I completely agree with Miguel. Look at
Australia or the Pacific Coast of North America before the arrival of Europeans.
Elaborate social rituals, widespread bi- or multilingualism and even
long-distance trade do little to reduce linguistic diversity.
To be sure, neolithicisation "from below"
does not automatically lead to the appearance of a macroregional lingua franca
either. New Guinea, where agriculture developed thousands of years ago,
still hosts several language families and hundreds of individual
languages. Hence the "inflationary theory" -- the idea that the untypical
linguistic homogeneity of Northern Europe resulted from its _initial_
neolithicisation by the LBK people. If anybody was in a position to impose a
lingua franca that eventually replaced the innumerable languages, it was them.
(This of course doesn't mean that the hunter-gatherers were exterminated or
genetically engulfed by the farmers.)
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2001 3:03 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Genetics and Renfrew's Model
On Sat, 03 Nov 2001 03:33:20 -0000, markodegard@...
wrote:
>Farmers are into inheritance of land. Hunter-gatherers
(lox-eaters)
>are into social occasions to gather the bounty of Nature.
>Archaeologists are saying that Northern European farmers seem to be
>little (but more populous) enclaves surrounded by 'more primative'
>hunter-gatherers. These little enclaves became isolated linguistic
>islands, while the much more wide-ranging hunter-gatherers spoke a
>lingua franca.
I'm sorry, that's just not how it works. The
Mesolithic populations
of non-Mediterranean Europe must have spoken hundreds
of different
languages. There probably was widespread bilingualism, and
localized
lingua francas, but it's absolutely out of the question that there
was
a single "mesolithic lingua franca" from, say, the Netherlands
to
Poland.