Re: Agriculture and IE

--- In cybalist@..., x99lynx@... wrote:

> > there farmers in Europe before the advent of IE languages?>>
>
> There are two points of view on this (actually there have been

about a

> dozen.)
>
> Remember that we can only recreate how IE languages spread. We

have no

> actual direct written evidence.
>
> When we find the first actual record of IE languages - in Greece

and Asia

> Minor just before 1000BC - they are already individual languages

that make it

> look like IE has already been "spreading" for some time. And we

only have

> records of other IE languages 100's, even 1000's of years later

than that.

>
> Linguistically, the difference between those first two attested IE

languages

> (Hittite and Mycenaean Greek about 1200BC) appears to be pretty

large. If

> you and I had common great-great-great-etc.-grandparents and we now

speak

> different languages because our families after that lived in

different

> places, how long does that difference take to happen? It seems to

have taken

> about 1500 years for Latin to split into modern Italian, French,

Spanish,

> Romanian, etc. But Hittite and Mycenaean Greek seem much farther

apart than

> the Romance languages - at least to some people. So how much time

would it

> have taken for a theoretical proto-indo-european parent language to

split

> into all the different IE languages is a little tricky. We don't

have a lot

> of exact measurement of documented language-splitting time to go

by, really.

>
> So, one question is time. How long must the IE languages have been

separated

> in order for them to have been as different as they are when we

first have

> records of them?
>
> The other question is why early IE languages were spoken in such a

wide area

> of Eurasia - from Norway to India and from Spain to Russia. There

have been

> a lot of theories. For a long while, archaeologists were very sure

they

> could identify IE speakers in things that were buried in the

ground. But

> then other archaeologists were able to prove that things in the

ground don't

> always match up with what language was being spoken. So, things

are not

> quite so clear anymore, although there is definitely a hybrid
> archaeological-linguistic-philosophical "majority" opinion that

thinks that

> things like the horse and chariots will tell you who was speaking

the

> earliest IE languages. They usually think that IE first started

spreading

> between 4500BC and 3500BC.
>
> There's a minority opinion that is developing however that thinks

that maybe

> IE languages spread when people learned to do more than just gather

wild

> plants and wild game for food and started planting food and raising

animals.

> This happened in Europe mainly in the period between 6000BC and

3000BC. This

> is not completely inconsistent with the horse and chariot theory,

because you

> can't have a domesticated horse or a chariot until you have

agriculture.

>
> Now, in other areas, agriculture was of course spread by people

speaking

> other languages, and horses and chariots were used by speakers of

other

> languages, too. So we have to be careful that we don't make these

connection

> too universal.
>
> Now, if you put a map down of how agriculture seems to have spread

through

> Europe and parts of Asia, it sort of matches up with where IE

languages were

> spoken 1000's of years later. And if you put a map of where

archaeologists

> have found horses, e.g, it sort of matches up with where you find

IE

> languages 1000's of years later. But as Piotr pointed out, neither

horses --

> nor cows, for that matter -- spoke IE languages. But it's worth

pointing out

> that we have no evidence that agriculturalists in Europe spoke

anything

> before IE (with the possible exception of Basque, which is spoken

in an area

> of Europe that got agriculture very early from a different

direction than the

> rest of Europe.)
>
> So, in all honesty, we don't really know where IE languages were

being spoken

> in 4000BC. But we do know that something big was happening at that

time and

> that was the spread of agriculture. This was not really understood

when the

> horse and chariot theory first came up. But now archaeology has

given us a

> better picture of those events and a better idea of how important

they were.

>
> One last important thing to remember is that when you

say "agriculture" (in

> Europe, at least) what you mean includes a wide variety of

domesticated

> plants and animals, and that includes what we call pastoralism.

Domseticated

> plants and animals came TOGETHER when agriculture spread in

Europe. The

> horse seems to have been domesticated later than the cow, the pig,

the goat,

> the sheep -- but not necessarily the chicken. (However, there are

very few

> people who think that IE languages spread along with the chicken.

But South

> East Asia is a little bit of a wild card in all this.)
>
> And "agriculture" also mean a lot of other things that people who

only live

> off of wild food are not very good at, maybe for obvious reasons.

And one of

> those things in Europe seems to have been making things like metal

and

> ceramic pottery. Another is sustaining large populations. And

large

> population increases are a very good way to spread languages.
>
> Steve Long

Steve

well presented.

Thank you.


Ravi