Piotr wrote:
>I can't see how the Indo-Europeans in general could be credited with
exceptional warlikeness ...
"P&G" <petegray@...> replied:
<<Only because they won.>>
Well, of course, if they lost, we wouldn't have heard about it either.
BTW, for what it's worth, most of the messages on this board are in English,
often by non-native speakers who handle the language quite adroitly. I don't
remember the US Marines landing in either Poland or Denmark. So as far as
the "spread of a language" goes, there are certainly other motivating factors
than military operations. Most Americans are descended from people who did
not speak English as their native tongue 200 years ago. The vast majority
were not forced by the US military to make English their native tongue. The
language spread to them for better reasons - often economic ones.
"P&G" <petegray@...> also wrote
<<My real point is that I find it hard to imagine that the spread of IE
languages is due to anything in the nature of the languages. Or maybe coping
with grammatical gender prepares you to conquer the world....>>
See, again, I think this is underestimating the full power of language.
Languages carry more information then gender, case and tense. Much more.
Judging the content early IE languages might have carried is not limited to
structural features. This list, for example, is not an exercise in simple
roots and endings or grammar. There is a huge flow of information going on
that may be facilitated by structure, but that structure is totally
subservient to the message.
Language can store huge amounts of intricate information. And this storage
is not lexical in the sense of one word at a time. We're dealing with words
intermeshing into concepts. The scientists at Mission Control were able to
"talk" the Apollo 13 crew through building a carbon dioxide scrubber without
any visual contact, because the words carried concepts, including totally
invisible ones like carbon dioxide. If the concepts were not already in the
language, this could not have happened.
The power of early IE may have been in carrying concepts that were not
available in the myriad of local languages that may have dotted the
mesolithic landscape (in the manner of a New Guinean scenario). And because
these concepts were not merely lexical, it might have been a lot easier to
learn the new language than invent a whole body of analogous terminology in a
local tongue or just borrow a lot of words.
This idea is particularly relevant when one considers one thing that happend
when food production (versus food gathering) was introduced into Europe. And
that was the creation of markets.
There is very little evidence of trade in mesolithic Europe. There is really
no evidence of surpluses or food storage.
But once the neolithic arrives, we begin to see the long distance movement of
materials and products, and the arrival of clear indications of storage
(e.g., LBK vats and grain-storing pottery.) Even remaining mesolithic
settlement locations shift towards neolithic areas. Cattle bones appear in
mesolithic areas apparently before cattle are being raised there. Trade is
everywhere. Which means that communication was occuring on a regular basis
between a wide range of a continent and a half of isolated groups of former
hunter/gatherers who had little economic need to understand each other in the
previous 5000 odd years of mesolithic life.
The coming of food production -- dirt farming and animal breeding -- was a
gigantic change in the way humans lived and how they lived with one another.
Not until modern times would language carry so much new and revolutionary
information. And not until modern times would there be such a strong need
for a common language.
Steve