The Neolithic Hypothesis (Germanic)

[Robert Whiting]

On Mon, 19 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>In a message dated 4/13/99 3:02:01 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote:

><<Ah, I get it now.  The Ur-Germans were too poor to afford new
>words and too primitive to think up their own so they were just
>stuck with what they had.  I can see it all now:>>

>I didn't catch this when it came on the list.

Not surprising; you seem to have missed a lot (including an
epistemology course in college).

>And B-T-W that's not what I wrote.  And I'm sure the writer is
>aware of that.

Okay, so you don't know what "irony" means either, which is shown
both by your misunderstanding of my use of the term and your own
misuse of it.  Yes, that is not what you wrote, it is what I
wrote with a large "irony" label in front of it.  Again, for the
lexically challenged, irony is "1. a figure of speech in which
the literal meaning of a locution is the opposite of that
intended" or "2. an utterance or the use of words to express a
meaning which is different from, and often the direct opposite
of, the literal meaning."  Now the purpose of the "irony" label
was to alert readers to the fact that what was said was not what
was meant.  But one cannot expect anyone who doesn't know what
"irony" means to understand that.  So to make it clear at last,
the purpose of the "ironic" dialogue was to ridicule the idea
that "poor" and "primitive" cultures use "poor" and "primitive"
languages, which you have advanced as an explanation for the
archaisms in Germanic languages.

>Let's go to our [ironic] Ur friends to get back on track:

I'm afraid that your Ur-friends are not ironic, but merely
sarcastic.  And since you seem to think that irony and sarcasm
are the same thing, for those who don't understand the
difference my Webster's says "Irony differs from sarcasm in
greater subtlety and wit.  In sarcasm ridicule or mockery is used
harshly, often crudely and contemptuously, for destructive
purposes."  So as long as you are using your Ur-friends to say
what you actually think, you are not being ironic, but just
sarcastic.

>Ur-Hans:  UF, why is whiting at cc.helsinki.fi talking about
>handshoes when he should be talking about "archaisms" the way
>Miguel used the term in those earlier posts?

>Ur-Fritz:  I don't know, Hans-to-be.  Perhaps
>whiting at cc.helsinki.fi is avoiding the issue.

Ersatz Ur-Fritz should have continued:  Or perhaps the man behind
the curtain who is operating our switches and levers doesn't
realize that 'handshoe' is an archaism or understand what irony
is.  It's a pity he didn't catch Miguel's answer to his earlier
question when it came on the list or he might not be making us
say such ridiculous things as if we really believed them.

And Ersatz Ur-Hans should have replied:  Yes, he does seem to
miss a lot, and I find it embarrassing saying such silly things
when they aren't ironic, but do you mean Miguel's answer when the
man behind the curtain said:

     And what about "peripheral conservatism?"  Isn't that really
     a matter of distance or what is peripheral about?

and Miguel replied on Mon, 29 Mar 1999:

     It's about location.  There are indeed cases where location
     (geography) matters.  We expect "archaisms" to turn up in
     peripheral, or mountainous areas, where isogloss waves do
     not travel so fast or so often.  But that doesn't mean that
     "peripheral" languages don't change: they do, and the
     changes often look very striking (odd, bizarre), precisely
     because they are shared by no-one else.  And it doesn't mean
     that archaisms cannot survive in central areas.  They do.

And Ersatz Ur-Fritz would have replied:  Yes, that's what I mean.
If he had seen that he would have realized that "archaisms" don't
necessarily have to be connected with isolation.  He would have
realized that different areas that are not in direct and regular
contact don't necessarily have more archaisms than the other
area, they just have different ones because the languages aren't
necessarily developing in the same direction and that peripheral
areas may be affected by different factors such as language loyalty
in the face of pressure from neighboring areas of distinctly
different languages that core areas don't have.  And I think it
is funny that he seems to see a connection between "peripheral
conservatism" and "archaism" but can't make a connection between
"conservatism" and "archaism."

>Ur-Hans:  Well, if we were cut off from the so-called "innovative
>core" does that explain why we would compound words?

