--- In cybalist@..., "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...> quoted:
>>> "Das Baskischen (Euskera bzw.
Euskara genannt) gehört nicht zur indogermanischen Sprachfamilie
und
gilt als die älteste lebende Sprache Europas."
<Snip>
> Richard:
> >But that is simply based on the assumptions that Uralic and IE are
> >not native to Europe!
>
gLeN wrote:
> I'm confused by this statement.
>
> Ultimately Uralic and IE languages _aren't_ native to Europe. At
> the very least, certainly not native of Western Europe where the
Vasconic
> speaking population have been recorded for thousands of years (cf.
> Aquitanian).
Richard writes:
1. Europe goes a long way East!
2. Georgian is as old as Basque, perhaps older. I forgot it and its
neighbours.
3. Piotr Giasowski for one favours a Balkan homeland for IE.
gLeN wrote:
> As for the genes debate, I'm just so tired of people intertwining
genetics with linguistics as if the two must somehow completely
correlate. You people still don't get it, do you? I'm just not
getting through to you people, am I?
Richard writes:
Renfrew's theory on the spread of IE is appealing in its simplicity
and its European consequence - a vast dialect cluster that eventually
broke up. (The spread of IE in India and in the Mediterranean lands
remain complex stories.)
If culture and people spread together, then one can expect language
to move with them. If only the culture spreads, then language need
not spread with it. This makes the genetic background interesting.
I studied the paper
(
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~macaulay/papers/richards_2000.pdf) over
the weekend. It now actually looks as though some of the Europeans
picked up farming quickly, rather than being steadily assimilated.
According to Table 5 (which uses an analysis, 'fs' in the paper's
jargon, that severely underestimates the Neolithic contribution, as
may be seen from Table 4) the proportion of the population deriving
from the Neolithic immigrants is very similar in 'South East', 'North
East', 'North Central' and 'North West' Europe. It seems to me as
though a native group adopted farming and then spread through much of
Europe much as Renfrew envisaged the descendants of Anatolian farmers
(and later a few native groups) spreading. (The native group seems
to have incorporated a fair number of immigrants.)
I can see some different explanations of the results, but I don't
find them very convincing:
(a) The population of these continental regions has subsequently been
thoroughly intermixed.
(b) The neolithic immigrants spread rapidly through the best farming
lands of much of Europe, but were absorbed by the locals before they
dominated the total population of any region. (In his book, Renfrew
suggests a farming population density 50 times greater than the
hunter-gatherer population.)
This model of a native group adopting farming early and then
spreading through much of Europe would make IE a native European
language family, with a Balkan or Greek urheimat! The disadvantage
of this model is that it then requires a later migration to establish
the Anatolian languages. (One might hypothesise a long-lasting -
2,000+ years - Mesolithic dialect cluster connecting pre-Anatolian in
Turkey to a European non-Anatolian IE dispersal centre. This would
again make IE an immigrant language group. However, the paper found
little good evidence for Mesolithic immigration. Also, what splits a
dialect cluster into independent languages?)
Of course, before leaping to conclusions:
(a) it would be better to wait for the Y-chromosome study that the
paper says is in progress; and
(b) one ought to look at the raw data for the paper. (The paper
gives the URL for it.) The paper makes it clear that extracting
numbers from the genetic data was not easy - the Neolithic immigrants
were similar to previous immigrants!
As to Finno-Ugrian, has anyone answered Piotr's question about
substrates in Scandinavian Finno-Ugrian? (I think the question of
the Finno-Ugrian homeland probably belongs with the Nostratic group!)
Regards,
Richard.