IE and Substrates and Time

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/8/99 6:14:14 AM, you wrote:

<<I think we should keep in mind that the European linguistic situation in
historical times is probably much simpler than it was in the Mesolithic or
early Neolithic.

But, there is a gap here.  In most of Europe, the traditional Bronze Age and
early Iron Age did not occur in historical times.  In most of Northern Europe,
"history" at best begins 500 years after the Iron Age begins.

<<Reasoning by analogy from the situation in New Guinea or eastern pre-
Columbian North America, there were probably _many_ more languages and
language-families in Europe before the Indo-European expansion.  Not just one
or a few non-IE families which were then replaced by Indo-European.  The IE
expansion would then represent a massive linguistic simplification, a
"reformatting" of a previously crowded scene.>>

This seems to me to be very important to any analysis of how IE diffused in
Europe.

1. Why do we assume that the IE languages would not act precisely like the
non-IE languanges and splinter into extremely local variations?  What glue
would hold IE together ESPECIALLY if you take the view that PIE entered or
expanded in Europe before 4000BC along with agriculture?  This gives us a huge
period of time for PIE speaking settlers to sit in their own local areas
throughout Europe and somehow maintain "a massive linguistic simplification"
instead of breaking down into a whole patchwork of PIE descendents.

The theory that says that either PIE or the standard IE protolanguages were
being spoken in Europe in even 2500BC requires a very small number of language
groups to put a hold on localization for a millenium while Hittite, Sanskrit
and Mycenean were just getting ready to rear their heads as the first
historically identifiable IE languages.

What was holding them together as one language or perhaps a set of no more
than what?, four or five proto-languages for a thousand years?

2. You analogize the coming of PIE to the coming of the European languages to
the patchwork of pre-Columbian American languages.  But it took European
languages no more than two centuries in most places in America to displace the
prior languages in a much greater mass of land.   Compare this to the Renfrew
or even the Mallory hypotheses that have PIE (as a contiguous language) cross
Europe a few square miles per year over as much as 3000 years.  The time of
conversion is not the point here, it is rather the amount of time intervening
afterwards.

3. A critical question this raises seems to me to be how these languages were
standardized.  The idea of a proto-IE or even a proto-Keltic throughout Europe
before say 1800 BC gives us a language being spoken mainly by illiterate
sedentary farmers who would have no knowledge if their language had varied
from those of their neighbors a hundred miles away.  An yet it has them all
having spoken fundamentally the same language for as much as 2000 years before
hand.  If a sound shift did arise out of nowhere because of some sudden
predisposition or fashion towards fricatives or aspirates, how was that shift
passed on?

The English, Spanish and French of the 1600's all had core institutions for
regularizing speech and grammar.  The hornbook, the Bible, the priest or
preacher, the Castilian or Etonian administrator or cleric, the school teacher
and of course the itinerant merchant were all instruments of both continuity
and change for such a large displacement of language.  The written word itself
- our only direct evidence of languages and dialects no longer spoken  and
syntacts no longer used - is something totally absent from the PIE scene in
Europe before 1300 BC.

What standardized those PIE speakers in Europe so that they didn't turn into
the "the situation in New Guinea" over the course of thousands of years?

I think one viable answer is that they didn't.  The solution is time - to
reduce the amount of time they would have to develope thousands of different
IE daughter languages in every nook and cranny of the European continent.  And
it also brings us closer in time to recognizable standardizing influences -
like merchants, priests, manufacturing specialists and urban centers.

This would also give us a much faster process of conversion to IE, much closer
to the analogy given above to the conversion of the American languages - "a
massive linguistic simplification."

Regards,
Steve Long