From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 19872
Date: 2003-03-16
----- Original Message -----
From: <x99lynx@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2003 7:45 AM
Subject: [tied] Dating PIE's Ancestors (Piotr vs Renfrew)
> Renfrew often enough does not even admit the existence of a language called proto-indo-european. So it is inaccurate to say that he places such a language in the Fertile Crescent.
Steve,
Where does he deny it? He uses the term "Proto-Indo-European" often enough without qualifying it in any way, and some of his dispersal scenarios (see _Archaeology and Language_, subchapter 8.5) make it clear that he treats Anatolia as _the_ PIE homeland rather than a pre-PIE pre-homeland. To quote Renfrew himself ("Nostratic as a Linguistic Macrofamily", 1999): "... the Proto-Indo-European homeland would be located in Central Anatolia, around 7000 BC". I plead innocent of twisting his words.
> Renfrew needs no such deep date for *PIE, because he is (in most of what he says) not placing PIE - the linguistic reconstructed language - but rather placing the ORIGINS of indo-european languages. Those origins would have happened before PIE, unless PIE dropped out of the sky.
> Since PIE -- wherever it was -- did not just drop out of the sky, we can assume that it had ancestors. If you are saying that the ancestors of PIE could not have come out of Anatolia, I'm going to have to ask why?
_I'm_ not saying that. I have no idea at present where the linguistic ancestors of PIE came from (apart from being fairly sure that they ultimately came from Africa, but that's a much higher order of magnitude in our timescales). _Perhaps_ they came from Anatolia, but there is no convincing evidence to support such a claim.
> And again, how would linguistics alone help Renfrew -- or anyone for that matter -- in deciding whether an ancestor of PIE was in Anatolia in 7500 BC? Or even how French got to Canada, for that matter.
If any of the long-range proposals involving IE turns out to be more than a fringe hypothesis, that will probably have a bearing on the question (e.g. if Uralic were shown to be the closest known relative of IE, that would have different implications from showing IE to be closely related to Sumerian). Of course linguistics alone does not offer the evidence needed to pinpoint a protolanguage geographically, but neither does any other discipline _without_ linguistics. You have to use the combined interdisciplinary data, looking for correlations. It's also quite possible that your question simply cannot be decided.
Piotr