--- In cybalist@..., jpisc98357@... wrote:
> In a message dated 8/6/01 3:23:47 PM Central Daylight Time, pva@...
> An analogy might be the million Vietnamese who migrated to the
> US after the war being so influential that we started using the
> Vietnamese words for Mother and Father ...
These agricultural societies long before modern communications and
industry etc were heard of, were very different from now. Society was
very stratified. People had little knowledge of what happened 50
miles away. No message travelled faster than the fastest foot or
hoof or sail, and then mostly among the upperclass only. The
PIE-speakers would have invaded and become the upper-class, married
mostly among themselves, and kept up their own language for a long
time afterwards. The tendency for people to "ape their betters" would
encourage the lower classes to imitate the language of the upper
classes. In the same sort of way, a probably quite small superimposed
upperclass of Romans imposed a sort of Latin on the Gauls and made
them into French-speakers. Sometimes the language of the land wins
whrough, marked by the encounter with a mixture of words from the
invading language: for example, PIE-speakers conquered
Finno-Ugrian-speakers in the lands east of the Baltic; in the south
PIE suppressed Finno-Ugrian and became Lithuanian and similar, but in
the north the native Finno-Ugrian languages survived the encounter and
became Finnish and Estonian and similar, which have an assortment of
loanwords from PIE.
Add to that, some people's fascination with the exotic: for example, I
heard it said that among English-speaking British troops in North
Africa in the 1939-1945 war, the drink "tea" was 75% of the time
called by the Arabic word "shai" rather than by the English word.