From: Jörg Rhiemeier
Message: 70541
Date: 2012-12-09
On Saturday 08 December 2012 16:22:04 Tavi wrote:
> [...]
> In Mallory-Gimbutas' theory, Kurgans (nomadic shepherds from the Pontic
> Steppes)
The speakers of PIE probably weren't nomads. PIE has words for
the house and its parts which are not particularly likely to
originally refer to tents, for agriculture and for keeping pigs,
which are unsuitable to pastoral nomadism. Of course, hardly
any archaeologist now still believes that the kurgans were built
by nomads.
> took over farmers of the Lower Danube area, leading to an
> acculturation process ("Kurganization") by which they imposed their own
> language (Kurganic) over the autochthonous population. However, in my
> view the replacement of the existing languages was way of being
> complete, so a kind of creolization happened by which large portions of
> them survived in the historical IE languages.
I wouldn't call it a "creolization". Late PIE was a morphologically
highly complex language about which one could say with only little
overstatement that "all verbs were irregular". Compare that to a
creole such as Bislama or Mauritian. It is a very different thing.
One can definitely say that the spread of IE was the establishment
of languages of a single origin onto a large area, by which means
ever. However, it is indeed the case that many words and probably
also phonological and grammatical patterns from the languages
previously spoken in the area found their ways into the individual
IE languages.
> This is why I regard
> Kurganic as a *superstrate* to native IE, which essentially was a
> Neolithic language spoken in the North Balkans-Lower Danube area.
Gobbledygook.
> Thus I think the identification of Kurganic as the real "PIE" by most
> IE-ists is wrong, and the refined version of an "Early PIE" from which
> Anatolian and "Late PIE" later split is only a palliative.
Bullshit. The Anatolian languages differ from the rest of IE in
some important ways (hence the proposition of an Early PIE and a
Late PIE), but are clearly related to the rest of IE in basically
the same way as the latter languages are related to each other,
only a little more distantly.
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