Is it possible to combine the Anatolian and Steppes model of IE?

[alan]

I know this is a big nutty but always like a side bet on a non-favourite and it would be interesting to consider how a model linked to the spread of dairy farming might work

Something like:

Anatolian in NW Anatolia 5500BC or older - basically native to the area

SE Balkans c. 5500-4500BC - Anatolian morphing towards PIE

Penetration into Sredny Srog in the steppe interface c. 4800-4200bc probably also in PIE form. Sredny Stog is the big networking steppe culture with settlement as far as the Don and beyond and influence as far as the Urals.

PIE forming around 4500BC

Big sudden long distance offshoot of dairying through central Europe, the Alps and the north and to the north-west c. 4500-4000BC (pre-Celto-Italic and pre-Germanic? split)

Other groups who remained behind in the Balkans and western steppe become involved in a complex situation with reflux waves back into the Balkans that would be very difficult to entangle c. 4000-3000BC but probably involved a mix of Palaeo-Balkan dialects.

Wheel and other innovation vocab spread by secondary massive cultural networks like late TRB, corded ware, Yamnaya etc.

Doesnt seem impossible to me that some sort of combination of the Anatolian and steppe models like that could work.

[Generalissimo]

No, it's not. The Anatolian branch entered Anatolia from the north very early, and didn't move back into Europe.

[Andrew Lancaster]

I think it is not unreasonable at all to say that both Anatolia and the Steppe played a role in the development of PIE.
But then the Balkans and the Caucasus should probably be added to that list?

Andrew

[Jean M]

Alan - This just seems to be the Revised Renfrew model, which has been dismissed as firmly by linguists as his original version.

PIE was not native to Anatolia. The non-IE Hattic language was spoken in Central to north Anatolia before the arrival of IE-speakers and may be related to the Kaskian language of NE Anatolia and perhaps the NW Caucasian language Abkhaz. Significantly the name Hatti was retained by IE speakers after they took over Hattusa from Hattic kings - it was the familiar name for the territory and clearly indicates that IE speakers were not its original inhabitants.

The IE-speakers that we call Hittites called their own language Nešili, meaning "the language of Neša" or Kanesh, the site of which has been excavated at Kültepe. This trading town was an Assyrian outpost 1798 BC - 1740 BC, then destroyed by fire. When it was rebuilt, it was no longer Assyrian, but early Hittite. Interestingly the Assyrian merchants there before the town was razed had contact with Hittites. Hittite names and two pre-Hittite loanwords (words for "contract" and "nightwatchman") appear in their texts.

Here's the crucial point. Hittite adopted words from Hatti. But PIE did not. There is no indication of PIE being in contact with any of the languages of Anatolia. More follows, with references.

AnatolianLanguages.JPG

Map of the languages of Ancient Anatolia from Calvert Watkins 2001, including the non-IE languages of Hattic and Hurrian.

[Jean M]

Petra M. Goedegebuure, Central Anatolian languages and language communities in the colony period : a Luwian-Hattian symbiosis and the independent Hittites, In: J. G. Dercksen (ed.), Anatolia and the Jazira during the Old Assyrian period (Old Assyrian Archives, Studies, Volume 3. (PIHANS 111) (The Netherlands Institute for the Near East: Leiden 2008), pp. 137-180.

Hittite and the other Anatolian Indo-European languages were spoken in an area that also hosted languages from other language families, such as Hattian and Hurrian. Since the populations using those languages did not live in isolation, we may expect that these languages influenced one another to a certain degree, depending on the nature and intensity of contact....

Watkins* explains the three syntactic isoglosses which set the Anatolian languages apart from the other Indo-European languages, —the split ergative system, the use of enclitic pronouns and particle chains after the first accented word of the sentence, and the nearly obligatory use of sentence connectives—, as the result of diffusional convergence in Hittite, Hattian and Hurrian (2001: 54). Given Watkins’ dating of these innovations between 2200 and 1900 BCE (or 1700 BCE at the latest) (2001: 55), these innovations are probably not the result of the Hittite conquests of Pitana and Anitta. We may infer from this time frame that they are the side-effects of the rather peaceful and unifying contacts in the Assyrian Colony period, with its elaborate trade network, that is, if Watkins’ views are correct ...

https://www.academia.edu/350837/Cent...ndent_Hittites

Watkins, C. 2001: “An Indo-European Linguistic Area and its Characteristics: Ancient Anatolia. Areal Diffusion as a Challenge to the Comparative method?”, in: A. Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon (eds.), Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative
Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 44-63. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=s...page&q&f=false

[Jean M]

Bill J. Darden, On the question of the Anatolian origin of Indo-Hittite, in Robert Drews (ed.), Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family (2001)
http://humstatic.uchicago.edu/slavic...n-anatolia.pdf

evaluates the various proposals for an origin in Anatolia for Proto-Indo-Hittite and disposes of them.

[Jean M]

Possibly the most recent look at the topic is F Josephson, Transfer of morphemes and grammatical structure in ancient Anatolia, in Copies Versus Cognates in Bound Morphology, 2012, pp. 337-354. He cites Watkins 2001 on the theory that rapid linguistic change in the Anatolian branch of IE was due to intensive language contact. http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=e...page&q&f=false

He discusses specific contacts between IE Anatolian languagues and Hurrian and Hattic on p. 350. http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=e...page&q&f=false

[alan]

Jean thanks for all that information. I just thought it was worth a further chew over but I will read that stuff you linked to and have a think.

