherwise an African language family) should be as follows: 1. Migration from Egypt (Natufian, specifically the semi-desert specialist branch, the Harifian) 2. Continuity in PPNA/B as distinct desert-specialist branch in the Negev area, possible expansion to West Arabia all the way to Yemen (and later to parts of The Horn of Africa). 3. Spread to the wider semidesert south of the Fertile Crescent (Circum-Arabian Pastoralist Complex or CAPC). 4. Conquest of the Levant and Central Mesopotamia c. 4000 BCE, replacing other older languages/ethnicities. The rest is, as they say, history. My personal take is that Nubian languages were more important in the Levant (and maybe in parts of Egypt even) before the Afroasiatics became hegemonic. This is because I (rather shockingly) found strong vocabulary connections between Basque and Nubian languages when doing a routine mass lexical comparison "just beacuase" and that can only make sense if Nubian or proto-Nubian was spoken as main language of the Levant Neolithic at some point. Some day I have to take a look at the Semitic/Afroasiatic issue, haven't yet.

[@LearnHittite]

I'd be interested to see some of your Nubian / Basque comparisions.

[@LuisAldamiz]

@@LearnHittite - TY for your interest. Posting here the relevant link (links usually give me problems in YT comments, hope it gets through): > forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.com/2015/09/vasco-nubian.html From it you can access the Swadesh list comparison (for Nubian languages I used materials from Satrostin Jr., whom I believe is a respectable linguist, as there is no such list available in Wikitionary).

[@LearnHittite]

Got it, cheers. Yes, Starostin Jr is a very talented linguist. He's helped me before with some research I did on time depth in Khoe.

[@LuisAldamiz]

@@LearnHittite PS- Please notice that the work is from almost 10 years ago (it took me almost a whole year to get through the shock or self-disbelief and dare to write on it) and that some details of the explainatory hypothesis may need to be updated: 1. In those days I (and everyone else AFAIK) was still unaware of the Southern and Western Anatolian roots of mainline European Neolithic (EEF in genetic papers, proto-Vasconics for me and many others), so I described it as "coastal migration", which we now know it's not the whole or even the main story in the Anatolian leg of the Vasconic journey, which actually began in Southern Asia Minor and not in the Levant (but clearly influenced by Levant Neolithic anyhow). 2. The "Western Vasconic" of Dolmenic Megalithic cultural speciality may have or not been a thing but now I'm pretty sure that what we can call "proto-Basque" or "proto-Vasco-Iberian" is rather a Bell Beaker thing (because of archaeogenetics showing a major demographic change in that time in all Western Europe). In any case I differentiate Vasconic-1, of Sardinian-like genetics and Vasconic-2 ("proto-Basque"), which has Basque (and Irish) like genetics, dominated on the Y-DNA by R1b-S116 and spread in the late Chalcolithic or (in Iberia maybe) in the early Bronze Age at the expense of previously dominant Vasconic-1, which somehow collapsed west of the Alps (maybe because Indoeuropeans brought the bubonic plague with their Corded Ware invasion of Central-North Europe). 3. In those days I felt that the Nubian family should have migrated from Africa to the Levant. This is loosely backed by African, Egyptian or Sudanese derived, archaeology and archeogenetics, also readable in terms of Afroasiatic or proto-Semitic expansion (this however I associate rather with Harifian than Natufian proper). However later I began considering that maybe Nubian as such could also have expanded from the Levant to Africa (as back-migration if you wish). This is largely because Sudan has very intriguing genetics, especially in terms of Y-DNA, that seem to stem from West Asia: not just lots of R1b (some of which is surely V88, which is however not just African but also important in Sardinia and mainland Italy, overall R1b must have originated in West Asia anyhow, probably towards the West of it and IMO so did R1b-V88) but also of I, which is otherwise considered a Paleoeuropean haplogroup. This last is the weirdest one because it shows up in the Guanche (pre-colonial Canarian) mummies (along with R1b again but not "Indoeuropean" R1a, which only shows up after the Spanish conquest) but not at all in North Africa. It could represent a spillover of Cardium Pottery Neolithic (which definitely influenced NW Africa and is also clearly associated to I2, especially the "Sardinian-Pyrenean" variant) but how it got to Sudan is anyone's guess (it should have existed among early Berbers but why not anymore?, and even then...) So maybe there was some sort of founder effect involving West Asian Neolithic but a lot more research is needed, which seems unlikely to happen now as Sudan has again fallen to endless civil war. And that's it I think, except for a typo in the previous comment: "Starostin" and not "Satrostin". 😅

