what did Corded Ware west of Poland speak?

[alan]

While various corded ware linked groups in eastern Europe have been linked to ancestors of the Slavs, Balts and Indo-Iranians, noone seems to have a clear idea as to what the big chunk of corded ware east of Poland and as far west as the Rhine and Switzerland spoke.

I think there is an interesting situation in that zone in that beaker quickly overlapped a chunk of the corded ware in those areas. It is interesting too that pre-Germanic and pre-proto Celtic share identical vocab to do with religion, war etc which is peculiar to those two groupings and long pre-dates later borrowings between Celtic and Germanic. It has also been suggested that some of this peculiar shared vocab is also known in Finnish. That strikes me as suggestive that the Corded Ware/battle axe horizon could be the origin of the peculiar subset of shared - not borrowed - vocab between pre-proto-Celtic and pre-proto-Germanic. This shared vocab could have been absorbed c. 2500BC when beaker and corded ware overlapped from the Rhine to the Baltic. The Finnish link seem to me to point to corded ware rather than beaker being the origin of this shared vocab subset. Other than this shared subset they were very distinct branches.

[Gravetto-Danubian]

IMO ,*edit-> possibly** it wasn't even Indo european.
I know everyone will disagree

[gravetti]

IMO , it wasn't even Indo european.
I know everyone will disagree

It was Finno-Ugric.

[Generalissimo]

It was Finno-Ugric.

And Finno-Ugrians migrated to India did they?

Corded Ware > Sintashta > Andronovo > Finno-Ugric Indo-Aryans

Makes sense.

[Coldmountains]

It was Finno-Ugric.

Why not Sumerian? But seriously Finno-Ugric languages were not spoken in Ukraine or Belarus (lack of Finno-Ugric hydronyms). This regions, which also belonged to the Corded Ware culture, had hardly any major Finno-Ugric population during this period. Corded Ware in Russia had likely contact with some Proto-Uralics but it is obvious that Corded Ware was a new culture coming from the west, which pushed them and other " locals" back and expanded on their costs. By the way Finno-Ugrian languages have many Indo-Iranian loanwords but Indo-Iranian languages have zero Uralic loanwords, what shows that Indo-Iranian tribes were more developed and pushed Uralics back. Even Slavic languages lack basically any Finno-Ugric loanwords except of some exceptions in North Russia, which was just recently slavicized.

[gravetti]

The eastern outposts of the Corded Ware culture are the Middle Dnieper culture and on the upper Volga, the Fatyanovo-Balanovo culture. The Middle Dnieper culture has very scant remains, but occupies the easiest route into Central and Northern Europe from the steppe. If the association of Battle Axe cultures with Indo-European languages is correct, then Fatyanovo would be a culture with an Indo-European superstratum over a Uralic substratum,[citation needed] and may account for some of the linguistic borrowings identified in the Indo-Uralic thesis. However, according to Häkkinen, the Uralic–Indo-European contacts only start in the Corded Ware period and the Uralic expansion into the Upper Volga region postdates it. Häkkinen accepts Fatyanovo-Balanovo as an early Indo-European culture, but maintains that their substratum (identified with the Volosovo culture) was neither Uralic nor Indo-European.[17] Genetics seems to support Häkkinen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corded_Ware_culture

[alan]

Anyway, we have clear linguistic associations suggested for the Middle Dnieper-Fatyanovo-Abashevo-Sintashta group springing from a corded ware base. Some would say Battle Axe variant may be pre-proto-Germanic. So what about the rest of corded ware - the part usually simply known as CW - which stretched to the Rhine and Switzerland?

