Archaeolinguistic discussion

I tried to make this  post in the comments section of the Eurogenes blog, but it was too long and the system rejected it.  Even though the person I'm responding to will never see it here, I thought  "what the heck" and I'll post it anyway.

@Andrzejewski "I would love to know what language Tripolye spoke and its linguistic affiliation- is it related to Etruscan, LBK or whatever it was that Ötzi spoke."

Wouldn't we all love to know that! Get to work on interpreting that Vinca script!

Here's a few things we do know: the only languages that we have full agreement on that have ancestry that probably predates the Indo-Europeanization of Europe are Etruscan and Basque. There are other southeastern languages that MAY be related to some of these that we know existed, although we know almost nothing else about them other than that: Aegean/Pelasgian, Minoan, and Hattic. There are some other languages of dubious provenance from ancient Iberia, Italy and Anatolia/Aegean like Tartessian or North and South Picene, etc. Almost nothing is known about any of these, even if they are Indo-European or not. The best "theories" still don't manage to rise above the level of handwavey speculative hypotheses, such as the "Tyrsenian family" or the "Vasconic family" and there is little agreement among linguists about the basis for any of them.

Basque does seem to at least have been geographically consistent as far back as we can trace it, but we can't trace it much further back than to just prior to the Roman conquest of Gaul, many millennia after it was presumably already in place.  It is probably related to or even descended from the geographically larger Aquitanian language, but even that supposition is pretty handwavey. Etruscan "claims" by Roman historians to have come from the north, and may be related to other Alpine languages  like Rhaetic. The Etruscans themselves present a genetic profile that is pretty close to what we'd expect from early Italic-speaking Indo-Europeans, who also presumably came from north of the Alps or at least the Po valley from the Bronze Age, and the exact same material cultures have been proposed for the ancestors of the Italics as for the ancestors of the Etruscans. How a steppe-appearing population that looks on paper like a good candidate for the spread of early Italic languages came to speak a non-Indo-European language is a total mystery. While it seems possible that Etruscan is descended from a language similar to what Otzi's people may have spoken, that's simply based on geographical dead reckoning, and is abductive reasoning that may well have no basis in reality.

I wish for more information on it too, but the reality is that we have no idea what language(s) the EEF population spoke, nor do we have any idea what the WHG language(s) may have looked like, although it seems possible that Etruscan and/or Basque is descended from one such lingering linguistic stock. Quite probably, the linguistic picture was more complex than we expect; if we paint brush in broad strokes, that makes it easier for us to theorize, but in the areas where we actually have SOME information from neighboring early historians among the Greeks, Hittites, Egyptians or Romans, such as the paleo-Balkan linguistic situation, the Bronze Age and early Iron Age Anatolian, Italic and Iberian situation, we see the precise opposite; a patchwork of languages who's relationship to each other is confusing and uncertain at best.  We can probably deduce that that same situation was common across most of Europe, and that the "settling in" of Indo-European languages was a much longer and more involved process that involved multiple waves of differing "grades" of I-E development before Europe was well and truly Indo-Europeanized. By the time we have, for instance, records of the expansion of Celtic in the Iron Age across much of Central Europe, we can presume that it superimposed itself over a number of completely unrelated and anonymous previous Indo-European languages that existed in the area already, as well as who knows how many lingering stumps of pre-Indo-European that was fading away to be lost forever to the mists of time.

One of the best proposals I've seen, although it is precisely the type of broad-stroke paint job that I am making the case against, is Peter Schrijver's broader Anatolian theory where he makes a vague case that Hurrian, Hattic, Minoan, possibly at least some of the modern Caucasian languagess, and even Sumerian all have an ancient genetic link, and that that language family is most likely the starting point for EEF languages. That leaves Basque a little out in the cold, but again based on geographical dead reckoning, I like the idea—speculative though it clearly is—that it might be a lingering descendant of the old El Miron genetic cluster's original language, transmitted through WHG to more modern populations, and against all odds surviving as a hinterlands language isolate in the mountains for millennia. But I wouldn't bet money on that idea, as catchy as it sounds.