I don’t agree with this characterization of the article at all. What you see as clickbaity I see as using a reductive idea to set the stage for a more complex one. I just think this is good, engaging writing.

Even for a non-linguist like myself, the article didn't feel right. I expected to find more information about the Thracians, who inhabited those lands for quite some time and left some extraordinary (albeit non-written) heritage.

Also, “not having a known etymology” is weak evidence for borrowing, full stop, let alone for borrowing from a substrate. There are lots of very common words in english (dog, pig, boy, girl) that have no known etymology which are incredibly unlikely to impossible to have come from a substrate language.

Languages invent new words and sound patterns endogenously all the time.

Ya, barrrrmp! disagree, the main thesus is lingustic evolution as sort of hereditary characteristics whose exact origins are difficult to elucidate, kind of like apples and horses, that also share the same general geographic origins. Various lists of words show conclusivly how many words are conserved over very broad geographic, temporal, and cultural ranges, so it will always be a (low stakes) game of reverse engineering how words and full languages moved around. perhaps of interest was an early study of austrailian languages, where over time local languages became incomrehensable to distant tribes, but the ancestral origin songs, were recognisable from there melodic and rythmic structure, and the actaul storys were essentialy identical, so language drift, but cultural continuity, which is aparently what you get after 50 millenia hanging out with marsupials.

The author does mention the possibility of more than one non-IE pre-Greek language, as well as the possibility of an Indo-European predecessor in the region.

There are similar arguments over Pictish, but at least with Greek there is a substantial body of vocabulary, which Pictish lacks.

>wine

It could be an original Proto-Indoeuropean word as well, because Greek has ὑιήν "grapewine" (< *wih₁-ēn), which follows PIE ablaut (weyh₁-ō ~ wih₁-ēn), which doesn't usually happen if it's just a borrowing of a foreign word. And the same root is found in Latin vitis "vine", Russian vit'sa "to twist (often about vines)" etc.

There are decades of scholarship on those cognates, and a longstanding view that in Proto-Indo-European the word meant simply "large body of water" and not specifically "sea". Moreover, it may be a substrate word borrowed into European IE languages, as the affinity of that Sanskrit word to this cognate set is not very certain.

Wiktionary's note says some people think this root may originally have referred to freshwater/inland seas, not oceans.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

In many of the daughter languages it does regularly include saltwater connected to the world ocean (certainly the Latin "Mare Nostrum" for the Mediterranean!); it just seems uncertain from this description whether it necessarily had that sense in PIE.

That doesn't seem like "had no ... word for ... 'sea'" is a very clear or helpful description of the situation, though.

For an analogous but completely unrelated example, Stoney [0] has a word for "ocean" (mînîtâga) [1], but it's also only spoken in a landlocked region. So maybe human languages have a tendency to preserve/invent the word for "ocean" for some reason?

(I actually remember asking the professor why they had a word for "ocean", but he wasn't sure either.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoney_language

[1]: https://dictionary.stoneynakoda.org/#/L/m%C3%AEn%C3%AEt%C3%A...

I think this is mostly a disagreement over semantics.

Or, we have multiple anatomy textbooks [0] from before the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_textbooks

Yeah I think to calibrate you should probably look to Native American words that made it into English — place names, local foods and wildlife, cultural items. Those are going to be your substrate borrowings for most languages.

> would look like today that would take us back 200-400 years technologically.

If those technologies were concentrated amongst the elite and only a handful of palace scribes could write most people would have no or little contact with writing. Same with most people living outside of the palaces (overwhelming majority) and who had no access to the amenities.

It’s hard to say what happened but these collapses sometimes have paradoxical outcomes e.g. we have evidence that the quality of life and health improved for Western Europeans at least in some places after the Roman Empire collapsed (less population pressure, no crippling taxes etc.)

How long ago before the Myceneneans does there remain a coherent concept of Greek-ness?

“Solon, oh Solon!” — are Greeks truly ancient or relative newcomers in a seafaring land?