European Genetics/IE

philjennings at juno.com philjennings at juno.com
Fri Jun 1 21:34:09 UTC 2001


My fondness for half-assed pronunciamentos has served me well, as I grow
educated thanks to the kindly and informative rebuttals of people like
JoatSimeon and Steve Long.  I have read the two papers that Steve Long
mentioned a few steps back along this topic and now realize that the same
genetic information can be used to argue that the neolithic Anatolian-
farmer contribution to the European gene pool amounts to (1) ten percent
and (2) two-thirds.  Since experts draw such varied conclusions from the
same body of data, perhaps we're not yet ready to use their findings in
support of one origins-theory or the other.  My inclination, therefore, is to
take back much of what I've said recently on this topic.  Someone better
equipped than I to sort among genetics papers may return to enlighten us
all, and I will be very interested when that happens.

I find the JoatSimeon emails very interesting, esp. the one regarding
memes and their reproduction/progression from phratry A through
bruderbund Z.  I would guess that linguistic rate-of-change would be at a

maximum during the process he describes.  How could it be otherwise?
Yet the end result consists of IE daughter dialects still mutually
intelligible
in many cases.  Could we possibly agree that before this process began,
when PIE was a genetic language (comparatively unexposed to outside
factors) rather than a radical way-of-life language, it may have loitered

along at a much slower rate of change?  And this must have been
s-l-o-o-o-w indeed, given that even during the meme-transmission era,
battle-axes and such, the rate of change doesn't seem to have been all
that fast.  Warp two versus warp one.  Warp three during the iron age
and into classical times?  Warp four thereafter until the spread of
nation-
states and printing-press literacy?

(Things get clouded afterward.  Linguistic innovations bring languages and
cultures together as much as they set them apart, we get meldings and
French Academies as well as schisms.)

I am still curious whether any proto-language requiring reconstruction, has
ever been reconstructed as a creole?  Not PIE, JoatSimeon says, but what about
proto-Sino-Tibetan, or proto-Dravidian, or any of the other protoi?  Because if
the answer is a universal no, is that really likely?  The world must have been
a different kind of place than it is now.  But that's the idea I'm toying with
in the paragraphs above, with all that talk about "warp factors."  The world
was different, and rates-of-change were slower.



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