Festlig Faglig Fredag with Matthew Scarborough: Lost Languages at the Roots of Europe

We are happy to announce that Matthew will give another Festlig Faglig Fredag talk 🥳

“Lost languages at the Roots of Europe: Diagnosing language contact in the prehistoric Aegean”

As always, we will meet up from 16:00 onwards, and Matthew will begin his talk at 16:15.

See you there!

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Abstract

It has been long recognised that the Ancient Greek lexicon contains a significant proportion of vocabulary of obscure etymology which cannot be traced back to Proto-Indo-European or any known and identifiable donor language. This vocabulary is usually attributed to a non-Indo-European substrate language (or languages) in the Aegean and Balkans, but beyond that there is very little consensus exists on its/their nature. In this talk, I will attempt to de-mystify the notion of the Pre-Greek substrata by addressing past and current theories, discuss why the problem deserves revisiting today, and to present some of the preliminary efforts and results of my Marie Skłodowska-Curie research project which strives toward developing new methodological approaches to this material and to set it on more firm philological grounding. In particular, this will be carried out through a case study on construction and craft terminology.