--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "ytielts" <ytielts@...> wrote:
> (1)
> What do you mean by the North European Pamela Anderson type.
Sorry, I was being facetious, I meant the blue-eyed, blond-haired
easily tanning type that is concentrated in Denmark and adjacent
areas. (It is probably for a reason that Pamela is called Anderson.)
> Is it equivalent to the Cro-Magnon type?
I've no idea and I doubt it. The Pamela type is pretty localized and
there is no reason to assume that it was much more widespread in the
past. In the absence of information to the contrary its origin will
have to be accounted for in local terms. Of course, skeleton-wise,
the Pamela type cannot be distinguished from other "robust" (as
distinct from "gracile") types that are sometimes called "Cro-
Magnon".
> ... Did the original Indo-European speakers
> have blonde hair, blue eyes and white skin or Did Nordic people
> create the language as they say on some websites.
Extremely unlikely. I suspect I can count myself fortunate in not
knowing those websites. The unfortunate thing about the Pamela type
is that it has been tainted with political agenda's too nasty to go
into here. That is a pity.
> Were all the
> original indo speakers blonde-haired, blue-eyed and white-skinned
or
> did they vary in these three counts?
Given the range of places where Proto-Indo-European is held to have
originated nowadays it seems safe to say that the idea that the
speakers belonged predominantly to the Pamela type is seriously at
variance with the current state of the problem. This can also be
expressed less politely.
> (2) You say that A very modest amount of information about Pamela
> language is retrievable in principle through the study of
substratum
> phenomena in Germanic (and possibly also Saami). Can you go in
> details please? Do you mean that some words in Germanic subfamily
> fall out of the indo? If it does, please give me some examples?
Well, we can all see that the Pamela people ended up speaking
Germanic (I'm not referrring to English here). In switching to an
Indo-European language these people must have done what other people
do under similar circumstances: they retained quite a bit of
information about their ancestral language, for instance words
referring to locally available foodstuffs. It is relatively easy to
make a list of Germanic words that have no convincing Indo-European
etymology. But that is only the beginning. It is very difficult to
make such lists yield credible information. The ancestral language of
the Pamela's may not be the only substratum language underlying
Germanic, so nothing is gained by ascribing every non-IE element of
Germanic to pre-Pamela. Yet it is almost impossible to get any
further. Recently scholars have started sorting such non-IE words
into groups sharing certain structural characteristics. In time that
may lead somewhere but at present this hasn't yielded much in the way
of solid results.
> (3)I do want to read some reliable books that well incorporate
> archaeology, linguistics with genetics.
So do I.
> Sometimes languages are not
> concerting with genes. However, I believe that languages mostly go
> with gene flows.
The problem is how "mostly" your "mostly" is intended to express.
Languages have a way of spreading to other populations, who spoke
other languages at earlier stages. Look at North America. What
happened there has happened often in the past, e.g. in the first
millennium in Europe. In the Roman empire the dialect of Rome spread
far and wide. That was not because original inhabitants of Rome
spread their genes, but because their language was adopted by people
who originally spoke different languages. In such cases, which are
frequent, the connection between language and "gene flow" becomes
highly indirect and I'm not at all enthusiastic about
anthropologists' (and archeologists') tendency to identify the two.
When Cavalli-Sforza started dabbling in linguistics just about the
first thing that happened was that Indo-European was identified with
the language of the earliest Europeans practicing food production.
That was the opposite of an advance.
The bottom line is that people can too easily shift to another
language (if sufficiently motivated) to count on the kind of God-
given stability you have in the case of gene flow. I commute to
Leiden in trains filled with perfect or near-perfect speakers of
Dutch who were born (or whose parents were born) in Turkey or
Marocco. Millions of blacks in the US speak English. Those are well-
documented people who came from western Africa now speaking a well-
documented language that originated in northern Germany or
thereabouts. And don't think for a moment that that is an atypical
situation and that that similar things did not happen in the case of
configurations that are less well documented.
Willem