The Neolithic Hypothesis

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/15/99 5:21:05 PM, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

<<Whether IE began to spread across Europe from the Balkans in the mid sixth
millennium, as I claim,...>>

I don't want to give the impression that much of what you've said about this
isn't plausible or compelling.  The question I think it does not address is:
What is the latest that PIE could have emerged from a local homeland and
expanded to where we find it when the evidence gets direct?  (I.e., written
evidence)
This is a natural governor - a reality check - on the tendency to keep back-
dating PIE to the point to alleviate the very ungradiated jumble of IE
languages.

<<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. >>

I don't think that is an answer in itself.  Because the later languages you
mention fall into Mallory's category of "state languages."  Whether the exact
term is right or not, the meaning is that there is a standardizing agent or
agents that prevents splintering.  Whether it's trade or the school marm or
the Academie or the Latin grammarian or the mass media or even a dictionary,
you have a strong force working against splintering and gradients.

Without this standardizing force, epecially among sedentary populations, like
sedentary farmers separated by thousands of years from one another, one should
not even expect PIE to have been PIE a relatively short distance from the
place of origin.  Especially, if one follows Renfrew's "a few square miles per
year" rate of expansion for agrnts of PIE suddenly pick up and "swallow up"
another gradient of PIE?  Did PIE follow the spread of agriculture all the way
through to its outer fringes and then suddenly some of those dialects start
moving and replacing other dialects?  Did the first PIE converts wait 3 or
4000 years till the whole European gradient process was completed before they
started mucking it up by moving around?  Or did they move ahead of agriculture
by trade or war, converting before agriculture got there?

In the 5000 years that separates first agriculture from direct evidence of the
languages of Europe (aside from Mycenaean), there should have been dozens of
"swallow-uppers" that preceded Celtic or German or Romance.  And these might
have moved back and forth all across the continent in a way that would put
many ancestors between the first historical IE languages and PIE.  There might
be many proto's between Proto-German and PIE.

<<All we can say with confidence is that the number of
languages has been going down on average since the Paleolithic.>>

But you know, Mallory's expert on the North American tribes says the exact
opposite.  That the number of languages and language families actually
substantially increased over time and with the coming of agriculture.  The
reason is obvious.  Farming causes stabilization of location and localization
promotes local diversity in language.  Standardization is only something that
happens with centralization - a very different event.

I wrote:
<<At that rate Europe would have about150 different languages.>>

You wrote:
<<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?>>

But we have the answer to those question.  The only singularity we have in
late Neolithic Europe is the final conversions to agriculture.  Otherwise we
have a tremendous patchwork of cultural groups with some regionalized pockets
that show evidence of common material cultures.  And once again there is no
historical evidence that one needs to adopt a language in order to adopt
agriculture.  Some of the existing cultures were doing materially better
before agriculture, so the appeal is questionable.  There is quite a bit of
current literature that points out that the adoption of agriculture does not
always make sense and does not necessarily increase population.

<<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.>>

But when we speak of the initial spread of PIE, we are talking about nothing
but expansion at the expense of non- IE languages.  By definition, the "edges
of the area" would be right next to the core.  At this point - if agriculture
is spreading IE - we should expect that splintering should have started taking
place very early - as you say.  And wouldn't that mean that further out from
the core, the source of expansion would not have been PIE but a dialect or
language that was already an ancestor.  And the next expansion would have been
descended from a descendent.  While nothing was keeping the original parent
particularly stable.  The whole scheme sends us to diversity and not
uniformity.

But the unique thing about IE languages is not their diversity but their
commonality, something that makes the reconstruction of the proto language at
all plausible.

I think when you look for the latest possible date for a unity you get closer
to the truth.  PIE gives evidence of having been a standardized language in
some way early on.  The kurgans may explain it.  Agriculture doesn't - not by
itself.  It creates the opposite effect without a standardizing agent.

If Latin had been PIE, for example, it accomplished a lot of what it did in
less than 600 years.  And it did it without mandating conversion - in
comparison for example to the German laws against speaking Wendish in the
middle ages.  I don't think elite dominance describes the Latin phenomena
either.  Whatever the Romans did, it seems to be one of the best historical
model we have for what happened in the days when PIE was just another local
dialect BUT on its way to turning into "the first ancestor" of a whole new
family of languages.

Regards,
Steve Long