The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.)

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/19/99 2:14:58 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote:

<<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.">

Slavic too?>>

Church Slavonic was designed specifically to give "all Slavia one tongue to
worship with" and it provides the earliest records preserved of Slavic.  That
is planned standardization.  But even before that Slavic may have been
standardized by traders as the lingua franca of the northeastern trade routes
- this is pretty much Dolukhanov's theory for the enormous ground Slavic
already covers when it first appears in history.  Conversely, the greatest
diversity (least standardization) among early Slavs is said to appear between
the Elbe and Vistula, where agriculture is attested to have been more intense
and productive than even among the northern Germans and Church Slavonic never
reaches due to persistent paganism.

<<The unique thing about IE is the amount of data that we have.
There's nothing unique about being able to reconstruct a
proto-language.  Given enough data, we can do that for any group
of languages that stem from a common ancestor.>>

But there is no data before 1500bce.  Putting PIE at 7000bce or 5500bce
means no data for 5500-4000 years.  Finding a common ancestor dating back that
far is like reconstructing a trip from NY to LA based on information that the
travellers were at one time in Salt Lake City.  When I read that "Kurylowicz
demonstrated that Hittite preserved laryngeal-like sounds precisely in those
positions where Sassure had theorized they had existed in PIE"  (aside from
being amazed) I was struck by the fact that it wasn't PIE but Hittite.
Somewhere around Kansas City.  Once again can PIE origins possibly found a bit
closer than those long ago dates?

<<I disagree completely.  The mechamism(s) by which PIE and its
daughter languages (Latin excepted) expanded was nothing like the
Roman Empire, and given the time-frame, it couldn't have.  PIE
was not a "standardized language" in any way.  It was just a
language like any other, and it fell apart into different
dialects like any other>>

Please be patient with me here.  I'd ask you to temporarily suspend these
conclusions, if only to do a small thought experiment.  If IE was a Latin, at
an earlier, probably pre-literate time, how would that change the outcome of
what you find starting 1500 bce?  Would the linguistic distance between PIE
and its daughter languages be more or less than the distance between Latin and
French or Romanian?  Could PIE like Latin have turned something like a Gallic
into a French?  Perhaps more importantly if PIE affected distantly related
languages the way Latin affected English, would we be able to spot it?  If PIE
was like Latin, could it have persisted like Latin did, as a language of court
and law and international relations - and thereby have continued to influence
its daughter languages and others long after it was the official language of a
specific group?

Did Greek grammarians in Rome in 200 ace or at Oxford in 1880 preserve Attic
Greek so that we could have lots of borrowed words to use  - remembering that
we chroma-key and sync and morph and hexacolor and put an audio-stripe on
video-tape today not because these procedures were invented by Greeks or
Romans?  Or did they preserve it because it was a model tongue - the way that
PIE may have been preserved and constantly returned to for new uses?  Why does
it say e pluribus unum on every American dollar?

Didn't modern English, Spanish, Russian and French spread pretty much like
Latin did?

Finally, what would have prevented PIE from even being a "state" language in
its own right, like Egyptian or Minoan or Akkadian or a Hittite?  LBK or
Kurgan are as much unified cultural entities as we find later on in history.
Why couldn't PIE represent a language preserved by kings or priest or the
requirements of trade?

Thanks for your patience,
Steve Long

[ Moderator's comment:
  The only reason that Latin or Attic Greek or Sanskrit is available to us is
  writing.  Grammars of Attic and Sanskrit were created by near-native speakers
  because they were no longer commonly spoken, and important texts would be
  lost if the knowledge of the languages themselves was lost (Homer on the one
  hand, the Vedas on the other); grammars of Latin were created because it was
  culturally important to the Romans to emulate what the Greeks did.  Note that
  being written had no effect on language change in the long run.

  The only way for the Indo-European Ursprache to have survived to fill the
  role you suggest is writing--and as we have seen in history, even a written
  language will change out from under the written form.  Since there was never
  a written form of Indo-European, I think your final questions are answered.
  --rma ]