In a section of "Guns, Germs and Steel " that is principally devoted to the replacement of former indigenous tongues by speakers of Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian languages, Jared Diamond makes the offhand parallel to the spread of Indo-European languages across Europe, where, according to him, they displaced every language except Basque.
Is this correct? On the assumption that Finnic peoples came after the initial Indo-European expansion (as we know the Magyars and Turkic peoples did), it sounds plausible.
But I’m remembering comments about now-dead languages and cultures which nonetheless survived into more-or-less historical times: the Pelasgians in Greece, the Etruscans in Italy, the Picts (who seem to have finally been defined as a branch of Celtic, hence I-E) in Scotland, and the Iberic people in Spain. Each of these was at one time claimed to have been non-Indo-European.
Hence the question. Is Diamond overgeneralizing? Are the counterexamples I mentioned no longer considered not to be I-E? Were there any other surviving groups I’ve missed? (And if anyone knows a time for the Finnic migrations, that would be an interesting sidelight.)
Don’t the Etruscans count as displaced? Did Diamond specify a date cutoff?
Sailboat
Finno-Ugric languages ancestral to Lappish, Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, etc., have probably been spoken in the same parts of northeastern Europe continuously for many millennia, long before the Indo-European (Baltic, Germanic, Slavic) languages arrived in the region. The Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic family is tentatively associated with the “Comb Ceramic Culture,” from which artifacts as much as 6000 years old have been found in northeastern Europe.
*"The Paleolithic Continuity Theory (or PCT) is a proposal formulated in (1996-2000)[1] by Italian linguist Mario Alinei that Indo-European origins can be traced to the Paleolithic era, earlier than estimates accepted in Renfrew’s NDT
The PCT posits that the advent of Indo-European languages should be linked to the ‘arrival’[2] of Homo sapiens in Europe and Asia from Africa in the Upper Paleolithic, some 30,000 years ago.[3] Based on lexical periodization results in a timeline 3.5 times deeper than that of Colin Renfrew’s Anatolian hypothesis…"*
So the Indo-Europeans would not have displaced any language ?
Pictish was definitely an Indo-European language, so you can cross that off the list.
The Finnic languages originated from Asia, as did the IE languages, but Sami (Lappish) predates Indo-European in northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland. I’m not sure when Finnish and Estonian arrived, but I would be surprised if it was after the IE languages arrived.
PS: I don’t think much of Renfrew’s theory, but I don’t have the credentials or the ability to explain why to the board’s satisfaction. It shouldn’t be hard to find a linguist to chime in on why archaeologists’ assumptions about language are sometimes less than reliable. (To be fair, I know several archaeologists whose linguistics are first-rate, as well.)
Basque’s origins are a puzzler for linguists and historians, from all I’ve read. I remember in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two, several Basque shepherds were astounded when an alien appeared to them, speaking flawlessly in their own fiendishly-complicated language. How could it know?