The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis]

Larry Trask larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
Fri Apr 2 13:26:37 UTC 1999


On Thu, 1 Apr 1999, Ray Hendon wrote:

> But I do have a question about Indo-European as the proto-language
> for most of Europe. It seems to me the IE is an hypothesis that
> posits the existence of an Indo-European language that was actually
> spoken by some ancient population. The hypothesis further asserts
> that this language is this mother language of many Asian and
> European languages and subsequently spawned child-languages over
> Asia and Europe. Celtic, Germanic and Italic languages, to name a
> few, are, then, child languages of IE.

To be finicky, the hypothesis is that a single ancient language, which
we call Proto-Indo-European (PIE), was spoken somewhere in Eurasia some
thousands of years ago, that this language -- unrecorded, because its
speakers were illiterate -- underwent the ordinary and remorseless
processes of language change, that -- as usual -- different changes
occurred in different areas, and hence that regional varieties of PIE
diverged to such a degree that they became quite distinct and mutually
incomprehensible languages, the languages we call the Indo-European
languages.  This splitting happened repeatedly, so that the several
immediate daughters of PIE themselves often gave rise to sub-families of
several distinct languages.

The core of the hypothesis, then, is the single common ancestor, PIE.
The kind of model that we apply to the development of the IE family is
called the `family-tree model', and it stresses the centrality of
divergence in giving rise to languages.

> My question is this: is there disagreement among linguists about IE
> as an hypothesis?

Not today, no.

> Are their linguists who dispute the IE model and posit some
> alternative model of language development?

Yes, but not for the IE family.  At present there are a number of
linguists who argue that the family-tree model is not universally valid,
and that some languages have developed in other and more complex ways.
For example, Bob Dixon argues that the Pama-Nyungan languages of
Australia have developed in a very different way, with convergence being
more important than divergence.  Other types of convergence model have
been proposed by Jeff Leer for the Canadian language Tlingit, by Roy
Miller for Japanese, by George Grace for certain Melanesian languages,
and by Uriel Weinreich, Bob Le Page, C.-J. N. Bailey and others for
various cases.  Malcolm Ross has recently been defending a complex
divergence-convergence model for certain Pacific languages and more
generally.  And everybody now accepts the reality of mixed languages
like Michif, Ma'a and Mednyj Aleut, which clearly have not arisen in a
manner consistent with the family-tree model.

> If so, are the alternative hypotheses credible?

They may well be credible for some cases, and my own view is that they
are established beyond dispute in a few cases.  I think it is fair to
say that historical linguists in general no longer believe that the
family-tree model represents the only way in which languages can arise.
But there remain disagreements about the degree to which the family-tree
model is generally valid.  Some of us prefer to see family-tree
divergence as the norm, with the other things being rare and eccentric.
Others of us see the complex patterns as the norm, with family-tree
divergence being unusual.

> Or, is the IE model universally accepted as the only possible
> explanation for how IE languages developed?

The family-tree model is *not* universally accepted as the only possible
model of the rise of languages.  But it *is* universally accepted today
as the best model of the rise of the IE family of languages.

In the past, however, such linguists as C. C. Uhlenbeck, Nikolai
Trubetzkoy and Antonio Tovar all rejected the family-tree model of the
IE family, preferring instead to see the IE languages as having arisen
out of some kind of mixture of two or three distinct and unrelated
languages.  In this view, of course, PIE never existed.  But all three
of these men are dead, and I know of no linguist who takes such ideas
seriously today for IE: we can reconstruct so much intricate and complex
grammar for PIE that it simply *must* have existed.  A "language
mixture" scenario is just not consistent with the elaborate grammatical
system which can be reconstructed for PIE and which is substantially
preserved in at least the earlier IE languages.

As our moderator has noted, non-linguists sometimes believe that we
historical linguists have been doing everything wrong for 200 years.
I myself am quite satisfied that we have not, and that these outside
critics have no idea what they are talking about.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk



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