Hieber’s Pre-Greek.

Danny Hieber, “a Ph.D. in linguistics who works with indigenous communities to help them document and revitalize their languages,” has a long post called Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek. Here are some excerpts: The peoples who preceded the Indo-Europeans—called Early European Farmers—spoke any number of Paleo-European (a.k.a. Old European) languages. Very few of these left any written evidence (just Aquitanian, Etruscan, Iberian, and a handful of others), and only one survives today (Basque). Even so, these Old European languages left an indelible mark on the Indo-European languages that succeeded them. Imagine you’re a band of early Hellenic (Greek) speakers whose ancestors had migrated over generations from the Pontic–Caspian Steppe into the eastern Mediterranean. Along the way, those ancestors encountered all sorts of novel foods, plants, animals, and terrain—things like olives, hyacinth, figs, and cypresses. Even the sea was unfamiliar at one point,…