IE to ProtoSteppe

[Glen Gordon]

Hi y'all,

JOATSIMEON at AOL.COM:
>The initial agricultural colonization of Europe probably carried
>_some_ language, but there's no evidence whatsoever it was IE
>...
>It's historically demonstrable that migrations resulting in complete
>language replacement _don't_ have to leave any particular
>archaeological trace.

Which is what I have been saying for a some time. I'm glad someone
agrees. The overall _linguistic_ evidence (not only within IE, but
external as well) shows that an Anatolian homeland is out of the
question. Archaeological evidence is at most only a clue. If we take
Miguel's view that IE and Etruscan are in fact related and came
originally from Anatolia/Balkans, to account for the Uralic similarities
with IE/Etruscan, we have a couple of options.

We could say that IndoEtruscan is not genetically related to Uralic and
try desperately to explain similarities by using a Uralic creolisation
arguement of IndoEtr as it moved into the Balkans (as well as trying to
correlate Uralic data with such a westerly homeland in itself). Not easy
stuff. Etruscan shows a greater similarity to Uralic in terms of the
fact for instance that it barely uses a nominative -s and has no gender.
Why would IE become less Uralic despite its travels into Uralic
territory? Everything that we should expect is backwards and opposite.

If we accept (as we should) that IE is genetically tied to languages
like Uralic and Altaic, steppe-based languages (and we would have to
honestly conclude that Uralic/Altaic is more closely related than
languages like Kartvelian despite Miguel's ploys to have us reason
otherwise) then if IndoEtruscan is from Anatolia, ALL these other
languages like Uralic and Altaic, etc, must have traveled out of
Anatolia via the Balkan route earlier. Anything from IE to IndoEtruscan
to "Proto-Steppe" speakers might have spread agriculture to Europe in
this scenario.

However, we should see IndoEtruscan words being adopted by Semitic and
the like if they were in the same area or into another language group
like Hattic or something. Nope. It seems that the Semitic loanwords in
IE are one-sided. If IE (and IndoEtruscan) had been seperated
sufficiently from the North Semitic core (or "East Semitic" if you
will), it might explain this one-sidedness since the North Semitic would
come to the IE via Black Sea trade. I don't even think that IE's
adoption of Semitic words dates much farther back than 3500 BCE and
therefore hasn't affected Etruscan (this is why I refuse the
relationship between IE *septm and Etruscan semph, which don't look
enough alike, as being from the same inherited source. I personally
would expect something like Etr. **sapthum). If we could find Semitic
borrowings into IE that show up without question in Etruscan as well, we
would have a winner. I doubt that kind of hard linguistic evidence will
ever be found.

By the way, I want to stress that I don't consider Kurgan I (4500-4000
BCE) as necessarily ENTIRELY Indo-Etruscan-speaking. There may have been
Caucasian speaking peoples involved in it as well, no one knows.

Secondly, when I proposed an NEC type language as the language of the
Anatolians that carried agriculture with them, I meant it only as a
quickly dismissable conjecture. (But I think it's a better conjecture
than believing IE as the language).

Lastly, I'm disturbed that when I said that the IE had wiped out
_ALMOST_ all traces of any previous language existant in Europe that two
people had interpreted that I had said ALWAYS and performed redundant
surgery on a comment I never made. Please carefully read your mail,
guys/gals. Thanx.

--------------------------------------------
Glen Gordon
glengordon01 at hotmail.com

Kisses and Hugs
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