Linguists like to argue!?

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 05/24/2002 9:39:05 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
mufw at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU writes:

> James Landau proposes a position once advocated by Nikolai Trubezkoy in
1939:
> "Gedanken über Indogermanenproblem" in Acta Linguistica 1.81-89. I am not
> sure that anything similar to the creole lifecycle, for which I maintain
that
> there is no compelling empirical evidence, played a role in the process.
But
> I too believe strongly that language contact was an important factor in the
> speciation of an already variable proto-IE group of languages or language
> varieties. History has always suggested such a thing.

Yes, I thought of Trukezkoy when I wrote my original e-mail, but my sole
source of information on Trubezkoy is a few short mentions in Colin Renfrew
_Archaeology & Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins_ Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-521-35432-3 (hardback).
>From page 42 of the hardback "Few scholars today would go so far as Trubeskoy
in suggesting that there is no genetic or family-tree relationship at all
among the Indo-European languages, and that they just came to resemble each
other through the effects of prolonged contact.  And very few indeed would
agree with the French archaeologist, Jean-Paul Demoule, that there really is
no Indo-European language group at all, or that the similarities observed are
unimportant, insignificant and fortuitous."   (Demoule is footnoted as "'Les
Indo-europe/ens ont-ils existe/?" in _L'histoire_ 28 (1980) pp 109-120.

If Renfrew's summary is correct, then Trubeskoy was arguing a convergence
theory, and I am skeptical of convergence theories, e.g. if convergence were
a natural feature of adjacent languages, Canadians would now be speaking
Franglais as their national language.  As you point out in _The Ecology of
Language Evolution_, Creoles arise when there is a specific type of contact
between peoples speaking different tongues that requires one people to have
to develop a way to speak to the other.

Far from "denying any genetic or family-tree relationship at all among the
Indo-European languages", as Renfrew says Trubezkoy does, I was accepting for
purpose of discussion that a family-tree DOES exist among IE languages, and
was as a mental exercise showing one way such a family tree could exist
without requiring the existence of a unified proto-Indo-European language.

While my particular suggestion is too far-fetched to be believable (did you
spot the fatal flaw in it?), it does serve a serious purpose.  Many IE
researchers have made elaborate attempts to identify the time and place of
PIE by examining similarities in the known IE languages.  If PIE did not
exist as a tongue spoken in one particular area at one particular time, then
this is wasted effort.  Perhaps researchers should concentrate more on
examining the DIFFERENCES between IE subfamilies, asking such questions as
"do the differences in *proto-Greek and *proto-Indo-Aryan show that the
Greeks and Indo-Aryans were once a united people or that they were on
different sides of the proto-Indo-European spectrum?"

I also had a second purpose in my little theory.  Question: when and where
did PIE (or reasonable facsmile) exist.  Consensus answer: 5K to 10K years
ago, somewhere in Europe or the Black Sea region.  Fine so far.  Now assume
that before the time frame in which an identifiable putative-PIE existed, the
proto-proto-IE speakers spent millenia speaking ancestral versions of our
reconstructed *PIE's.  With me so far?  But add a few millenia to "5K to 10K
years ago" and you are in the Ice Age, when glaciers covered northern Europe
and our proto-proto-IE speakers were huddling in the Mediterranean or Fertile
Crescent regions, along with proto-Basques, proto-Semites, and
proto-Finno-Ugrians.

Someone who wishes to argue that IE is unrelated to other language families
must then, by my analysis, argue that the predecessors of the PIE speakers
INVENTED language sometime shortly after the END of the Ice Age, with no
input from the proto-Basques etc.  who were their neighbors in the late Ice
Age.  (Perhaps the proto-Basques etc. independently invented language after
the end of the Ice Age as well).  I find this to be a preposterously late
date for the invention of language, considering that Cro-Magnon man was
creating cave art DURING the Ice Age, and I can't imagine Cro-Magnon man
inventing art before having language.

I have now created a quite tenuous argument that proto-proto-IE speakers,
proto-Basque speakers, etc. were all using language while neighbors in the
Mediterranean-Fertile Crescent area DURING the Ice Age.  I am NOT suggesting
any convergence between these early examples of modern language families.
However, I suspect that the geographical realities strongly suggest (although
they do not prove) that at least some of the IE, Basque, Semitic (actually
Afro-Asiatic), and Finno-Ugrian families were descended from some unknown
earlier language,  This is not an original suggestion; rather it is my
variation on the Nostratic Hypothesis.

My point is not to advocate the Nostratic Hypothesis but rather to point out
that if IE is descended from Nostratic, something strange happened along the
way.  Finno-Ugrian languages share some distinctive grammatical and phonetic
features which simply cannot be found in PIE.  Semitic languages have a
three-consonant root for most words; again IE has nothing of the sort and
allows vowels to be as significant as consonants in distinguishing roots.
Basque is notorious for not resembling anything else, including PIE.

So we have a PIE which was descended from some sort of Nostratic, yet
grammatically and phonetically resembles no other plausible Nostratic
descendant.

Now to connect all this meandering with my original e-mail.  There is one way
that PIE could arise from a different language yet with a structure so
mangled as to be unrecognizable.  How?  If PIE were a creole.  More exactly,
if the proto-IE speakers found themselves in a position (e.g. defeated and
enslaved by neighbors speaking an unrelated or distantly related tongue) that
would cause a creole to develop.  Then after some centuries the proto-IE
speakers would escape from slavery but by then have forgotten their original
tongue and speak only the creole we recognize as PIE (undoubtedly in several
dialects), with all evidence of their original tongue being lost due to the
poor signal-to-noise ratio of paleolinguistics.

        Climbing down from my soapbox now

      - James A. Landau