The Neolithic Hypothesis

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>Yet the premise is that PIE somehow crossed the continent in this plodding
>manner over thousands of years, not due to migration or trade, but following a
>technology that created not mobility (as with the Polynesians) but sedentary
>local populations.

>JS has written on this list of a kind of gradient of dialects spreading from a
>core.  Renfrew mentions that the Polynesian migration can (to some degree) be
>traced linguistically.  Where is the gradient of language variation across
>Europe from the core?

A lot has happened in Europe since the Neolithic.  Whether IE
began to spread across Europe from the Balkans in the mid sixth
millennium, as I claim, or from the Pontic-Caspian steppe in the
early fourth millennium, as claimed by the Kurgan theory, any
initial dialect gradients that came into being have been
destroyed by later language spreads.  Celtic has been largely
swallowed up by Romance and Germanic, the Slavic and Hungarian
spreads have replaced whatever gradients there were in Eastern
Europe with new dialect gradients.  Etcetera.

>Mallory in In Search of the Indo-Europeans writes (for another reason) that
>generally, "before the emergence of major state languages we encounter most
>linguistic entities in the world occupying areas that range from the extremely
>small up to 1,000,000 sq kilometres."  That rather high top number is an area
>about 380 miles on each side.   The figures on North America in 1492 Mallory
>gives has each language of the estimated 350 with 64000sq km - about 150 miles
>on a side.  At that rate Europe would have about150 different languages.

That's a pretty meaningless number.  Where does one draw the line
between language and dialect, especially when dialect gradients
are involved?  What are the geographical conditions?  What are
the social and technological conditions?  What is the recent
history?  All we can say with confidence is that the number of
languages has been going down on average since the Paleolithic.

>The idea that PIE could have avoided this splintering outcome, without an
>extraordinary standardizing agent (like Mallory's "state languages" or strong
>central markets), just simply goes against anything we know about the
>neolithic period in Europe.  In fact it even goes against all we know about
>the behavior of pre-standardized languages themselves.

Nobody is denying that PIE *has* splintered.  The extent of the
splintering is somewhat obscured by the fact that many of the
splinters have not survived at all and are not known to us, or
only very marginally.  There is a large number of real or
hypothesized IE languages that have been swallowed up by later
migrations and language replacements: "Nordwestblock",
"Alteuropa"isch", Lusitanian, Siculan, Elymaean, Messapian,
Illyrian, Venetic, Daco-Thracian, Phrygian, Cimmerian,
"D-Baltic", etc.  And there's no reason to think that this
process of language spread, followed by differentiation (dialect
gradients), followed by yet another spread of one or more of the
dialects, obscuring the gradient, etc. hasn't been going on since
the very beginning of the Indo-European expansion.  In fact, it
*is* the IE expansion.  At any given time, IE languages have
expanded mainly at the expense of other IE languages and
dialects.  Only at the edges of the area, IE expanded at the
expense of other language groups.

This is what makes the subgrouping of IE such a difficult matter.
Transitional dialects between one variety and the other have been
wiped out, and languages from different dialect gradients have
later come into contact with each other, drawing closer together
again after an initial differentiation.  As I have stated, I
think there's evidence that this has happened with Germanic and
Balto-Slavic, and with Greek and Armenian.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam