the Wheel and Dating PIE

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl
Wed Mar 1 19:41:25 UTC 2000


JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>>>-- and currently around 800 million speaking Indo-European languages there,
>>>which if you add in Iran, eastern Anatolia and central Asia, comes to over 1
>>>billion.

>>That wasn't my point.

>-- well, it was my point.  The Indo-Iranian expansion into these areas was
>_later_ than the probable Indo-Europeanization of Europe, but comparable in
>scale... and demonstrably due to the infiltration of elements ultimately
>derived from the Eurasian steppe zone.  If Iran/India, why not Europe?

My point being: if Europe, why not India?

>>I consider Welsh (including its Latin component) to be pretty
>>solid linguistical evidence.

>-- of a Celtic language _in Wales_.  In the absence of written records, it
>would be virtually impossible to show that there had ever been such a
>language in most of England.  Even the place-names of minor landscape
>features are mostly Germanic; those Celtic names that do survive are few and
>often the product of misunderstanding -- eg., a number of western English
>rivers are called "Avon", which means... 'river'.

Evidence enough for Celtic in western England.

>>>-- not according to Cavalli-Sforza, who shows a wave of migration starting
>>>north of the sea of Azov and spreading throughout Europe.

>>Yes, *precisely* according to Cavalli-Sforza.

>-- he shows two migrations into Europe, one in the early neolithic from the
>south-east, and one in the late neolithic, from the east.

>How do you valorize the earlier one over the later?

I could look it up, but as I recall, the primary component
according to Cavalli-Sforza is the Anatolian one (besides the
"paleolithic" "native European" component).  The "steppe" genes
form one of several minor components.

>>How so?  The linguistic evidence confirms that there is a sizeable
>>Pre-Germanic substrate element, which fits exactly with the genesis of the
>>TRB culture in the area around Denmark.

>-- a pre-Germanic substrate in _Germanic_, not in the rest of the IE
>languages.

>In fact, Baltic and Slavic -- closely adjacent -- show the _least_ evidence
>of pre-IE substrates.

Exactly.

>>Early infiltration in the Baltic area fits with the PIE borrowings into
>>Uralic

>-- nonsense.  Much too far to the west.  There's virtually universal
>agreement that the Uralic languages dispersed from the _Ural_ area (that's
>why they're called "Uralic", of course)

The name "Uralic" of course doesn't prove a thing.  The
consensus, as far as one exists, is that the PFU homeland is well
west of the Ural mountains.  It stands to reason that Samoyedic
(and earlier possibly Yukaghir) split off from a Proto-Uralic
located in roughly the same area.  If anything, and depending on
the time-depth of Proto-Uralic, more to the south(-west), for
reasons of climate.

>>But linguistic information gives no absolute dates.  There's nothing about
>the "linguistic information" that "rules out" a date of 5500 BC.

>-- sure there is.  It's too early, unless we make radical assumptions about
>slow differentiation;

Nothing radical about it.  Based on the differentiation of the IE
languages as attested ca. 1500 BC (Vedic Sanskrit, Mycenean Greek
and Hittite), any date within the range 5500-3500 is absolutely
reasonable for my Sprachgefuehl.  Older or younger than that is
of course possible, but not terribly likely.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl



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