The Single *PIE Village Theory

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/27/2001 4:35:07 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< Not at all. What you have forgotten while gathering the woodpile is that my
example involved members of the same tribe. In modern North America, such a
community corresponds roughly to a village like "Mayberry" with its
surrounding farmland, not to the entire eastern USA. If a single village
actually exhibited such a wide variety of terms for the same tree, it would
be a major dysfunction indeed,...>>

Earlier DGK wrote:
<< I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent? >>

What's interesting in this and the quote above is the notion that *PIE is
being located in a single village.

Is this the current thinking on the geographic distribution of *PIE during
the time it was *PIE (as against Pre-PIE or PIE in the process of breaking
up)?

Does anyone on the list have a problem with this view?  Mallory talks about
the territorial size needed for PIE but I seem to remember it was a bit
larger than one village.

In any case, my problem with this, with regard to the history of the yew word
is simple.  What happens when the village/tribe splits up and a part moves to
a new location, not far away, and there are yew trees there?  They still
speak the same language, but now some of them have the yew (and yew word) and
some don't?  Does this mean that the next extension out of the original
village could discover the yew on its own and give it even another name?  And
so forth?  So that by the time we hit the first 20 IE speaking villages, most
coming from the yewless core, we could have twenty different names for the
yew?

I think that what would happen - as the yew proved useful for different
purposes - is that trade words would develop that traveled not with the
language but with the products and processes.  So even after *PIE split up,
there would still be new common words to be shared by the newly distinct
languages, perhaps even before the particular sound changes that occurred
later in the yew word(s).

<<If you and I belong to the same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call
trees in the next valley, then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you
really believe that
prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent? >>

I posted (6/14/2001 12:04:03 PM) under the title "The Yew and The Native
Guide" the research that says that this is probably wrong.  In fact, the
functionality of language demands a little more than connecting a word to a
tree, since that is plainly not how language works at this level.  The
members of a pre-literate village share names and give names on an as-needed
basis and functionality may give different names to the same object or the
same name to different objects as is necessary.  To do otherwise would be
dysfunctional.  Specialists only need to know specialized knowledge such as
specific tree terms and to have it otherwise would be a misallocation of
resources.  If we all had to learn the exact meaning of all plant and
plant-related words in English, we'd spend many years doing nothing else.

Regards,
Steve Long