Re: Divergence vs. convergence (was: Witzel and Sautsutras)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <bm.brian@...> wrote:

>
> > > Sanskrit is one of the most conservative IE languages to
> > > be sure, but its conservatism should not be overrated,
> > > and the history of the standard model of PIE is a history
> > > of emancipation from the Sanskrit model - more and more
> > > features of Sanskrit were recognized as innovations of
> > > the Indic branch. And now it turns out that we have to
> > > posit a quite different Early PIE to account for the
> > > divergent features of Anatolian.
>
> > Not only "earlier" (in diachronical terms) but also
> > "diverse" (in diatopical terms). Thus we've got (al
> > least) two different "PIE"s. In my own model, the IE
> > family is the result of the superimposition of several
> > (proto-)languages due to contact and replacement
> > processes over millenia. The classical genealogical tree
> > model is simply inadequate.
>
> > > Would you mind giving evidence for that? There are
> > > well-established regular sound correspondences linking
> > > the various Indo-European languages with each other, and
> > > the best way of accounting for them is to posit a common
> > > ancestor language that gradually diversified and broke
> > > apart.
> >
> > You're contradicting yourself, as you previously said that
> > "we have to posit a quite different Early PIE to account
> > for the divergent features of Anatolian". So you're
> > implictly recognizing a single proto-language doesn't work
> > at all.
>
> Nonsense. He's simply arguing for an early split between Anatolian and the rest of IE.
>

I'm afraid this is an over-simplification. Not only the protolanguage from which Anatolian "split" is earlier, but also different (in morphology, lexicon, etc.) from the "late" PIE from which Indic (Sanskrit) and other languages are supposed to derive. Other isoglosses across non-Anatolian IE lead to scholars such as Rodríguez Adrados to propose a series of splits and branchings, which IMHO is better than the traditional tree model but still inadequate.

In my own view, which is closer to the of the Spanish scholar Francisco Villar (a former disciple of R. Adrados), who has studied the ancient toponymy and hydronymy of Europe and SW Asia (I'd recommed his last book to skepticals), the IE family isn't the result of the spread of a single (proto-)language at a rather recent time (Chalcolithic-Bronze Age) but rather to a series of language  spreads and contact/replacement processes over many millenia: 1) The repopulation of Europe from the Ice Age refuges in the Mesolithic, 2) The immigration of Near East farmers in the Neolithic, who introduced agriculture in Europe, and 3) The Kurgan invasions of nomadic pastoralists from the Pontic Steppes.