Dating the final IE unity

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/14/00 12:53:28 AM, you wrote:

<<So?  The linguistic evidence puts PIE as post-neolithic.  Thus the
Neolithic Revolution is too old on linguistic grounds.>>

But remember both the horse and the wagon are now pretty much "neolithic" in
Europe.  And the horse's domestication in is a region that is late in
converting to agriculture.

I wrote:
>Perhaps the most recent trend has been the realization that "kurgan"
>characteristics did not cause anything but minor changes in a great many
>areas where they were adopted.

You wrote:
So?  Why does language replacement *have* to make more than a minor change?

I wrote
>  More important changes seem to have to do
>with climate, economics and resulting changes in trade and material
>processing and social structure.

You wrote:
<<The economic changes seem, to me, to be a possibly sufficient motivation
for adopting a new language - to the language of the rich folk who ran the
trade system.>>

Let me give you an alternative hypothesis.  One characteristic of most of the
technical changes that are associated with PIE or early IE languages show a
pattern of regular diffusion in one direction or another.  Is it possible
that language did not come along with or follow those innovations, but
instead made their quick diffusion possible?

Is it possible that PIE became the language of technology and cultural change
so that language was the pipeline for spreading everything from kurgan
culture to metallurgy to wagon-making (no easy task, if you've ever tried it)
to the potter's wheel?  Or even the improvements in farming we find
throughout the neolithic?

This puts language on a higher level - where I think it belongs - as a medium
for the spreading of the advances we keep on trying to attribute to something
else.  Homer's "winged words" outrun traders and armies and chariots and
bookeepers, so that the idea of wheel (along with maybe those wheeled models
we call toys) gets to Europe before any physical wheels get there?
Transferred along various dialects of PIE that maintain their mutual
intelligibility because they are the language of new ideas and new material
goods?

I wrote:
> The influx was not of new peoples in
>most cases and where they were we do not find horse warriors, but rather "the
>sheperds of the kurgan culture" as one recent research report described them.

You wrote:
<<So?  Just because the martial aspect of the model is wrong doesn't make the
*whole* model wrong.  There are other ways of spreading language than
warfare and large-scale population replacement.>>

It's funny, but one of the largest replacements we see in modern times
happens in  migration, but the language change is not to the home population
but to the migrant.  The US Census estimated that 65% of the US population
consists of those whose ancestors did not speak English in 1850.  The
parallel idea is that the PIE spread not by it coming to people, but people
coming to it.  Or lets say to the PIE farming settlement and polis from the
countryside.

Regards
Steve Long