Substratum

Translations

sostrato | substrat | Substrat

Article

Concept introduced by G.I. Ascoli in the 1860s, a linguistic substratum is an endemic language that, in a context of language superposition, influences an intrusive language called a superstratum. The seminal discussion by Ascoli opened the field to the concept of strata, which, with several modifications and evolutions in the studies that followed, became a crucial model for the description of multilingual areas. Diachronically, the term substrate not only refers to the phenomena which appear as a result of superposition in the dominant language, but to the linguistic layer to which, in a given area, a dominant language has been superimposed, thereby resulting in cultural domination, which in turn could have been caused by economic, social, political or military factors.

Example

For corpus-languages, substrata are quite elusive and can only be identified basing on historical information about the demographics of specific areas. They tend to emerge in corpora as low-ranking codes as opposed to the standard scribal tradition of more prestigious superstrata (cf. Anderson and Vita 2016, who present three case studies from the Semitic and Hurrian environments).

An example from the Anatolian area is represented by the presence of grammatical mistakes in the Old Assyrian corpus from Kaneš that depend on interference from the Hittite morph-syntax, e.g. the lack of proper gender marking, as in:

Šašalika (wife of Ni-ki-li-et) […] ašar libbi=šu (expected: libbi=ša) illak
“Šašalika may go where (s)he wants” (TC III 214a)

Other typical examples include the influence of Hittite syntactic patterns on the Akkadian language in texts composed in Hattuša, such as the very common reproduction of the double marked genitive with "genitive-noun" order, as in:

ša GÉME^MEŠ-šú ŠU^MEŠ-ši-na (KBo 10.1 rev 11; Devecchi 2005, 52)
of his slave hands-their
"The hands of his slaves"

Note that both these examples pertain to the field of grammatical interference, as grammatical are normally the features that the superstratum (in these cases, Assyrian and Akkadian) may absorb from the substratum (in both cases, Hittite).

A topic that is strongly connected to the research on ancient language contact is that of the existence of a Pre-Greek substratum in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean area. According to scholars such as Furnée (1972) and Beekes (2009), a large portion of the Greek lexicon that does not appear to be inherited may be explained as resulting from contacts with one or more local languages that were spoken in the Eastern portion of the Mediterranean before the alleged migration of Indo-European speakers. The problem of the Pre-Greek substratum is methodologically complex and interesting, as it highlights several methodological issues, sich as (a) the problem of the unicity or multilplicity of substrata, (b) the boundaries and extension of an area interested by the presence of a substratum, (c) the limits of reconstrucion of substrata when working only with a limited set of words and forms that are, furthermore, adapted to the morphology and phonology of one or more target languages (see Merlin 2020 for further discussion).

References

Andrason, A. and Vita, J. (2016). Contact Languages of the Ancient Near East – Three more Case Studies (Ugaritic-Hurrian, Hurro-Akkadian and Canaano-Akkadian). Journal of Language Contact 9, 293-334. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/19552629-00902004. Devecchi, E. 2005. Gli annali di Hattusili I nella versione accadica. Pavia.