Against Greek-Centric Abstractionism
Generation, Quantity, and the Misordering of Semantic History
Greek-centric historical linguistics has long suffered from a systematic inversion of semantic chronology. By privileging abstract lexical forms preserved in Classical Greek—particularly adjectives of quantity such as πολλά (“many”)—it mistakes philological visibility for semantic primacy. This error is not incidental; it is structural.
At the core of this paradigm lies an unexamined assumption: that the earliest attestable abstractions in Greek texts reflect the earliest stages of linguistic meaning itself. This assumption collapses immediately when confronted with cognitive, typological, and anthropological evidence.
1. The Greek fallacy: abstraction as origin
Greek-centric models routinely treat abstract categories—number, measure, plurality—as primary semantic units, simply because they are lexicalized early in written Greek. This is a methodological fallacy. Writing preserves late cognitive compressions, not primordial semantic acts.
Adjectives like πολλά encode results without processes. They presuppose a fully developed conceptual apparatus capable of:
recognizing repeated emergence,
abstracting over events,
and erasing agency and temporality.
Such operations are cognitively sophisticated and therefore chronologically late. To treat them as foundational is to confuse literary antiquity with linguistic antiquity.
2. Albanian as an inconvenient witness
Albanian is systematically marginalized in Indo-European studies precisely because it preserves process-based semantics that disrupt Greek-centric abstractionism. The verb pjell / polli (“to give birth, to produce”) encodes generation as action, not as countable output. This is not a peripheral lexical fact; it reflects a deeper semantic stratum.
Greek-centric linguistics dismisses such evidence because it cannot be easily aligned with the prestige categories of Classical Greek grammar. Instead of revising the model, the evidence is excluded.
This is not comparative linguistics; it is philological gatekeeping.
3. The illusion of symmetry in PIE reconstruction
Proto-Indo-European reconstruction is often presented as neutral, but its semantic hierarchy mirrors Greek categories. Roots meaning “to bear, to make, to generate” (gen-, bher-, pel-) are acknowledged as archaic, yet their implications are never fully drawn. Quantifiers such as polh₁u- (“many”) are treated as coeval primitives, despite being clearly second-order abstractions.
This false symmetry allows Greek abstraction to masquerade as proto-language structure. In reality, it represents a late analytical layer projected backward.
4. Quantity without generation is semantically empty
The concept “many” is semantically vacuous unless anchored in prior generative experience. One cannot count without something that comes into being repeatedly. Greek-centric linguistics treats plurality as self-explanatory, when it is in fact parasitic on generation.
Albanian pjell encodes:
emergence,
causality,
and temporal unfolding.
Greek πολλά encodes none of these. It is a semantic residue, not a foundation.
To elevate residue over process is to reverse the natural order of meaning.
5. Contact without hierarchy: a methodological error
The long coexistence of proto-Greek and proto-Albanian populations is often invoked selectively: contact is acknowledged only when Greek forms appear dominant. Yet contact implies semantic exchange, not unilateral derivation. What Greek-centric linguistics refuses to accept is that Greek may have abstracted and re-encoded meanings that survived more concretely elsewhere.
This refusal is ideological, not empirical.
Conclusion: the Greek model is upside down
Greek-centric historical linguistics begins with abstraction and works backward toward life. Real linguistic history moves in the opposite direction:
generation → repetition → plurality → abstraction
Verbs like pjell / polli belong to the substrate of human meaning, formed when language was still inseparable from bodily experience. Quantifiers like πολλά belong to a later analytical stratum, shaped by cognitive compression and cultural formalization.
To treat Greek abstraction as origin is not scholarship—it is the canonization of surface form over semantic depth.
In short:
Greek did not invent meaning; it refined, formalized, and abstracted it.
Languages like Albanian preserve what Greek-centric linguistics has systematically trained itself not to see.
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