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

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>whiting at cc.helsinki.fi writes:

>You said that Baltic and Slavic "_were_ in the 'innovative core'", while I
>said that they "were still in fairly close contact" with it and were
>transitional areas for the particular changes we were talking about.

-- I would agree with this, on the whole.  To be precise, my guess would be
that Balto-Slavic was in contact with Proto-Indo-Iranian on the east and
Proto-Germanic on the west; that is, that its relative geographical position
-- if not absolute location -- in the IE spectrum was consistent from the
time of the first break-up of the PIE linguistic continuum down to the
historic era, with respect to these dialect-clusters.  When we first get
written records, I-Ir and Slavic were in contact, and ditto Baltic and Slavic
and both with Germanic.

Of course, this brings up the question of how far back there was a meaningful
degree of differentiation between these "entities", _except_ of course that
with the advantage of hindsight we can say that one cluster was going to move
in a direction which eventually produced, say, Proto-Germanic.

Since, for example, some of the innovations that define Proto-Germanic seem
to be quite recent -- Iron Age, judging by the development of the Celtic
loanwords for things like iron technology and some social terminology like
"king" or "servant" -- what would be the distinction between
pre-proto-Germanic and pre-Balto-Slavic in, say, 1500 or 2000 BCE?

Not a question that can be settled, of course, but interesting to
contemplate.  (My own guess would be "not much".)

>but after this change this branch seems to have become very conservative
>(Sanskrit, Slavic, Baltic).

-- here I would disagree, to a certain extent.  Baltic and Slavic yes; but
Indo-Iranian, no.  After all, Sanskrit appears conservative precisely because
the version we have was fossilized as a "learned" and liturgical language,
rather like Latin.  Its forms date from a very early period, analagous to
that of our Mycenaean and Hittite records.

As a _spoken_ language, the Sanskrit of the earliest Vedas is usually
assigned a second-millenium BCE date; and certainly the (admittedly scanty)
remains of Indo-Aryan from the Mittannian sources would support that, since
they're datable to around 1500 BCE or a little later.

Thus if we compare our reconstructed PIE with Sanskrit (1200 BCE) and
contemporary Lithuanian (2000 CE) we get a roughly comparable degree of
innovation... but 3000 years + more time between PIE and Lithuanian than
between PIE and Rig-Vedic Sanskrit.

When we compare contemporary Lithuanian with contemporary Indo-Iranian
languages -- with Urdu, say, or modern Farsi -- the Baltic example looks to
be in another category altogether!

>(actually, one of the other Baltic languages, like Old Prussian or Curonian,
>may have been even more conservative, but since little or nothing of them
>survive it is not possible to say).

-- very true; entropy strikes again.  On the other hand, if you run Latvian
backward, you get a proto-language very much like Lithuanian!   Plus, of
course, we know that much of the territory now occupied by Latvian was
originally Uralic.

>But again (or still) this doesn't say anything specific about where they
>started out geographically except that Baltic was always in close proximity
>to Slavic.

-- not definitively, no.

However, at the earliest historic attestation, Baltic was directly north of
Slavic and Slavic extended from east of the Vistula into the forest-steppe of
the Ukraine.  The relationship of Baltic and Slavic and the lack of
identifiable substrata other than some influence from Uralic _and_ the
presence of Baltic river-names in the eastern and northeastern areas later
colonized by Slavic (Russian and Beorussian particularly) would argue that
they had occupied both this relative position _and_ their respective actual
territories for a very, very long time.

>But the presence of more archaic lexical items and fewer obvious substrate
>borrowings could equally well be a result of the refusal of the language to
>accept loans as of its still being in its original home.

-- quite true; we know, for example, that Anglo-Saxon ended up in England due
to migration and supplanted a Brythonic-Celtic language (and Latin), but you
couldn't prove it by linguistics alone.  11th-century Anglo-Saxon, the Wessex
dialect specifically, was still an extremely ordinary West Germanic language
and probably fully mutually comprehensible with its near kin in the Low
Countries.  It was still marginally mutually comprehensible with
Scandinavian, for that matter.   And there were very few Celtic loan-words --
about 12, if I remember correctly.

So the archaism and lack of non-IE loanwords in the Baltic languages _by
itself_ would not be a firm indication of anything, as you say.  However,
when taken in _combination_ with other factors, we're in somewhat different
territory.

Eg., Anglo-Saxon/Old English is geographically peripheral to the main mass of
the Germanic languages, with salt water in between, and there -are- a number
of Celtic place-names in its territory, increasing in number as you move
west.  Even if one knew nothing about the history prior to 1000 CE, you'd
still have enough for an informed guess that Anglo-Saxon was a fairly recent
offshoot of the main Germanic zone. (And, taking in similar evidence from the
Continent, that Germanic in general had been expanding at the expense of
Celtic and Romance.)

>English, on the other hand, just gobbles up loanwords and neologisms
>regardless of whether they violate English phonotactics or not (e.g.,
>aardvark, gnu, syzygy).  This is simply not a function of how close these
>respective languages are to their original homelands.

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

Interestingly enough, English only became exceptionally open to loan-words
after the Norman Conquest.  Prior to that, Old English was notably resistant
to foreign lexical influence.

>If we didn't have a historical record of the situation, the argument of
>conservatism plus lack of substratum influence could, other things being
>equal, be used to claim that Iceland is the original Scandinavian homeland.

-- good point.

Although there, we know that there was no prior population -- and my original
argument was that Baltic probably entered an area not far away from the
_urheimat_ ... _and_ one which was very thinly populated.  (What's now the
eastern part of the Baltic was late being neolithicized, if memory serves me
correctly.)

>Negative evidence cannot be used to construct specific scenarios. Negative
>evidence only means that there is no evidence.

-- it's not demonstrative, as positive evidence is.  However, I think it can
be legitimately used _in conjunction_ with other supporting evidence to say
that one of a number of alternative explanations is more likely than another.

As Holmes said, the crucial thing was what the dog did in the night.  When
Watson pointed out that the dog had done nothing in the night, he replied:
"Exactly."