Richard writes, for the third time:
Someone thought the statement "Das Baskischen (Euskera bzw.
Euskara genannt) gehört nicht zur indogermanischen Sprachfamilie
und
gilt als die älteste lebende Sprache Europas." in the magazine
summary was interesting
Richard wrote:
2. Georgian is as old as Basque, perhaps older. I forgot it and its
neighbours.
gLeN wrote:
"Older" in what sense? And what's your point there?
Richard writes:
My main point is simply, "Never believe what you read in the
newspaper". (A journalist is often in too much of a hurry to get the
full story.) A subsidiary point is that Basque is NOT the only
member of a very long-established extant language group in Europe.
"Older" is a dubious concept, as I expect you [gLeN] know. Gergian
certainly has a longer written history than Basque. That region may
also have been home to the Kartvelian group (which contains Gerogian)
and its geographical neighbours for a very long time. (Sorry to be
long-winded - I can't remember the circumlocution for the C-word, as
in 'NEC'.) I suspect it may have been inhabited by modern humans
earlier than Western Europe.
Richard wrote:
3. Piotr Giasowski for one favours a Balkan homeland for IE.
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!
gLeN wrote:
Well, then we are redefining native according to European
borders then. They would not be native to Western Europe.
Even so, how long does someone have to be in a region
before they are "native".
Richard writes:
Until there is nowhere else felt to have a claim to be home! Native
is a usually a relative word.
Richard wrote:
Also, what splits a dialect cluster into independent languages?
gLeN wrote:
A mixture of laziness, imperfection, seperation and time.
Richard writes:
Physical separation (e.g. by another language, or an infrequently
traversed barrier) plus time will do it. But I do not think physical
separation is necessary.
I am not sure how laziness and imperfection come into it, unless you
are referring to linguistic drift. But I do not think linguistic
drift would split a village! The Indic languages of 'village India'
have been claimed as a dialect cluster although the regional
languages are not mutually comprehensible.
Richard wrote:
The paper makes it clear that extracting numbers from the genetic
data was not easy - the Neolithic immigrants were similar to previous
immigrants!
gLeN asked:
Explain "previous immigrants"?
Richard writes:
For details, see
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~macaulay/papers/richards_2000.pdf p6 (of
PDF document - p1256 in the jourmal). The paper posits five
concentrated waves of incomers:
Original settlement by human settlement (EUP, c. 45kYBP)
Middle Upper Paleolithic settlement (MUP, c. 26kYBP)
Late Upper Paleolithic settlement (LUP, c. 14.5kYBP)
Mesolithic settlement, c. 11.5kYBP
Neolithic settlement, c. 9kYBP
The middle three are based on climate changes. The paper says that
there is little evidence that a Mesolithic sttlement actually
occurred.
The settlers are assumed to have come from the Near East, for which
several definitions are used, apparently without much effect on the
conclusions. The smaller area is the fertile crescent; the larger
area includes the Caucasus, Turkey and, for some reason, Egypt.
Re-expansions within Europe would be included in the original waves.
Mitochondrial haplotype H first entered in the MUP wave and was also
borne by a large proportion of the Neolithic wave. (I don't know how
significant it was in the LUP wave.) This significantly complicated
the analysis. Some members MIGHT be interested in what the paper has
to say about haplotype T. (The paper might be of some interest to
Nostraticists, but remember that experts have had difficulty in
interpreting the data! Remember all the other caveats about genetics
and language!)
Richard.