A heretic thought: Is PIE the language of the oldest members of the
homeland community, or is it the language of the last ones to leave and
influence the language of the places where they went? If it is the latter,
should we then perhaps repent and give Renfrew a second chance? Does it
matter that farming is much older than we want the protolanguage to be if
it was still in operation when later migrations took place? If the
protolanguage is the youngest stage of the *common* language, i.e. PIE
just prior to the first individual change in a linguistic colony that had
lost contact with the homeland, could the homeland then not be pre-wheel
and proto-farming, while the earliest colonies known to us from the very
indirect source of their language were fully wheeled and had been farming
for a long time? Could a civilization known from 6000 BC not have caused a
migration at 4000 BC? And could the Kurgan raid reflect an assault of some
IE-ans on others, whereby for large parts of the territory it would only
be the language of the victorious ones we would be reconstructing?
I am an absolute amateur in these matters, so please tell me where I am
wrong.
Jens
On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Dec 2002 20:14:46 -0000, "Richard Wordingham
> <richard.wordingham@...>" <richard.wordingham@...>
> wrote:
>
> >Incidentally, why do the Anatolians need to have 'stayed behind in the
> >Balkans', rather than having stayed behind in Western Anatolia?
>
> Attractive though it is to let the Anatolian group stay behind in
> Anatolia rather than somewhere in the Balkans, especially given that
> the Balkan Neolithic came from Anatolia in the first place (the
> technology certainly, the people maybe), it does create an impossible
> timeline problem. If Renfrew is right, and the homeland is in
> Anatolia, the date of PIE must slip back at least two millennia
> further into the past (to at least 7500 or 8000 BC), which is
> stretching it too far.
>
> =======================
> Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
> mcv@...
>
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