From: Jörg Rhiemeier
Message: 70553
Date: 2012-12-10
On Sunday 09 December 2012 23:50:29 Tavi wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
> wrote:
> > The speakers of PIE probably weren't nomads. PIE has words for
> > the house and its parts which are not particularly likely to
> > originally refer to tents, for agriculture and for keeping pigs,
> > which are unsuitable to pastoral nomadism.
>
> Contrarily to you, I don't think the IE lexicon comes from a single
> source, so words from the Dnubian farmers (e.g. 'plough') could coexists
> with others from Steppe shepherds (e.g. 'horse').
Certainly, some words in IE languages come from other sources than
PIE. But the substratum languages were very diverse and did not
form a single family, so a word that occurs in two very distant
IE languages (e.g., Sanskrit and Latin) *and* shows the known
regular sound correspondences must be inherited from PIE.
But the notion of regular sound correspondences appears to be
something you are adamantly refusing to wrap your mind around ;)
> > Of course, hardly
> > any archaeologist now still believes that the kurgans were built
> > by nomads.
>
> Possibly "agro-pastoralists" would be a better term for describing
> Kurgan people.
Yes.
> [...]
> > I wouldn't call it a "creolization". Late PIE was a morphologically
> > highly complex language about which one could say with only little
> > overstatement that "all verbs were irregular". Compare that to a
> > creole such as Bislama or Mauritian. It is a very different thing.
>
> Possibly "hybridization" would be a better term, and defenders of the
> Paleolithic Continuity Theory (PCT) use it throughly.
Why do you listen to those crackpots? The Paleolithic Continuity
Theory is nonsense (see my last post on why it is), and it does
not surprise the least that its proponents use the same kind of
intellectual contortions as you do in order to get around the#
evidence against their sectarian beliefs.
> > One can definitely say that the spread of IE was the establishment
> > of languages of a single origin onto a large area, by which means
> > ever.
>
> But this is only a *hypothesis*, not a proven fact.
It is a well-established hypothesis that has yielded many useful
answers to etymological questions. There are test cases such as
the Romance languages where the common ancestor is known, and the
ways languages change can be studied. All alternative hypotheses
have problems of various sorts, and none so far has been shown to
be capable of explaining the facts with fewer unproven assumptions
than the standard model.
> IMHO there's no way
> the IE family could be the result of a single linguistic event, whatever
> it might be.
Why not? Show us your evidence. Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
> > However, it is indeed the case that many words and probably
> > also phonological and grammatical patterns from the languages
> > previously spoken in the area found their ways into the individual
> > IE languages.
>
> I'd say "areas", in plural. This is precisely what I said Kurganic is a
> superstrate in many IE languages.
Surely, the area (or "areas") is large enough to accommodate many
unrelated families of substratum languages, and these have left
their marks on the individual IE languages. That has always been
my position in this debate; don't try battering open doors.
> [...]
> > Bullshit. The Anatolian languages differ from the rest of IE in
> > some important ways (hence the proposition of an Early PIE and a
> > Late PIE), but are clearly related to the rest of IE in basically
> > the same way as the latter languages are related to each other,
> > only a little more distantly.
>
> Sure, some of the isoglosses running through the IE family are shared by
> Anatolian, while others are not. I agree this points to a more distant
> relationship, but IMHO the dichotomy Early/Late PIE is a crude
> simplification, so to speak.
Your contortions only add unnecessary *complications*. Oh dear,
we have been through this several times, and we have achieved
*nothing*. We could go on forever, but we could just as well
stop now.
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