NEW GUINEA AND ANATOLIA IN 7500BC

From: x99lynx@...
Message: 20126
Date: 2003-03-21

I wrote:
> Anatolia is larger in size than New Guinea where over 30,000
> languages were spoken by different hunter-gatherers group (which is
> what Hattic and Hurro-Urartian would have been in 7500BC). Hattic
> and Hurro-Urartian does NOT eliminate the presence of IE.

John <jdcroft@...> (Thu Mar 20, 2003  5:07 pm) replied:
<<Steve, you are wrong on two counts. New Guinea first of all did not have
30,000 languages. Instead, on last count it had something like 736 different
languages in Papua New Guinea, and a smaller number on the Irian Jaya side of
the border, so you can conclude that there may have been 1,100-1,300
languages, maximum.>>

John -
Your Point #1:
You're absolutely right. I don't know where I got 30,000 from - ridiculous.

HOWEVER, if you remember my point, 1,100 languages in an area smaller than
the size of Anatolia is much more than enough. Three languages would be all
I need.

If there is room enough for 1,100 languages in New Guinea, there was room
enough for some form of Pre-IE in Anatolia in 7500BC. (Again, I am not
saying it was there. I'm just saying Glen has NO way of knowing it wasn't.)

John also wrote:
<<Secondly while there were some cultures that had hunting as a part of their
life style, 90% of Papua New Guineans were subsistence gardeners, growing
sago, taro, bananas, or sweat poptato, or a mixed stable of 2 or more of
these crops.>>

For a contrary view, see Thomas N. Headland, "Hunter-Gatherer Revisionism and
New Guinea Foragers: A Discussant's Comment" 90th Annual Meeting of the
American Anthropological Association, Chicago 1991. It is argued that this
"subsistence gardening" is in fact well below subsistence and merely
supplemental and that these peoples's economy and lifestyle are firmly based
in foraging. (not hunting) Slash-and-burn and other self-replenishing forms
of farming/gardening are considered in some anthropological circles as
transitional between food gathering and food production.

BUT in any case, I don't think that anyone believes this diversity in
language was caused by subsistence gardening, so I would think it would have
existed, at least to some degree, before subsistence gardening.

A standard anthropological explanation for the enormous number of languages
in New Guinea is the absence of markets and market networks that would have
canceled the isolation of these groups. We really do not have evidence of
markets in the pure mesolithic (versus say the hybrid economies of the
American Plains Indians) so the condition may have mirrored in the situation
in Anatolia in 7500BC. And there may have been, if not a thousand, then
hundreds of languages there at that time.

JOHN ALSO WROTE:
<<To try to draw linguistic lessons for other parts of the world, given the
diversity selecting and rate of linguistic evolution found in New Guinea, is
not a valid approach.>>

What, you also know what "the diversity selecting and linguistic evolution"
was in Anatolia in 7500BC? We don't even know what language was being spoken
in Crete in 2500BC. If the human population in Anatolia in 7500BC had been
there for, say, the prior 10,000 years, why couldn't they have developed a
large amount of local diversity? I'm told that languages are becoming
extinct at a much higher rate than new ones are being born. Extrapolate from
that there once was a great many more languages around.

I WROTE:
> Only a single Spanish dialectic group is centered in Spain. The
> remainder of Spanish is found elsewhere. That should tell you that
> Spanish must have come to Spain from somewhere else, possibly
> Argentina.

JOHN WROTE:
<<Steve, I know you are being facetious here, but there is more than one
Romance language in Spain.>>

Glen said "dialectic group", whatever that means. Hittite, Luwian, Lykian
(and while I'm at it let me throw in Phrygian and Lydian) were certainly
different IE languages and not dialects, just as much as Castilian, Catalan,
etc.

<<Catalan shows a close fraternal affinity to Castilian Spanish, as does
Galician - with three related languages in Spain and one in Latin America -
one could conclude that Spainish evolved in Iberia and spread to Argentina.>>

So you have three related languages in Anatolian, and the other branch of
*PIE elsewhere. If you give Spanish in Latin America (and the Phillipines)
enough time, it should become as splintered as "non-Anatolian PIE" after it
left Anatolia.

<<The same applies to Anatolia and PIE.>>

What applies to Anatolia and PIE? Or do you have a long-ranger crystal ball
too? Better get it out on the market before Glen starts selling his.:)

As I said most current IE trees has "Anatolian IE" branching off FIRST from
*PIE. Presumably before the branch off, both branches were in roughly the
same place.
Where that place was therefore can't have anything to do with the later
geographic dispersal of IE languages. Just as Spain is not at the
geographical center of all Spanish speakers to be the point of origin,
Anatolia does not need to be at the center of all IE speakers to be the point
of origin.

The only thing that says that pre-IE was outside of Anatolia is
paleolinguistics -- which is a highly dubious technique in general -- and
especially at 7500BC.

And if you are equating the one of the languages in Spain to Uralic, etc.,
I'll remind you that you don't know where Uralic was in 7500BC, either.

Steve