About forcing a language on someone

[Vidhyanath Rao]

> [ Moderator's note:
>   The following message addresses a number of issues brought up in
> a recent  post by S. M. Stirling (JoatSimeon at aol.com); nothing further
> on those issues will be posted to the list.  However, a comment in the
> final paragraph takes us beyond those issues, and back to
> Indo-European issues, and I will welcome further discussion *of that
> paragraph only*.  --rma ]

I agree that the topic is minefield and may not be suitable, but I am
not sure if that is possible to discuss only the issues in the cited
para: After all, the question is whether the examples given so far can
be used as models for PIE spread.

"Plourde Eric" <plourer at MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA> wrote:
> [...] But the people who used the IE languages were
> probably very violent and bloodthirsty people who imposed their
> culture (and languages) on the others. How else would they have
>spread so quickly? How Scythians and the Germanic tribes were
> depicted?

Just how quickly did PIE spread? How can we know given the
uncertainties about the PIE homeland, the time of split, and the time
of disappearance of non-PIE languages?

How do we know where PIE speakers stood on the scale of
bloodthirstiness? And just how do we set up this scale: By the number of
bodies excavated from conquered areas? And what is that count? and so
on.

And how does bloodthirstiness help in spreading a language? There have
been bloodthirsty (from the point of view of the conquered: Alexander
was supposedly magnanimous, but that is not what Zoroastrians said)
conquerors such as Genghis Khan who did not manage to impose their
language on even a third of their conquered lands.

The models for `imposing' languages that have been given all seem to
depend on schools and other such institutions, which were compulsory for
the subject peoples. Are we to assume that PIE speakers had the same
setup?

The whole thread seemed to me to be pointless. The examples given in the
last 15 years for the spread have been cases of slow absorption via
client-patron relation into an open hierarchical society, not forceful
imposition via the sword (which seems to have been limited to religion
before 1500 CE).