Re: [tied] Re: Woof

On 2006-05-16 09:57, tgpedersen wrote:

> Are you arguing that this PPPST language might be the ancestor of
> PIE?

With enough P's -- why not? But as regards the time-depth, intuitively,
14000 years is probably far from enough.

> GEORGE VAN DRIEM: TIBETO-BURMAN vs INDO-CHINESE
> (in: The Peopling of East Asia,
> Edited by Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench and Alicia Sanchez-Mazas)
> tries to trace the development of PST. It seems to me he is arging
> for an age of 13500 years for it:
>
> On the map p. 92 he has, among other blobs, two with the texts
> Szechuan Mesolithic and Neolithic > 11500-2000 BC
> Indian Eastern Neolithic ? 7000 - 2000 BC
> with an arrow from the former to the latter
>
> a quote from same article:
> "
> Three arguments support the identification of Sichuan as the T(ibeto-
> )B(urman) homeland. The first is the centre of gravity argument
> based on the present and historically attested geographical
> distribution of TB language communities.

The centre of gravity argument doesn't always work. Asymmetrical spread
of language families is common enough (cf. Austronesian, Bantu), not to
mention smaller groups (Celtic, for example)

> Sichuan encompasses the
> area where the upper courses of the Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong and
> Yangtze run parallel to each other within a corridor just 500 km in
> breadth. The second argument is that archaeologists identify the
> Indian Eastern Neolithic, associated with the indigenous TB
> populations of northeastern India and the Indo-Burmese borderlands,
> as a Neolithic cultural complex which originated in Sichuan and
> spread into Assam and the surrounding hill tracts of Arunachal
> Pradesh, the Meghalaya, Tripura, the Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and
> Chittagong before the third millennium bc (Dani 1960; Sharma 1967,
> 1981,1989; Thapar 1985; Wheeler 1959).
> Archaeologists have estimated the Indian Eastern Neolithic to date
> from between 10,000 and 5,000 bc (Sharma 1989; Thapar 1985). If
> these estimates are taken at face value, it would mean that
> northeastern India had shouldered adzes at least three millennia
> before they appeared in Southeast Asia. Whilst some archaeologists
> may give younger estimates for the Indian Eastern Neolithic, a solid
> stratigraphy and calibrated radiocarbon dates are still unavailable
> for this major South Asian cultural assemblage. The Indian Eastern
> Neolithic appears intrusively in the northeast of the Subcontinent
> and represents a tradition wholly distinct from the other Neolithic
> assemblages attested in India. Assuming that the Indian Eastern
> Neolithic was borne to the Subcontinent by ancient Tibeto-Burmans,
> then if the younger estimates for this cultural assemblage can be
> substantiated by solid dating, the linguistic fracturing of
> subgroups would have to have occurred earlier in Sichuan before the
> migrations, as I had suggested previously (1998, 2001).
> The third argument for a TB homeland in Sichuan is that
> archaeologists have argued that southwestern China would be a
> potentially promising place to look for the precursors of the
> Neolithic civilisations which later took root in the Yellow River
> Valley (Chang 1965, 1977, 1986, 1992; Cheng 1957). The Dadiwan
> culture in Gansu and Shanxi, and the contiguous and contemporaneous
> Peiligang-Cishan assemblage along the middle course of the Yellow
> River share common patterns of habitation and burial, and employed
> common technologies, such as hand-formed tripod pottery with short
> firing times, highly worked chipped stone tools and non-perforated
> semi-polished stone axes. The Dadiwan and Peiligang-Cishan
> assemblages, despite several points of divergence, were closely
> related cultural complexes, and the people behind these
> civilisations shared the same preference for settlements on plains
> along the river or on high terraces at confluences. Whereas the
> Sichuan Neolithic represented the continuation of local Mesolithic
> cultural traditions, the first Neolithic agriculturalists of the
> Dadiwan and Peiligang-Cishan cultures may tentatively be identified
> with innovators who migrated from Sichuan to the fertile loess
> plains of the Yellow River basin. The technological gap between the
> earlier local microlithic cultures and the highly advanced Neolithic
> civilisations which subsequently come into flower in the Yellow
> River basin remains striking. Yet a weakness in this third argument
> lies in the archaeological state of the art. Just as it is difficult
> to argue for a possible precursor in Sichuan in face of a lack of
> compelling archaeological evidence, neither can the inadequate state
> of the art in Neolithic archaeology in southwestern China serve as
> an argument for the absence of such a precursor.
> "

All this, of course, raises all sorts of questions about the validity of
identifying proto-languages with archaeological cultures and
technologies (pottery, axe styles, etc.). Even if van Driem is right
about the Sichuan homeland and about the relative autochthony of the
linguistic proto-lineage of ST in the area, that's still far from
claiming that the ST dispersal took place ca. 11500 BC. At this time
depth we may be talking (_very_ conjecturally) about a PP...PST stage.
Van Driem's own classification of ST gives "basal" status (near the root
of the tree) to a number of languages like Newari, Magar (in Nepal) or
Qiangic (a whole minor branch recently identified in NW Sichuan).
Kusunda (in Nepal, probably extinct by now), if ST at all, may represent
another early offshoot. If one were to use the "maximum diversity"
argument, the oldest primary branches and the most diversified ST
languages are found not so much in China itself but "in and near" Assam
and the eastern Himalayas, perhaps including parts of Burma and Sichuan.

Piotr