Re: [tied] IE & linguistic complexity

The term "pre-PIE" is meaningless unles you can offer a linguistic definition for it. Reconstructable PIE, i.e. the ancestral language of the family, is what was spoken at the time of the primary split, and that isn't likely to have taken place as early as Renfrew suggests. Internal reconstruction within PIE may give us some insight into its earlier history, but its limitations are well known: for each PIE alternation there will typically be several imaginable scenarios that may have led to it.

If PIE resulted from a split-and-diverge process that had begun, say, in Anatolia before 7000 BC, then the root of the IE family tree would be a node in a larger phylogeny, and if we knew any non-IE outgroup belonging to the same extended family, we could attempt to reconstruct pre-PIE stages of the process on a comparative basis. "Tyrrhenian" may or may not represent such an outgroup; its tiny size, the poor documentation of Etruscan (not to mention "Lemnian" and Rhaetic) and the immense time depth between the putative "Proto-Indo-Tyrrhenian" node and historical Etruscan militate against a reliable comparative reconstruction.

If, on the other hand, PIE emerged from a rapid "punctuation" in a local linguistic area, terminating a long-lasting state of equilibrium (such an area may have originally covered the Balkans together with Anatolia and the entire Near East), the comparative method would be of little use in reconstructing its remoter ancestry, but comparison within the area would nevertheless reveal a regional "prototype" (consisting of shared diffusional traits) -- the sort of typological convergence that can be observed in Australia, South Africa or North America. This, rather than shared ancestry, may be what links PIE with Etruscan, and further with Semitic or Kartvelian.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Odegard

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, November 01, 2000 9:49 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] IE & linguistic complexity

As I currently think about it, Colin, Lord Renfrew of K. might have some of it right, in that the pre-PIEs likely inhabited Anatolia ca. 7000 BCE. But his big book was written before any of us knew about the Euxine event, or even about the 'in publication' bits about the climate and hydrology of the Euxine region ca. 5500 BCE. And the historical linguists tells us they were either up there somewhere from Kiev to Samara, or north of the Carpathians south of a line drawn by Berlin and Warsaw.

My book (EIEC) gives a map for LBK Linearbandkeramik Linear Band pottery. It's the Seine, from its mouth to the big bend of the Loire, to the Seine's headwaters, and thence the upper Danube into Middle Europe, ending approximately where the Northern Bug branches off from Warsaw.

LBK seems to the the earliest archaeological horizon this far north. The ice age kept people out of it before then.

It seems that Europe got quite warm ca 3500 BCE or earlier. It's as if a close, tight-knit linguistic community suddenly and peacefully moved northward into the newly warm northern climes. Or to say it another way, the linguistic community fell apart quite peacefully.

Then the world got cold again, ca. 3150 BCE (Oetzi gets covered by the glacier). And Greece and Thrace become habitable again (presumably because of increased rainfall, but maybe because they are into transhumance of goats and sheep).

Did Oetzi speak PIE?