From: João Simões Lopes Filho
Message: 4544
Date: 2000-10-30
----- Original Message -----
From: Marc Verhaegen <marc.verhaegen@...>
To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Monday, October 30, 2000 3:10 PM
Subject: [tied] IE & linguistic complexity
> >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.
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