Re: The PCT of Indo-European origins

From: Francesco Brighenti
Message: 37080
Date: 2005-04-11

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
wrote [Re: the "Paleolithic Continuity Theory on Indo-European
Origins" website at

http://www.continuitas.com/index.html ]:

> Of course this completely static view of general history
contradicts > what we know from _historical_ sources. There was no
Anglo-Saxon > colonisation of Great Britain, because Great Britain
has been partly > Germanic-speaking since time immemorial (4.5c),
right? There have > "always" been Slavs in the Balkans (4.5e),
right? The fact that the > former Roman Empire is largely Romance-
speaking is just coincidence -- it was "Italoid" since the
Palaolithic (4.5d), right? Why doesn't the > author go the whole
hog? Perhaps Pre-Columbian North America was also > part of the
Germanic area and the rest of the New World has been Italoid
> since the first Proto-Hispanics came over from Asia during the
> Pleistocene? But why propose _any_ migrations at all? The most
> parsimonious hypothesis is that we were all created in situ and
haven't > moved at all. Sorry, but that stuff isn't worth anyone's
time.

Dear Piotr,

Perhaps that stuff isn't worth anyone's time, but yet it is
necessary to point out that the founder of the linguistic school in
question is a respected linguist who has his own followers within
the linguistic academia.

The Italian linguist Mario Alinei is Professor Emeritus at the
University of Utrecht, where he taught from 1959 to 1987. He is the
founder and editor of the Italian journal _Quaderni di semantica_.
Until recently he was president of _Atlas Linguarum Europae_ (ALE)
at UNESCO. Some of his main linguistic contributions which were
instrumental in creating the Paleolithic Continuity Theory (PCT)
were those about the tendency toward conservation of languages as
opposed to the theories of "biological laws" of linguistic change
and the method of lexical self-dating. Alinei and his work group
have basically argued that the distribution of the IE family of
languages is a reflex of the initial Paleolithic settlement of Homo
sapiens in Eurasia from Africa.

Here are the URLs of some of Prof. Alinei's online articles:

http://www.continuitas.com/invasionless.pdf
http://www.continuitas.com/towards_generalised.pdf
http://www.continuitas.com/interdisciplinary.pdf
http://www.continuitas.com/problem_dating.pdf
http://www.continuitas.com/merits_limits.pdf
http://www.continuitas.com/conservation_change.pdf

Has Alinei's PCT ever been discussed on the cybalist before?

Kindest regards,
Francesco Brighenti