From: Jörg Rhiemeier
Message: 70249
Date: 2012-10-23
On Tuesday 23 October 2012 02:02:04 Brian M. Scott wrote:
> At 5:14:04 PM on Monday, October 22, 2012, Tavi wrote:
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
> >
> > wrote:
> >
> >> 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.
Just that. And the "rest of IE" changed between that early split
and its final disintegration into the non-Anatolian IE languages.
The standard model describes Late PIE, i.e. the latest common
ancestor of the non-Anatolian IE languages, not perfectly but
aptly enough; Early PIE, the common ancestor of Late PIE and
Anatolian, was a quite similar language (it is only about 500 to
1000 years older than Late PIE), but different in some respects.
> >> If Indo-European was actually the outcome of "contact and
> >> replacement processes", one would expect this to show in
> >> numerous inconsistencies in the sound correspondences.
> >> Where are they? Granted, there are a few words which look
> >> "wrong" and are probably loanwords from other IE
> >> languages, but if Indo-European was a convergence area,
> >> such irregularities would have to be far more numerous,
> >> especially in the derivational and inflectional
> >> morphologies of the IE languages.
> >
> > As regarding morphology, there're some isoglosses such as
> > -r passive suffix, the augment, etc. There're also many
> > interesting phonetic isoglosses as regarding stops and the
> > so-called "laryngeals", denasalization of initial nasals,
> > an so on.
>
> A characteristically Tavi-esque non-answer, throwing around
> a lot of terminology without actually saying anything
> concrete. I believe that Jörg has had some experience of
> them in the past on the Zompist board, so it probably won't
> come as any surprise.
Indeed. I have seen many of these non-answers from Tavi on the
ZBB, the Nostratic-L mailing list, FrathWiki discussion pages
and in private e-mail.
Certainly, there are overlapping isoglosses in the IE family.
This is because before it finally broke up into distinct
languages, PIE was a language that extended over a large area
and consisted of many dialects through which innovations could
propagate (the "wave model"). Only later those dialects became
separate branches of Indo-European.
The family tree model and the wave model do not contradict each
other - they just apply to different stages in the process of
diversification of a language lineage.
> >> Nobody denies that most Indo-European languages contain a
> >> large number of lexemes that do not have reliable PIE
> >> etymologies and are thus likely to be loanwords from
> >> substratum languages, but that still does not make
> >> Indo-European a convergence area.
> >
> > There's no simple way the more than 2,000 "roots"
> > reconstructed by some IE-ists could belong to a single
> > (proto-)language.
>
> And your evidence for this unsupported opinion is?
Waiting for that evidence is about as useful as waiting for
Santa Claus, I wager. The 2000-something PIE roots follow a
coherent set of root structure constraints, which shows that
they were part of a *single* language, even if some of them
may have been borrowed from other languages in an earlier
stage.
On Tuesday 23 October 2012 12:02:36 Tavi wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <bm.brian@...> wrote:
> [...]
> > 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.
*Of course* it was different, in all these regards! Otherwise
it would be meaningless to talk about an earlier split.
> 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.
Rodríguez Adrados is pretty much in agreement with my own
thinking. What he calls "IE III" is what I call "Late PIE";
what he calls "IE II" is what I call "Early PIE"; what he calls
"IE I" is what I call "Proto-Europic", and it may have been the
ancestor of other languages besides IE, such as that of the
Linearbandkeramik culture which may have left traces in the Old
European Hydronymy (but I am digressing into paleolinguistic
speculations here - though unlike Tavi, I do not try to sell
them as "facts").
> 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
> <http://books.google.es/books?id=BAwzUADajUwC&printsec=frontcover&hl=ca&\
> source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> 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,
Led to the spread of several non-IE families into northern Europe.
> 2) The immigration of Near East farmers in the Neolithic,
> who introduced agriculture in Europe,
Controversial. The "Danubian" culture complex (Linearbandkeramik,
Vinča, Cucuteni-Trypillia etc.) is of uncertain origin, but it
does not resemble the Anatolian Neolithic much. My pet theory is
that these cultures were founded by refugees from the Black Sea
Flood (which, however, is controversial). In the Mediterranean,
at least, Neolithic agriculture seems to have spread by cultural
influence without large-scale migrations, and we thus have lots
of unrelated linguistic stocks, of which Basque and the three
Caucasian stocks have survived until today.
> and 3) The Kurgan invasions of
> nomadic pastoralists from the Pontic Steppes.
"Kurgan culture" is an obsolete cover term for a whole bunch of
different Late Neolithic/Chalkolithic cultures of the steppes
which are characterized by a particular type of grave sites,
and do not necessarily form a linguistic unit. *One* of these
cultures, the Sredny Stog culture (in Ukraine ca. 4000 BC), may
have been the Early PIE speakers, and a daughter culture thereof,
the Yamna culture (in Ukraine and southern Russia ca. 3200 BC),
Late PIE.
Certainly, many loanwords from the Mesolithic and Neolithic
languages ended up in the attested IE languages in the process
of the latter replacing the former. You are battering an open
door here. Yet, in their grammatical structures and the
majority of their lexemes, the IE languages show such a degree
of coherence that their descent from a single common ancestor
remains the most plausible hypothesis. I admit that many
Indo-Europeanists sweep the residue away into a dustbin labeled
"Uncertain etymologies", while this "debris" may contain valuable
information about the lost languages of pre-IE Europe.
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