Re: [tied] Will East and West ever meet?

On Sat, 20 Oct 2001 17:08:26 -0700 (PDT), george knysh
<gknysh@...> wrote:

>--- Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv@...> wrote: (a lot
>of interesting and withwhile things for which I thank
>him). GK=A few queries.
>MCV: This
>> means that a part of IE (which was later to migrate
>> back into
>> Anatolia) was present in the Balkans ca. 5500 BC. It
>> doesn't mean that
>> _all_ Balkan languages were PIE. Some of them may
>> have been more
>> distantly related to PIE, others not related at all.
>>
>> I like to think of my theory as "Renfrew +
>> linguistics".
>
>*****GK: How necessary to this theory is the notion of
>colonization? Is it endemic or sporadic and can you
>tell when this needs to be postulated and when not?
>For instance you say:
>>MCV: There was a
>> "break" in the expansion of Neolithic techniques to
>> the Western
>> Mediterranean (the techniques were adopted by
>> locals, without
>> invasion/infiltration/etc. from outside).
>
>And a little further you say:
>MCV: There was ... a physical break between the ones
>that started to
>> colonize the
>> European lowlands and those that stayed behind in
>> the Balkans (which
>> is why we have a clear linguistic division --not a
>> "break"-- between
>> Anatolian & the rest of PIE).
>
>Might a model of "acculturation" not work here as well
>as for the W. Med.? And if not why not?*******

Well, if I may quote Renfrew here:
"In Europe it has been calculated that the density of population
during the period of hunter-gathering might usually have been no more
than about one person for every 10 square kilometres on average. The
subsistance techniques of early farming can support, in Europe and
Western Asia, a population of about five persons per square kilometre
without great difficulty, and without advanced farming techniques.
That represents a fiftyfold increase -- an increase of 5000 per cent!"

So the concept of colonization *is* important. In the Western
Mediterranean, the circumstances were favourable to the locals:
domesticates and ideas arrived at first mostly by sea, carried by just
a boatful of people, and were picked up by precisely those Mesolithic
groups that were already able to sustain higher population densities
than the Mesolithic average of 0.1 per km2, and already enjoyed a
sedentary lifestyle (again: fish and shellfish), and were thus more
prepared to pick them up in the first place. The circumstances were
not so favourable in "temperate Europe": population densities were
lower, the lifestyle was more nomadic, and the number of newly arrived
farmers much higher.

Where the agricultural wave petered out (due to climate and/or
terrain) there were again opportunities for a model of acculturation.

>The rest of your message was truncated in the reply so
>I'll have to write out the query i.o. placing it in
>context. When I tried to use the "30% or so" analogy I
>did not mean to convey an idea of some sort of hodge
>podge (surely Germanic is not that); but a situation
>where the adoption of new technologies is accompanied
>by linguistic influences so major that they lead to
>the emergence of a new language to which both "donors"
>(whether or not these are present in abundance) and
>"recipients" contribute. Thus could ancient IE have
>been such a combination, which, once established began
>to "live on its own" with further modifications not as
>global and intensive as the ones which originally
>might have produced it?

I don't know what such a model would mean linguistically.