Re: [tied] Re: Genetics and Renfrew's Model

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 10942
Date: 2001-11-03

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 -----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
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.