The more important point than any Anatolian link per se is the flurry of interaction and at least limited movement between the Balkans, some cranial evidence of Stredy Stog groups having a farming element, and the steppe reverse flow in the Suvorovo period and then some return migration of the latter to the Dnieper. That broadly speaking falls within the period 5000-4000BC, arguably before full PIE had emerged from archaic IE. So, a fairly wide area was interacting and involved in the phase prior to full PIE and its pretty complex. I would think a fairly complex mix was involved in the period between archaic and full PIE.

So what I was saying to Polako on the other thread is I think genetically there is some evidence of mixing among the Sredny Stog groups in what would traditionally be seen as the archaic IE/Anatolian language phase. They were settled at least from the Dnieper to the Don and influenced right to the Volga. So, whatever they were in terms of yDNA their mix may have been spread across the western steppe before 4000BC. Therefore it is not entirely rational IMO to see a mono-yDNA picture in the western steppe at the time PIE proper emerged.

If one sees PIE as only emerging with the wheel c. 3500BC or after then we can add that Maykop elements were also in the mix to at least a limited degree. So, while I think certain y lines may have dominated (and this would have varied with geography) I do think there was a mix in the western steppe in both archaic PIE and full PIE times and it think its wrong to see PIE as the language of a single lineage which tends to be pushed by some posters. I know you dont think that but it does get pushed by some posters.

I see PIE as a broad western steppe thing probably with Sredny Stog as the group most capable of transmitting a more unified archaic PIE dialect. Otherwise their pre-wheel, pre-true mobile pastoralism, period of existence with groups separated by relatively empty areas between rivers would surely have been one of linguistic divergence rather than a single archaic head of the tree dialect. I think Sredny Stog were the only pre-Yamnaya steppe group capable of spreading a dialect or promoting linguistic convergence across the western steppe.

[alan]

When you say very early, I believe there is little or no evidence of a very early move into Anatolia from the north. I am not saying it didnt happen but the best I have heard was about a stelae like stone in Troy and it wasnt especially early. I, and some other posters, have problems seeing how wheel vocab could have been avoided by any group who remained in the Balkans after its invention c. 3500BC. Knowledge of it seems very widespread soon after invention so its hard to picture how Anatolian could have reached Anatolia without that knowledge unless it arrived pre-3500BC in Anatolia. Even if the less likely alternative that it passed into Anatolia via the Caucasus is considered then its still problematic as the Caucasus appear to have had the wheel very early, apparently before it was known on the steppe.

One possibility I raised is that perhaps Anatolians did have knowledge of the wheel before Yamnaya and therefore didnt need to borrow their standard terminology. You wouldnt borrow a suite of terminology from a group who had the wheel after you already had it. I would suggest that the standard wheel suite of terminology may have appeared on the steppe around 3300BC but that some archaic PIE groups on the fringes may have already had their own terminology and didnt need to borrow it from Yamnaya type groups. Yamnaya type groups after all only appear to have expanded west of the Black Sea and into the Caucasus around 3000BC or after, perhaps 500 years after the wheel would have been known outside the steppe in the Balkans, Caucasus etc. I suspect the Yamnaya suite of terms were created by the first fully mobile wagon pastoralists but their influence and spread outside the steppes long post-dates both the likely spread of archaic IE into the Balkans before 4000BC and also post-dates by c. 500 years the knowledge of the wheel which would have come to areas like the Balkans and Caucasus long before Yamnaya influences did.

Also if the standard Yamnaya type suite of wheel terminology evolved around wagon dwelling groups which emerged around 3300BC then this suite may not have been appropriate for less mobile groups off-steppe who already knew the wheel and who didnt follow that lifestyle. The pre-Yamnaya steppe groups may have been traders on horses but they pre-dated that wagon lifestyle - something that probably made them less 'alien' to Balkan farmers who had had long periods of contact with them anyway before their intrusion.

No, it's not. The Anatolian branch entered Anatolia from the north very early, and didn't move back into Europe.

[Jean M]

When you say very early, I believe there is little or no evidence of a very early move into Anatolia from the north.

I think that David was just sketching the story - early departure of the ancestors of the Anatolian branch from the PIE homeland, which lay to the north of Anatolia.

Probably David is busy with Christmas preparations, just as I am. So this is not really the ideal time to chew this particular topic over yet again. In my posts above, I had time only to summarise some of the linguistic points. I did not enter into the archaeology, which indeed shows that the entry point into Anatolia was from the west, not via the Caucasus, and took place probably c. 3000 BC. The staging post in between departure from the steppe and entry into Anatolia would seem to have been the Balkans, to judge from Balkan material of Ezero and similar type in Troy I, along with the notable anthropomorphic stele.

I should also quibble that people speaking languages of the Anatolian branch did enter Europe. They were Carians and Luwians in the Greek islands. But David's basic point is that PIE did not enter Europe from Anatolia.