[@LuisAldamiz]

I'm not sure if Colorusso is right or wrong, some of his cognates seem obvious, while others seem unlikely and forced, also it'd be necessary to do a mass lexical comparison and count the % of apparent cognates, to assess if it's not biased cherry-picking, random noise or sprachbund between nearby languages. However I'm rather for the hypothesis (at least as sprachbund) because of historical and prehistorical reasons. Also, as you mention mythology, it may be worth looking at the Nart legends of the North Caucasus, in which both Indoeuropeans (Ossetians, the last remnant of "stay behind" Indoeuropeans, the Indo-Iranians and more specifically the Iranics) and NW Caucasians consider the Narts as heroes, while NE Caucasians tend to consider them as villains (bandits that fight against their own ethnic heroes); this suggest a partial cultural (and thus historico-political) identity between NW Caucasians and at least Iranics (but maybe Indoeuropeans in general since times immemorial) but not (rather conflict) with NE Caucasians instead. I wonder where does Kartvelian (sometimes also associated to Indoeuropean, as in the Nostratic hypothesis) belongs here, and I also wonder at the proposed identities between Hattics and NW Caucasians on one side and Hurro-Urarteans and NE Caucasians on the other. Maybe there is an order after all in the Caucasian linguistic labyrinth?

[@LearnHittite]

Colarusso argued that the word 'sun' was in fact a loan from Kartvelian and associated with a Maikp sun cult so there's that. I, too, find the Hattic / Hurro-Urartean question to be one worth investigating... whether we will actually find order as you say, 'in the Caucasian linguistic labyrinth', frankly I am doubtful but very interested to hear what developments will come out next!

[@LuisAldamiz]

@@LearnHittite - If real super-family, I'm all for calling it "Nartic" (on the Narts saga) because proto-proto-West-Caucasic-proto-Indo-European gets a bit unwieldy. 🤣

[@LearnHittite]

I'm completely in support of 'Nartic'!

[@sunrise6496]

@@LearnHittite He´s lying though. NE Caucasians don´t consider Narts as villains at all. Narts were allied with NE Caucasians according to Chechen folklore, and were guards of the Chechen people and the lands, so queite the opposite of what that lunatic is saying

[@corpi8784]

Huh, wonder how the most recent Hybrid-Origin of Indoeuropean languages theory would fit with this Proto-Pontic hypothesis...?

[@LearnHittite]

Have you seen the Lazaridis preprint? I'm curious if you have any thoughts on it.

[@corpi8784]

@@LearnHittite It starts of with the ancestey of the Yamnaya. Problem with that is that yhe Yamnaya & related Steppe groups were not yhe oldest group of Indoeuroean lamguages.... It is the Anatolian branch of Indoeuropean languages that is the oldest nranch and these peoples don't have any relevant steppe ancestry in their aDNA......

[@corpi8784]

BTW the Yamnaya are related to Corded Ware peoples but not their direct paternal ancestors.... Just amreminder that culture and linguistica and genwtics cam diverge

[@hannahanna941]

Very good❤

[@vlagavulvin3847]

Looks like PIU chavs got some PNWC wifeys, eh?

[@sunrise6496]

no? it was north caucasian men who went up north and bred with PIU women

[@vlagavulvin3847]

@@sunrise6496 Quite controversial, though (as per the Y-dna analysis). All those R (being not even split to 1b and 1a) came from the spot way eastern than Gamarjoba Land.