Was it linguistically eclipsed by beaker too soon to leave a linguistic legacy or did beaker and CW languages hybrid in the overlap zone in central Europe? Or was IE in beaker introduced to beaker by CW overlap? There are a lot of unknowns. We could flesh out the mystery if we can get DNA from the really early beaker of c. 2800-2600BC in the west of Europe where CW was unknown. We know that beaker has a significant steppe component in central Europe and also had cousin yDNA of Yamnaya. Is this also true in the far west in the earliest beaker period? Or did the beaker-IE-R1b link only happen c. 2500BC in central Europe? These matter not only to the question of what different beaker subsets were speaking at various times but also have a bearing on what the CW groups between the Elbe and Rhine may have been speaking. I find it hard to believe that a shared vocab (not borrowed from each other later) at the root of Celtic and Germanic in the pre-proto stages points to a far western genesis of Celtic from generic west IE. This Celto-Germanic vocab is a feature of all Celtic languages from the Atlantic to the east so it seems to date to an early date when the very roots of Celtic and Germanic were in contact and apparently also in contact with ancestors of the Finnish. These are not later borrowings. Another clue may be that this vocab is not share with Italic. That to me is kind of suggestive that the ancestor of Celtic was an outlier of the Celto-Italic language that was in contact with pre-proto-Germanic and pre-Finnish. That to me might fit a model where some sort of pre-proto-Germanic language was spoken by CW in places like Germany and adjacent areas of central Europe and that beaker was an Italic-like Celto-Italic language. The two hybrided in the overlap zone between the Rhine and Elbe or beyond to produce the heritage of the shared Celto-Germanic vocab. My feeling from the fact it is in Finnish too in some cases suggests to me that CW was the doner of the vocab as it was in closer contact to the non-IE groups to the north and east.

On the other hand we have the issue that the CW derivative cultures to the east which have been linked to Slavic, Baltic and Indo-Iranian do not generally share this vocab. So perhaps I am wrong and the borrowing went the other way but then its lack of presence in Italic becomes an issue. I suppose then we could surmise that this shared vocab dates to a period where Celto-Italic was widespread and in incipient break up due to geographic positioning and the branch that led to Celtic was in contact with the pre-proto-German group while the Italics were already broken away. The pre-proto-Germans were meanwhile in contact with the Finns ancestors at the same time.

Its hard to figure this out but I think the interface between a subset of the Celto-Italic branch and the pre-proto-Germans in somewhere like Germany makes sense and the overlap period between beaker and corded ware seems to me to make the best archaeological scenario. That took place about 2500BC. If that was true then this would confirm that (if pre-2500BC early beaker in south-western Europe was IE) then it was probably in a kind of Italic-like basal node of Celto-Italic form and not Celtic. Celtic has this shared vocab at its pre-proto phase with pre-Germanic so by definition Celtic cannot be said to exist prior to this mutual contact. Given the apparent Celtic-Germanic-Finnish link at a basal node in the branchings then its pretty well impossible to place this contact west of Germany.

[gravetti]

Coldmountains:"Why not Sumerian?"

gravetti:"Because".

[gravetti]

Generalissimo:"And Finno-Ugrians migrated to India did they?"

gravetti:"Did they?"

[alan]

according to a crania study of corded ware

http://www.scribd.com/doc/396654/Syn...Culture#scribd

From the point of view of physical anthropology, the modalities can be outlined as follows. On the basis of the arguments presented up to here, Indo-Europeanization of northern Europe (i.e. of the Corded Ware culture s.str.) cannot have taken place by a direct invasion of whatever extent of South-Eurasian Kurgan people.

As demonstrated by Schwidetzky (in this volume) there are virtually no individuals within the whole sample of German Corded Ware people Ukrainian Kurgan populations.Considering the irresistible success of the new Kurgan traditions - whose expansion (as witnessed by the presence of the new human type in the regions adjacent to the North-Pontic steppes) must have been borne by migrations - it seems reasonable to expect similar processes also for the Kurganization of peripheral regions.

This further propagation was not carried out by North-Pontic Kurgan tribes, but by previously Kurganized local groups (such as perhaps Globular Amphora sub-groups). Two reasons must be taken into consideration to explain their supposed dynamism and mobility: a) a new thrust from the South-East by a successive Kurgan wave; b) intrinsic motivation due to the "cultural" Kurgan heritage, such as their new, patriarchal, social structure and new ideology involving the glorification of warfare.Although the following hypothesis would be difficult to corroborate, it is not unreasonable to assume, for the Central European Corded Ware, the arrival of external biological elements, i.e. previously Kurganized groups (hybrids).

As mentioned earlier, there seems to exist some morphological difference between early ("Einheitshorizont") and later Corded Ware populations: the disappearance of the "archaic" stenodolichomorphic type and an increased trend towards more eurymorphic forms as possibly vehiculated by these secondary Kurgan groups. Further studies would be necessary to determine whether these tendencies reflect admixture of such Kurganized groups