Re: Odp: voting results

From: Alexander Stolbov
Message: 578
Date: 1999-12-15

----- Original Message -----
From: Piotr Gasiorowski
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Monday, December 13, 1999 12:22 AM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: Odp: voting results

 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, December 12, 1999 8:13 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: voting results

Alexander:  First farmers appeared at the territory north of the Sahara
in the 6th mill.BC.
What a superfamily did they belong to? We can answer confidently - to
the
Nostratic one (or theoretically to the second hypotetical Near East
superfamily,
however I don't think so) because they had barley and wheat + sheep and
goats,
not millet + cattle.

Gerry:  I don't think all linguists will agree with you that the first
farmers belonged to the Nostratic family.  Piotr, can you help me out
with this?  And why are you saying they are Nostratic?  Because they had
barley and wheat + sheep and goats?  So folks with barley and wheat +
sheep and goats speak Nostratic?  Alexander, this is no different from
saying that what a person eats determines the language he speaks.   And
I thought we had concluded that this statement was absurd.  But perhaps
we hadn't.
Here I agree with your objections, Gerry. It is a little like asserting that Germans must have American ancestry because potatoes are so important in their culture. But perhaps all mankind comes from America: future archaeologists will unearth twentieth-century Coke empties all over the globe, and the oldest ones will be found in North America.
 
Forgive me this gross (and unfair) caricature of your argument, Alexander, but I'm generally against equating things like language, genetics, nationhood and material culture. Of course they tend to correlate with one another, but this tendency is easily thwarted bay various factors. When we're in the dark for lack of documented languages we tend to attach exaggerated importance to extralinguistic clues, no matter how unreliable, since they seem to offer some enlightenment. We say, for example, "the Kurgan culture can be iventified with the Proto-Indo-European culture", or we use expressions like "the Bell Beaker folk", or worse still "the Kurgans" and "the Beakers" (meaning linguistic communities), as if IE were a cultural, not a linguistic designation and as if barrows and beakers could speak.
 
As for Nostratic, the only kind of evidence for it I'm willing to consider is linguistic, as the Nostratic superfamily is supposed to be a linguistic concept. What I've read so far has left me unconvinced, and despite the enthusiastic attitude of the popular press towards the Nostratic hypothesis most historical linguists refuse to accept it for the very good reason that the linguistic evidence is shaky.
 
Piotr

Yes, Piotr, all you have said is right.
 
This was a fragment taken from the middle of a discussion. I had formulated a hypothesis explaining wide spreading of clusters (superfamilies) of linguistic families on the base of centers of the Neolithic revolution (sorry for extensive selfciting):
 
<<I'm convinced that such global events as spreading of large linguistic families
can't be caused by combination of accidental factors. If people speaking
languages of a family (or of a superfamily) systematically pressed their
neighbours they had to have a fundamental advantage. I believe that the most
important step (up to now) in the history of H. sapiens sapiens was the
"Neolithic revolution" (fire was obtained by earlier Hominids). Thereafter from
the ecological point of view a serious difference between people and other
animals appeared (still not ultimate then). This event happend independently in
7 or 8 places of the world from about 12 to 7 millenia ago.

I think that every such a place with its unique set of initially domesticated
plant and animal species (except dogs - it's a special story) strictly
corresponds to one superfamily:

TIME(mill.ago)-PLACE-PLANTS-ANIMALS-SUPERFAMILY(Families included)
12 - SE Asia - vegetables,rice - ? - Austric SF (Austroasian+Austronesian+Tai)
10 - Near East - emmer/einkorn,barley - goats/sheep - Nostratic SF + ? (North
Caucasian+Sumerian+Pre-IE European lang.)
 8 - China - chinese millet - pigs - Sino-Tibetian  family
 8 - Sahara - millet - cattle - Sindsch SF (Niger-Kordofan + Nilo-Saharan)
 8 - New Guinea - veget. - NG pigs - TransNG family (I have not learned it
properly yet)
10 - Peru - veget., potato - llama - "Andean" SF (Quechumaran+Araucan+Chimu)
 9 - Mexico - veget., maize - no anim. - "Mesoamerican" SF
(Oto-Manguean+Uto-Aztecan+Hocaltecan+Siou+Algonkian)
 7 - S.America - cassava - Guinea pig ? - "Amazonian" SF
(Mayan+Arawak+Chibcha+Caribean+Tupi+Ge+...)

(3 American superfamilies are my own "invention" not proved and even not
discussed yet)
(Racial correlations also can be found here)
What remains? Some unattested languages (like Basque or Burushaski) and
languages of folks which had not passed the "Neolithic revolution" (mainly very
small groups except Na-Dene Indians and Australian aborigenes).>>
 
When a new hypothesis is proposed everybody has 3 possibilities:
 
1) To say: This does not correspond to what I'm used to think therefore this is wrong.
 
2) To analize the hypothesis on the theoretical level and try to find an internal contradiction. If a contradiction is found the hypothesis should be denied. Though if there is no internal contradiction it does not mean yet that the hypothesis is surely correct.
 
3) To apply the hypothesis and to see how it would explain well known facts and predict new consequencies which can be checked. In this case during applying and testing the hypothesis we must say "if A therefore B" keeping in mind "if the hypothesis we are discussing were correct". For a person who have heard only this statement taken out of context, the phrase can seem to be very strange.
 
As to Nostratic hypothesis. I'm not a linguist, therefore I can't discuss concrete evidences. However I don't incline to believe that PIE was something special. Until the opposite is proved I think that it was just a language. Every language has relatives, maybe extinct by now. Maybe the company of languages gathered in Nostratic superfamily is a poor choise (suggest a better one). There is a possibility that no close relatives of PIE remain. OK, then we can try to find relatives of Proto-Dravidian, of Proto-Kartvelian, of Proto-Munda, of ... Anyway superfamilies (linguistic unities of a higher rank than family) MUST exist, have we already convincingly proved their contents or not yet (of course, if we don't belive that every human tribe independently started to speak only 5000-10000 years ago when families established).
 
Yes, language, genetics, nationhood and material culture are different things and interactions between them are not as clear as we could wish. Physiology and psychology, economics and politics, matter and fields, pressure and temperature are different things too. Let us establish this fact and go to sleep?
 
Alexander