Re: [tied] IE & linguistic complexity

I think a time depth of 11 or 12 millennia is implausible. If the expansion and primary splits of IE had taken place that early, "Indoeuropia" would now look rather like N America, with many small families of vague affiliations, whose shared traits of genetic and areal origin would be difficult to disentangle. We would have things like widespread regional vocabulary and typological similarities, but reconstructing a protolanguage or a neatly articulated family tree would prove a hopeless task. The pattern that actually occurs suggests a more recent expansion, with convergence effects well visible but not strong enough to obscure genetic relationships.

Hypothesis 3 gives rise to a number of questions (I ignore those related to linguistic palaeontology, like the horse-and-cart argument, as too easy to counter). First, what gave just one linguistic community of hunter-gatherers so much material advantage over other such groups that it should have spread over vast areas of Eurasia apparently uncontested? (After all the region in question, as opposed e.g. to Australia, has alway had a number of entry points.) Second, by what miracle did the descendants of those pioneers manage to maintain their linguistic identity with the advent of Neolithic farming -- not just in isolated pockets, like the speakers of Basque, but *everywhere*?

Hypothesis 2 avoids such pitfalls and that's why I prefer it, though unlike Renfrew I see no good reason to move PIE all the way back to Anatolia. A Danubian homeland with the Linear Pottery colonists providing the human material for the "population wave" would be just fine, as far as I'm concerned. The fact that PIE was a language of considerable grammatical complexity would square best with its original position as a member of a rather old and well-established dialectal network in "equilibrium mode", as Dixon ("The Rise and Fall of Languages") puts it, disturbed and fragmented but not completely destroyed in the transition to the early Neolithic. The subsequent simplification of the daughter languages would have resulted from spread and contact effects, as the author (Jonathan Adams, I presume) correctly remarks.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: Marc Verhaegen

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Monday, October 30, 2000 6:10 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.