GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?)

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>rao.3 at osu.edu writes:

>We must be careful to distinguish between entry of a language into a new
>area and its spread.

-- good point.

Eg., the entry of the dialects ancestral to English into the British Isles
took place in the 5th and 6th centuries AD, but their spread has been a
long-drawn-out process.  Even in England proper it took three or four
centuries to push Brythonic-Celtic bakc into Wales, and as recently as the
early 19th century, Gaelic was still a majority language in Ireland, for
instance, whereas now it's virtually extinct.

One has a tendency to assume that an area has been "Indo-Europeanized" when
the ancestral tongue first enters it, but this may well have been a similarly
long-drawn-out process in many areas.  Cf. the persistence of
Basque/Aquitanian.

>Now, there was significant change in social organization in North India
>during the ``Second Urbanization'' (urbanization of Ganga valley), from 700
>BCE to 300BCE (I am not sure of technological change). Interestingly, either
>Burrow or Kuiper date the majority of the influx of non-IE words in Sanskrit
>to about this period.

-- true, but there are _some_ Dravidian loans in Sanskrit from the earliest
times.

>It is not so clear to me that languages change without significant change in
>social/economic organization.

-- I'd tend to agree with that, but there's a distinction between _social_
change and _technological_ change.  The latter is often visible in the
archaeological record where the former is not.

Subsistence technologies in particular tend to be very tenacious,
post-Neolithic.