European Genetics/IE

[Larry Trask]

--On Friday, June 1, 2001 4:34 pm -0500 philjennings at juno.com wrote:

> I would guess that linguistic rate-of-change would be at a
> maximum during the process [Joat Simeon] 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.

We can imagine a lower rate of change, but there seems to be no good
evidence for it.  Without some hard evidence, we have no right to assume
that linguistic change was any slower in the remote past than it has been
in the historical period.  Such an assumption would violate our linguistic
Uniformitarian Principle: languages and speakers in the remote past behaved
much as languages and speakers have behaved in the historical period.

And consider the case of Basque.  With Basque, it is only for the phonology
that we can track the language back as far as 2000 years.  But we can do
this much, and the results are interesting.  Almost all of the big changes
in Basque pronunciation seem to have occurred in the early Middle Ages,
roughly AD 800-1200.  At that time, the Basque Country was a rural
backwater, largely cut off from the great political and social currents
sweeping across western Europe.  After 1200, though, most of the country
was absorbed by Castile.  It was at this time that the Basques began to
acquire their reputation as formidable seafarers, developing fishing,
whaling and trade.  They began to play an important role in Spanish
affairs, and they played a great part in the Spanish discovery and
settlement of the Americas.  Basque society was transformed by massive
emigration; Basque ports became bustling and prosperous; shipbuilding
became a great Basque industry, as did iron and steel, and eventually
manufacturing.  Yet, during all of these remarkable political, social and
economic transformations, the pronunciation of the language scarcely
changed at all.  Moreover, the scraps of evidence that we have suggest that
the rich and distinctive Basque morphology has not changed significantly
since the 9th century, at least.

So, in the Basque case, rate of social change does not appear to correlate
at all with rate of linguistic change.  It appears that the language
changed fastest when it was spoken in a stable and largely closed society,
but much less rapidly after it was caught up in dramatic social changes.

> 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?

To the best of my knowledge, no language yet reconstructed looks like a
creole.  That doesn't mean that such an outcome is impossible, of course,
but so far it seems not to have happened.

> 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.

Well, not necessarily.  Today there are nearly 7000 mother tongues.  Of
these, probably no more than a few dozen are creoles (I exclude pidgins),
even though the European expansion of several centuries ago created
exceptionally favorable circumstances for creole-formation in several parts
of the world.  If fewer than one percent of today's languages are creoles,
we should not be surprised to find that creoles were not exactly thick on
the ground in the remote past.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)