In regards to who is locating the IE "homeland" north of the Black Sea,
I blurted:

>> The sane people :)

Gerry:

>Ah me Glennie! You are in rare form. And where do the less-sane
>people locate the homeland?

This just happens to be the larger consensus. Anatolia would be a lesser,
but second alternative and finally, the other locations are just not
considerable because they are too looney-gaga to make sense of. Do your
ideas of this consensus differ in your mind?

>OK. I'll (for the moment) accept Ivanov and Gamkrelidze as presenting a
>fringe hypothesis for the origins of IE.

Hooray!

>Thus your conflict with John Croft has to do with linguistics vs
>archaeology.
>Are you perhaps claiming that linguistics can exist without archaeology?

I'm claiming nothing contraversial at all. Linguistics _does_ exist without
archaeology for the simple fact that archaeology deals with physical remains
and linguistics deals with non-tangible remains. We may use archaeology as
a guide but we have to realise that the archaeological data just can't give
us firm answers about language. Since archaeology doesn't provide us with
these, it is important to question and requestion the importance of the
archaeological finds when speaking of IE and, in the end, it must be
linguistics that more firmly decides the likeliest position of the
proto-language. Sorry, them's the brakes.

>IMO, anyone trying to "pinpoint" an area in which to locate the I-E is
>barking up the wrong tree.

I don't think anyone is trying to draw accurate boundaries of these
languages.
I certainly am not. My maps online are meant to give a general indication
of the greatest concentration of any particular language, not rigid borders.
... And let's not get into prehistoric multilingualism because that's
another
headache.

>What's wrong with the Altai? The archaeological evidence is there.

The "archaeological evidence"? Come now, Gerry. Found tablets written in
Proto-Indo-European in the Altai Mountains, have we? Did you find Noah's
Ark there too? Archaeology really doesn't speak volumes about the presence
of a language in the best of times. What about these remains show that the
IE language must have been there? The clothing? The horse remains? The
middens? What? What on earth demonstrates a language in the archaeological
record?

>You may have a point. The IE in its grand spread *could* have
>been located over a broad swatch of territory (as Mallory presents) yet
>each valley in that territory will have a sub-language (dialect).

Yes, I don't argue that IE _was_ spoken over a large territory but there
is a limit. The territory couldn't have been so large as to cover Europe
all the way to China since language cohesion for any length of time would
be impossible. Logically, this means that IE MUST have been spoken in a
smaller region before spreading this far... which means that IE itself
could never have occupied such a large territory. You're confusing the
spread of already fragmented PostIE dialects with the location of
Proto-Indo-European itself. There must be an epicentre from which IE had
spread. When we speak of this epicentre, it is largely placed north to
northwest of the Black Sea. Likewise there is an epicentre to each isogloss
as well. This still doesn't mean that IE was not surrounded by
"para-dialects",
which are kinda like dialects that didn't quite make it into modern times.
This is all very much like the mitochondrial Eve, who no doubt had sisters,
but their genetics have no bearing on modern humans.

To sum up: Language evolution is just a bunch of raindrops making waves in a
puddle. Think about it.

>It is my opinion that language operates *both* over a vast swatch of
>territory while at the same time having distinct dialects that are area
>(valley) specific.

The Inuit languages are good examples of what PreIE might have been
like where there is no major difference between one area and the area beside
it but very marked differences when comparing the western and eastern
fringes
of the language area. This pattern is caused by the mobility of the people
which ends up "smudging" any possible regional dialects together. Of course,
the speakers of the IE language were probably a little more sedentary than
their hunter-gatherer ancestors were, so more drastic regional variants
would have an easier time forming, like that whole "satem" thing which must
have started somewhere nearer the center of the area ('cuz both
eastern-spreading Tocharian and western-spreading Anatolian are non-satem
dialects and "closer" to each other in that sense).



- love gLeN



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