Re: [tied] Does Koenraad Elst Meet Hock´s Challenge?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham
<richard.wordingham@...>" <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
> > On Tue, 10 Dec 2002 20:14:46 -0000, "Richard Wordingham
> > <richard.wordingham@...>" <richard.wordingham@...>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >Incidentally, why do the Anatolians need to have 'stayed behind

in

> the
> > >Balkans', rather than having stayed behind in Western Anatolia?
> >
> > Attractive though it is to let the Anatolian group stay behind in
> > Anatolia rather than somewhere in the Balkans, especially given

that

> > the Balkan Neolithic came from Anatolia in the first place (the
> > technology certainly, the people maybe), it does create an
> impossible
> > timeline problem. If Renfrew is right, and the homeland is in
> > Anatolia, the date of PIE must slip back at least two millennia
> > further into the past (to at least 7500 or 8000 BC), which is
> > stretching it too far.
>
> I wonder if that really is too far. How is the dating done? I

can't

> help thinking that having a large dialect continuum, with no
> significant foreign incursions, and perhaps no war, might slow down
> the divergence of PIE. (What does happen to dialect continuums?

Do

> they just split apart into languages of their own accord? The
> dialects can certaily evolve in parallel for a long time, and I
> believe changes can sweep through them.) One thing that has

bothered

> me is that although reconstructed PIE is rich in roots, it seems

very

> short of actual words. I suspect that would be one of the biggest
> problems in writing 'Teach Yourself Proto-Indo-European'.

Translated

> fables have a very small cast of animals - horse, sheep, dog and

wolf

> seem to be the prime actors.
>
> Richard.

Unfortunately, I'm an avid reader of sensationalist populist books on
archaeology and stuff. They like huge and enormous disasters in the
past, meteor impacts and such. Hypothetical question: if there had
been widespread destruction in an area, would someone move in fairly
rapidly and establish a fairly undifferentiated language area? Cf.
the expansion of the Slavs after the ravages of the Huns.

Also: a loose fact I don't know where to put: Why did all IE branches
except Hittite drop the laryngeals, leaving only traces in the
vowels? That's a fairly extensive change. The only other example I
can think of is Assyrian (in fact thar's what gave Møller the idea of
identifying Saussure's coefficients sonantiques with Semitic
laryngeals, no other AfroAsiatic language has dropped laryngeals, to
my knowledge) which made me think of Emmeline Plunkett's idea that
the Assyrians were a once IE-speaking people conquered by Southern
Semitic-speakers (since they on top of the Semitic gods had a certain
Assur (?< *asura)). So: was PIE, complete with laryngeals once
imposed on a population that couldn't or wouldn't pronounce the
laryngeals (please note the emotional mileage people also today can
get out of the epithet "guttural", used of a language)?

Torsten