[@sunrise6496]

@@vlagavulvin3847 Point being North Caucasian men went up north took eastern european women and started the whole culture

[@albalb6409]

Europeans lived from Europe, North Africa up to the Himalayas. There was no other population. Then later the Mongols moved upwind, but thousands of years later. Europeans lived in those areas for 4-5 thousand years.

[@LuisAldamiz]

You can't call those "Europeans" but, if anything, West Asians (usually "Caucasoids"). The Paleoeuropeans are either very diluted on other layers from West Asia or fully extinct. Europe is almost completely a branch of West Asia ("Middle East"), not the other way around.

[@albalb6409]

@@LuisAldamiz you thing this.bur europeans are autocthonus in their land.how mongol how africans.everyone in their lands.west asian os bullshit. The most of west asian are europian until Afghanistan Tajikistan.the most of iranian.but you dont now the story

[@KeinsingtonCisco]

Sanskrit is PIE!! The Indian homeland was initially the most favored homeland for PIE in the 1800s. Then the leftists usurped academia. The flora and fauna of reconstructed PIE lexicon all seem to point to India (elephants, lion, etc.); syntactically, Sanskrit is the closest to PIE having retained all eight cases, three genders and three numbers, and the original PIE culture is only preserved by India. However, phonetically, PIE is very distant from a Vedic language, mainly because it sounds like a Centum language. So it seems syntactically it is near identical to Vedic Sanskrit, and phonetically it is very different from Vedic Sanskrit, yet still retains archaic forms, like aspirated plosive sounds, such as Bha, lost everywhere else. However, they say it still not possible that PIE originated in India, but why couldn't the Centum branches have left early and then PIE changed into Vedic Sanskrit at home? The Vedas say the Druyu went north. Considering that Balto-Slavic is a Satam language and it originated where they say PIE use to be spoken, cannot the same apply to India? Even the study of Linguistics originated in India. Europeans 'discovered' what Indian grammarians had written about language. Linguistics as a western discipline has its roots in ancient India, in the study and preservation of sacred texts. The grammarian Panini wrote a description of Sanskrit around 1500 B.C. There are quite a few linguists that support Sanskrit as PIE but they have been marginalized and censored.

[@talideon]

Sanskrit is not PIE. It's literally millennia too young to be PIE. If Sanskrit was PIE, you'd have to explain the kentum/satem split by doing mad phonological back flips if nothing else. Man, Hindu nationalism is a weird drug. Either everything can be traced back to India or even the slightest association of languages west of the Indus valley is treated like some kind of grave insult.

[@talideon]

Also, let's suppose for a moment that the centum languages "left first": that very assumption means that Sanskrit isn't PIE, but a descendent of it that went through radical phonological change. And oddly the kind of phonological change that would come from contact with the Dravidian languages. So, to have PIE originate in the Indian subcontinent, PIE speakers would've had to studiously avoid contact with their neighbours to the south until some of the migrated out of India, and then discover that there were people living right next to them. You can see how deeply implausible that is. Especially when phonology tends to be one of the most dynamic aspects of a language. Also, it leaves out all the evidence we have from the Anatolian languages, which were deeply conservative and explain phonological developments. That pushes the PIE urheimat westwards. And the Anatolian languages also appear to have been the first to split off from the rest. Now, reasonable people can differ on where is the most plausible place, but it's at least somewhere around the Black Sea. Whether it's that the non-Anatolian speakers migrated north and spread out or the Anatolian speakers went south (shared vocabulary, IIRC, tends to indicate the latter) is another question. But what isn't a question is whether PIE originated east of the Caspian Sea.

[@KeinsingtonCisco]

@@talideon Wow. Thank you for this. You clearly have not read, or can not read what I wrote, or your communist boss told you to try to say something intelligent? I was actually quite specific when I said that Sanskrit has quite distinct features and is the only one of the whole language group that fits most of the parameters of "PIE". (PIE is just a hypothesis and has no evidence unlike Sanskrit that has thousands of years of evidence)

[@KeinsingtonCisco]

​@@talideon Please do explain the kentum/satem split question you need to be explained btw?

[@anthropos_94]

@@KeinsingtonCiscoPIE has comparison evidence.