--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "matrix_blues" <matrix_blues@...> wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@> wrote:
>
> > As far as I am concerned, Indo-European was not the language of
> > first farmers, but of conquerors. It might be an exception
> > in this respect among the language families in the world.
>
> Could you elaborate on this thought?
Before the arrival of agriculture, the linguistic language was similar
to that of New Guinea or pre-Colombian America: many hunter-gatherer
tribes, each with its own language. Whichever tribe picked up the
agricultural technology first gained the upper hand on their
neighbors, they were superior in number and resources and spread their
language, which soon fell into several dialects, over a large area.
This is why so many words of agricultural technology have cognates in
the separate language families (they came with the technology) and why
reconstructing proto-languages beyond the individual families is so
hard: agriculture has been spreading basically since the last ice age,
which provides a relatively low upper time limit (approx. 10-12.000
yrs) on the proto-language of the individual families. With respect to
proto-proto-languages, no such limit applies, in principle the
ancestors of the individual families could have split up at any time
since the exodus from Africa, or even before.
Come to think of it Uralic (Finno-Ugrian), is another exception.
Torsten