GLEN WRITES:
<<As Steve rants about his precious, pet theory, I still don't hear any
logical reasons to SUPPORT IE or pre-IE in Anatolia yet.....An ignorant
statement, not just because Hattic is really autochthonous but because it
DOES matter to what is being said about pre-IE....You're living in a fantasy,
Steve. I wish you'd wake up and smell the overwhelming evidence against you.>>
Glen, I think your emotions may just be getting the better of you a little
bit.
What do you say that, with mutual respect, we just take a deep breath, relax
and consider things in a calm manner
GLEN WROTE:
<<So now that we got that straightened out, what you're fighting for, I am
guessing, is to have some pre-IE stage, between 7500 and 4000 BCE, in
Anatolia.>>
Let me rephrase that: what I'm saying is that there doesn't seem to be enough
information to establish any probabilities of any real significance with
regard to the year 7500BC.
GLEN WROTE:
<<In itself, it's immediately inane because we have IE going in and out of
Anatolia like a yoyo. It's not an economical solution at all.>>
Now, don't react. Let's just look at what you are saying. Does it make sense
to say that IE came in and and out of Anatolia aka Asia Minor like a yo-yo.
The answer may be in what we see historically in the same region. Many IE
languages do enter Anatolia returning to where there were IE languages before
(e.g., Phrygian, Greek, Persian, Celtic, Slavic, Kurdish, Armenian, etc.) and
some will actually use Anatolia to go elsewhere (e.g., the Ionian colonies in
the western Mediterranean). We do see historically also languages reentering
territory they have been absent from (e.g., a good part of the area of modern
Germany was in theory Germanic speaking in 1AD, Slavic speaking at the
beginning of the middle ages and again Germanic speaking today.)
Now, as a practical matter, what would prevent IE from returning to Anatolia?
Would for example the pre-Hittites have said, "no, our pre-proto-language
was already there 4000 years ago, we've got to go somewhere else?" It may be
economical if they didn't, they could have gone somewhere where the IE family
of languages never went before. But it doesn't seem likely that they would
even know where IE languages were before or that they even knew what an IE
language was.
(One aspect of Alex's "wave effect" analogy is that when a wave meets the
slightest resistance going outward, it will rebound and cross the center
again. In fact contained waves, will rebound and cross the center many
times.)
It may also be worthwhile remembering that the mouth of the Danube is about
250 miles from Anatolia. -- a little bit bigger than the length of
Cheasapeake Bay in the States. As far as Cheasapeake Bay goes, whole tribes
made that length of a journey back and forth every year just to take
advantage of the migratory bird season. And it has been well demonstrated
that the sea-faring mesolithic trade in obsidian in central Mediterranean
already could reach 500 miles and the neolithic trade could reach much
farther. So at least as far as travelling to occupy a piece of sparsely
inhabited Anatolia in say 3500BC, it wouldn't seem to take that much.
Given the above, I'm sure you can understand how reasonable persons may
differ about your premise that language families can never return to an
origin location.
GLEN ALSO WROTE:
<<Besides the yoyo problem, I've already explained to you that there are
connections between IE and Uralic that evidently stem back to something
further back than 4000 BCE since both Uralic and IE are of the same date...
To say that a pre-IE was in Anatolia 7500 BCE automatically implies that
Uralic was also from Anatolia.>>
Consider an alternative explanation. That any genetic relation between pre-IE
and pre-Uralic might point to an ancestor that was located a bit south of
northern Europe where Uralic later was located. As far as 4000BC, consider
that neolithic had already been on the Danube for some time by then and that
the "connections" reflect the contact of the neolithic in the north.
<<IE couldn't possibly have started spreading into Europe until around 4500
BCE, yet something evidently stopped it too from going west from Anatolia for
so long!>>
Of course, about this point, reasonable people may differ. I do not see why
forms of IE could not have been spreading in Europe or even in a fair part of
Europe well before 4500BC. Choosing a date like 4500BC is of course dependent
on some kind of measurement and I am not sure what you are using to arrive at
that date, but because I am inclined to connect the spread of IE to the
spread of neoliticization in most of Europe, I have no problem with an
earlier date.
As far as 7500BC is concerned, the date is not arbitrary. It is roughly
based on the time the human food production first began to spread in Anatolia
-- the region closest to the point of first neolithicization in Europe. It
may be that pre-IE was never there, but this fact one of the few links
identifiable from that period.
In fact, it did take about 2000 years for food production economies to first
develop and spread to a large part of Europe, especially given the difference
in conditions and flora and fauna available for domestication. A relevant
point is that "they" were not in the business of spreading a language, but
rather of living and making a living. So the spread of IE languages as an
objective may have been the last thing on their minds.
Glen, however languages may have spread before the neolithic, there are good
reasons to think that food production (vs foraging/hunting/gathering) had a
strong effect on how languages spread afterwards.
One reason you mention in your post to John:<<Let's face it. Farmers were
baby machines. They were spitting them out left and right. Foragers had a
baby or two -- Any more would slow them down. They'd have to leave the third
in the woods.>> The other is that quite plainly food production creates a
strong economic impetus for gatherers to socially integrate into the new
economy and favors a change in language.
Let me recommend enthusiastically that you give a read to Jared Diamond
"Guns, Germs and Steel" (1999), where he gives a good deal of documentation
to the premise that "Most [language] expansions appear to be attributable to
the advantages that the speakers of ancestral languages, belonging to
food-producing societies, held over hunter-gatherers." (p. 368). Although
this thinking has not had a deep influence on IE theory yet, it has become
the most accepted explanation I believe with regard to the major languages in
Asia, Africa and the Americas.
I hope this attempt at being calm and rational in this dialog will improve
the quality of our correspondence and the atmosphere on this list. :)
Steve