From: Jörg Rhiemeier
Message: 70569
Date: 2012-12-11
On Tuesday 11 December 2012 01:55:12 Bhrihskwobhloukstroy wrote:
> 2012/12/10, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>:
> (...)
>
> > What excludes it is the fact that words pertaining to farming,
> > wheeled vehicles and metals can be reconstructed for PIE.
> > *All* of these things were utterly unknown 40,000 years ago,
> > so you get an egregious anachronism. What did *h2arh3trom,
> > *kWekWlos and *h2ayes mean in the Paleolithic? These words
> > yield a _terminus post quem_ at about 4,000 BC, when the wheel
> > was invented and metalworking began in Europe (farming was
> > earlier, though, but not earlier in Europe than 6,500 BC).
> >
> > Also, it is hardly plausible that the rate of linguistic change
> > rises by a factor of about 10 in the very moment in history
> > when the relevant languages are first put to writing. Just
> > consider how similar Sanskrit and Latin were about 2,000 years
> > ago, and how different Hindi and French are now, only a puny
> > 2,000 years later. Sanskrit and Latin cannot be separated by
> > 40,000 years of independent development!
> >
> > --
>
> The rate of linguistic change can be different and differently
> vary according to the level of analysis.
Sure, it is not constant - this has brought down glottochronology,
after all. But we are dealing with about 40,000 years from the
first peopling of Europe to the first written attestations of the
IE languages vs. about 2,000 to 3,000 years from the first written
attestations to today, and that requires a change in the rate of
linguistic change that is simply ridiculous.
> It's apparent that
> reconstructable phonology has had an impressive rising of its rate of
> change in the latest millennia (at least up to the Middle Ages
> included).
It only appears like that as long one assumes that PIE was many
times older than the classical IE languages. If you assume that
PIE was only about 5,000 to 6,000 years old, the apparent rise of
rate of change disappears. Your assumption that PIE was 40,000
years old went into the input of your reason, so any attempt to
use this as an argument for paleolithic continuity is circular.
> On the contrary, lexical change doesn't exhibit a
> comparable variation. Phonological differentiation inside IE classes
> is greater and much more complex than *just* between IE classes;
> lexical differentiation inside IE classes is minimal if compared to
> the one between IE classes.
> What is highly probable is that IE classes had the same
> reconstructible phonological system immediately before their first
> attestation; that the huge lexical differentiation from each other
> took place in just the same short period would be even stranger than
> continuity from Palaeolithic.
That does not make sense because it violates the uniformity
principle. You assume that the ways languages change have
changed qualitatively a few thousand years before the oldest
written attestations, which is extremely unlikely.
> Anyway, in a idasystem with the same phonological inventory every
> loanword, especially as long as important cultural words like
> *h2arh3trom, *kWekWlos and *h2ayes are concerned, would be completely
> indistinguishable from hereditary lexicon.
Nopey-dopey. Your scenario requires that either
(1) The IE languages, after established in the first peopling
of Europe, all underwent the same sound changes
or
(2) The loanwords were adopted to the phonologies of the target
languages according to the sound correspondences.
(1) is certainly false because sound change is not predetermined
and any language spoken across a continent-sized area *will*
first develop dialects and later break up into several different
languages as time passes because different areas undergo different
changes. (2) is also false because when a word is borrowed from
one language into a related one, the phonemes are *not* substituted
according to the sound correspondences (which the speakers are not
aware of!) but according to which phonemes of the target language
are the most similar.
If the words for things as 'wheel', 'plough' or 'copper' were
Wanderwörter, they'd show irregularities in their phonology.
Armenian has borrowed massively from Iranian before the first
written attestation. How do we know? Because the words show
Iranian rather than Armenian phonological developments.
> Please don't put every Continuity Theory into the same slot; the
> extreme possibility to be taken into consideration is a PIE diasystem
> (in fact a very differentiated lexical one, just as one would expect,
> but with extreme conservativism at *reconstructible* phonological
> level, i.e. plosives, not liquids or vibrants) encompassed a whole
> linguistic history from Palaeolithic to Chalcolithic
You need some very strong assumptions, namely that languages spoken
before about 5,000 years ago changed in substantially different ways
than languages spoken after that magical point in time, to construct
your continuity theory. What kind of event effected that change?
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