From another list (MT). Any comments?
Marc
++++++++++++
Just sending you a rough draft of a brief paper on Indo-European
languages. I wonder, could you post this on the mothertongue listserver for
me, and ask people to e-mail me at
jonathan.adams@... if they
have comments? Thanks, Jonathan
INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES: GRAMMATICAL COMPLEXITY AND ITS POSSIBLE
IMPLICATIONS FOR THEIR MODE OF SPREAD.
The question of how Indo-European family of languages came to occupy a
broad swathe of Europe and western Asia has long attracted discussion. The
actual range that the Indo-European family of languages had achieved by
early historical times is uncertain, but they were certainly present in
central and northern Europe, southeastern Europe, Anatolia and parts of the
Near and Middle East. Celtic, Germanic and Slavic migrations may have
provided a relatively late overlay of Indo European languages in parts of
western and northern Europe, though without written records of the
pre-existing languages it is impossible to say what widespread before then.
Migrations and conquest may likewise have carried Sanskrit and Tocharian
further eastwards shortly before early historical
times. While acknowledging that these identifiable movements of cultures
and peoples contributed to the later spread of the Indo-European languages,
scholars have long discussed the events before this time which might have
led to this group being present widely through central, northern,
south-eastern Europe and the Near and Middle East.
Hypotheses which have been put forward to explain how the Indo-European
language family became widespread include 1) spread by warlike cultures
conquering relatively passive farming populations (Gimbutas), 2) initial
spread of a 'population wave' of agriculturalists spreading across lands
only inhabited previously by hunter-gatherers (Renfrew), 3) recolonization
of uninhabited by a wave of hunter gatherers following extreme depopulating
climate events such as the Younger Dryas (12,000-11,000 ya) (Adams & Otte),
4) a trading language which became of widespread usage in Europe during
prehistory, among ethnically diverse groups of hunter-gatherers or early
farmers (Sherratt).
A notable feature of all the early forms of the Indo-European languages is
their grammatical compexity. Latin, Sanskrit, ancient Welsh and Irish,
ancient Greek, old church Slavonic, ancient Persian, and early Anglo-Saxon
are all far more complex in terms of the range of verb and noun inflections
than their modern-day descendant languages. This change has been in spite
of the increasing spread of literacy and institutions of learning which
might be expected to have preserved and promoted this original complexity
against any broader trend towards simplification. Similar trends towards
simplification have been found in other widespread languages, for example
Arabic (Semitic Language Family) and Mandarin (Sino-Tibetan Language
Family). The cause of this widespread trend towards simplification of
widespread languages has generally been agreed to be the influence of trade
and outside cultural influences, including both invasion and external
conquest. Non-native speakers of languages find grammatical complexity
confusing and are likely to develop their own simplified versions of
grammar. This might in turn influence the native speakers who live among
them, or trade with them frequently. The process of simplification might be
aided when closely similar languages (e.g. early Saxon and early Norweigan,
in England) are being used by those living in close proximity; emphasis is
placed on common word-stems, leaving behind the inflections. However, this
requires an initial splitting and divergence followed by renewed contact,
which seems unlikely to have occurred so systematically throughout the
ranges of so many different language groups; the predominant pattern of
influence from the history of the past 2000 years seems to have been
contact with outsiders speaking completely different languages, even from
different language families.
What might the implications of this be for our interpretation of the
prehistoric origin of Indo-European languages? The complexity that is found
in all Indo-European language branches recorded in their earliest forms,
and in every case to some extent lost in the descendant languages, shows
that it is a delicate feature, easily destroyed. It also suggests that
complexity was a primary feature of these languages; a characteristic of
the common ancestral language which was maintained as they spread out
across Europe and western Asia. For this complexity to have been maintained
at least initially at this common high level (to the point where it
survived almost intact in every branch of the language family up until less
than 2000 years ago) there must have been much more limited contact with
non-native speakers than was the case during the last 1500-2000 years.
This observation make help us to sort between the various hypotheses
concerning the spread of Indo-European languages. Hypothesis 4, of
Sherratt, that the Indo-European languages were essentially trading
languages, seems unlikely in this context. If they were spread through
trading, complexity would not have been a hallmark of these languages. It
is notable that English, which is more than any other a language of trade
and of medieval trading origin, is the most grammatically simple of all
Indo-European languages.
Similarly, the view that Indo-European languages were spread by a warrior
aristocracy (Hypothesis 1) and imposed on a conquered population does not
seem particularly tenable. A characteristic effect of conquest by a small
elite has been that creoles and pidgen languages develop among the native
population, losing a large part of the original complexity of the language.
Thus if these warriors did indeed spread the languages by conquest, they
must have killed most of the previous inhabitants of the areas they
conquered. Thus, the context of spread of these languages would appear to
be rather different from that envisaged by Gimbutas.
Expansion of a large farming population into a relative 'vacuum' inhabited
only by sparse populations of hunter-gatherers seems another plausible
mechanism by which grammatical complexity could be maintained. The
continuous influence of contact with hunter-gatherers, who existed in very
small numbers, would likely be small compared to the overwhelming
population 'wave' of farmers.
The hypothesis (2) that the initial spread of Indo-European languages
involved hunter-gatherers expanding into previously uninhabited terrain
(following the dramatic climate shifts known to have occurred repeatedly
during the last 20,000 years) also seems tenable.
Thus, consideration of the changing complexity of Indo-European languages
may shed some light on this subject. The 'trading language' mechanism of
Sherratt seems unlikely to have been important in spreading these languages
in prehistory. If warriors spread the languages they did so not through
conquest but through genocide. Alternatively, or in addition, the
Indo-European languages may have been spread by a large 'farming wave' of
population expanding into territory only sparsely inhabited by
hunter-gatherers, or a 'sparse wave' of hunter gatherers expanding into
uninhabited landscapes following large sudden climate shifts.