Urheimat in Lithuania? (was Re: the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE)

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>whiting at cc.helsinki.fi writes:

>The reason for this, I think, lies in the fact that there has been extensive
>reconvergence among the early forms of these stocks so that the original
>branchings have been obscured.

-- Occam's Razor would suggest that this may simply be a result of there not
being much early differentiation.  If Proto-Indo- European broke up sometime
around 3000 B.C., then the western clump of dialects might well have remained
fairly uniform for some time.  As I said, my guess would be that around 2000
B.C. Baltic and Slavic certainly, and Germanic, italic and Celtic probably,
just hadn't developed many of their later distinguishing characteristics.

-something- then happened to the dialects which were going to become
Proto-Germanic.  When, where and why are obscure!

>Yes, I grant you this.  In fact (Sanskrit, Slavic, Baltic) almost looks like
>a "which language doesn't belong here?" question. Sanskrit looks archaic
>because, well, it's archaic -- as you say, it is at least 3000 years closer
>to PIE than modern Lithuanian is.

-- this is an interesting question.  What I'd like to know  -- and of course
we can't know  -- is what was going on with Baltic and Slavic [or more
precisely, their ancestors] while Proto-Indo-Iranian was developing and
apparently innovating like mad.  We do know that they shared some of those
innovations, but when did they become something other than "Late
Proto-Indo-European"?

>I would be willing to give more weight to the persistent connection with
>Uralic as an indication of not having moved much.

-- luckily, we have both... 8-).

>Using Amerind influence on English as an example, words taken into the
>superstratum will typically be toponyms (Mississippi, Mississinewa, Missouri)
>or words for local flora (squash) and fauna (woodchuck, chipmunk) or local
>implements (moccasin, tomahawk, wampum, wigwam) or institutions (powwow) that
>the superstratum language lacks.  Other words will tend to be used
>pejoratively or for comic effect (papoose, squaw, mugwump).

-- well, that isn't entirely comparable to most Old World cases of linguistic
succession.  English-speaking Europeans more or less blotted out the Native
Americans along the Eastern seaboard of North America.  Due as much to
imported diseases as anything else, there was no prolonged period of
bilingualism, nor were there many cases of non-native English speakers being
linguistically assimilated.

I understand  that there was considerably more influence from the indigenous
languages of Mexico on popular Spanish there -- although I'm operating from
memory, and distant memory at that.

By way of contrast, it's generally accepted that very large numbers of the
Celtic-speaking British population survived the Anglo-Saxon invasions. I must
admit, I am rather puzzled by the lack of substrate influence on Old English.
It's not as if the Anglo-Saxons had some sort of a linguistic Academy to try
and keep out loan-words, much less distinctive accents or the inevitable
influence of syntax which occurs when non - native speakers acquire a second
language in adulthood.

>And at the expense of Slavic too, but that also is a different matter.

--more of a new period, actually.  Prior to 1000 AD or so, it was the other
way round.  Gothic, for example, started out in what is now Poland.  The
migration period after the fall of the Roman Empire saw the Germanics moving
south and west and the western fringe of the Slavic peoples moving into the
vacated territory.

>>-- true; although, of course, we know that German is much closer
>>geographically to the proto-Germanic _urheimat_.

>But not *in* the Germanic Urheimat.

--certainly the north and west of the Urheimat.  It is generally accepted
that Jutland and the area of Germany immediately to the south of it were part
of the earliest area of Germanic speech.  Granted that large areas of
southern Germany were Celtic in the last centuries of the pre Christian era.

>No, it is only after the Norman Conquest that the loans become easily
>noticeable.  There are a lot of loans from Scandinavian in English that
>predate the Norman Conquest that most native speakers don't even recognize as
>loans.

--yes, of course, there were Scandinavian loans in pre-conquest English,
although less so in the Wessex dialect that was the chancery language in
Anglo-Saxon times.  I should have mentioned that; although as you say those
were more in the nature of cross-dialect influence.  What I meant to refer to
was the enormous freight of romance and other loans which came in after 1066.
Also the time when other aspects of the language began to shift rapidly.