>Ur-Fritz:  The Greeks used compounds and recycled words all the
>time.  No, it's probably just whiting at cc.helsinki.fi - that
>archaeological evidence was a bit too much.  Honest dialogue
>might address whether the idea of a cut-off is valid in terms of
>history and linguistics.  It's easier to just make us up than to
>actually address the evidence presented.

I'm sure Ur-Hans and Ur-Fritz are smart enough to realize that
compounding words is an archaic feature of IE and the fact that
it appears in so many IE languages is just a shared archaism.
And I'm sure they are also smart enough to realize that
compounding words is not the issue.  But I doubt that they are
smart enough to realize that the archaeological evidence is
simply irrelevant to language classification.

I have said this before, but it seems to be among the things
that you didn't catch, so I will say it again:  there is no
cultural artifact that is diagnostic of language except writing.
Without written records (that can be read) there is nothing that
can be said about the nature of a culture's language (or
languages) no matter how rich or poor the archaeological record
may be.  The most that you can say is that if there is
archaeological evidence for something then there was probably a
word for that something in the culture's language.  But without
inscriptional evidence, there is no way of telling what that word
might have been and thereby gaining a clue to the nature of the
language.

The fact that archaeology shows that a culture was "poor" or
"primitive" says absolutely nothing about the nature of the
language that it spoke.  "Poor" cultures do not speak "poor"
languages and "primitive" cultures do not speak "primitive"
languages.  In fact, there is no such thing as a "primitive"
language, at least not as far back as historical linguistics has
so far been able to reconstruct language.  To the extent that
every language fulfills the needs of the speech community that
uses it, all languages are equal.  If a linguistic community
finds a need to express something that the language has no
mechanism for expressing, a means of expressing it will be
developed.

Germanic is a branch of PIE.  PIE was not a "primitive" language.
Therefore Germanic is no more primitive than PIE was.  What
Germanic has is a number of archaisms that are not found in other
branches of IE.  The retention of archaisms does not mean that
the language is "primitive," it merely means that older forms
have been preserved.  Germanic also has a number of innovations
that other branches of IE do not have (e.g., Grimm's Law).  And
this is indeed an indication of isolation from other branches of
IE where these innovations did not occur.  But it is not an
indication of a "primitive" language.

Knowing a language can tell us a great deal about the culture
that used or uses it.  But no amount of archaeological evidence
of a culture that lacks inscriptional material can tell us
anything about the nature of the language(s) that the culture
used.  So there is no such thing as "honest dialogue" about what
archaeological evidence tells us about the nature of language.
The dialogue consists of only one word:  NOTHING.

What then of the various theories of Gimbutas, Renfrew, Mallory,
Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, et cetera, et cetera, that try to locate
the IE homeland and to connect the various branches of IE with
specific archaeologically identified cultures?  They are just
that, theories (or hypotheses) that attempt to identify various
archaeologically reconstructed cultures with various
linguistically reconstructed languages or language stages.
By now you should know that a hypothesis is an explanation put
forth to account for some group of observed phenomena.  These
hypotheses attempt to connect two sets of observed data that
have no observable connection.  That is, they try to link the
observed (reconstructed through observations) prehistoric
stages of languages with the observed prehistoric cultural
assemblages on the ground.

To do this, they must account for such things as the time-depth
that the linguistic reconstructions indicate, the other
(reconstructed) language groups that each of these languages or
language stages must have been in contact with during their
prehistory, and the geographic locations that the languages must
have been in for these contacts to have taken place at the proper
times.  Since these are hypotheses, they can never be "proved."
"Proof" could only come from the discovery of readable
inscriptional material, in which case these cultures would no
longer be "prehistoric."  They can only be confirmed to a level
that invites confidence that any particular hypothesis is more
likely than its rivals.  Ultimately the most acceptable
hypothesis will be the one that accounts for the greatest number
of observations in the most concise or parsimonious fashion.  But
no hypothesis is likely to be generally accepted unless it
accounts for all the observed data in a consistent and coherent
way.

But the very reason for this proliferation of hypotheses about
the identity of prehistoric languages with prehistoric cultures
stems from the fact that archaeological remains without
inscriptional material tell us absolutely nothing about the
nature of the language(s) involved.  If they did, there would be
no need for this mass of competing theories.  So advancing
archaeological evidence as an explanation for the nature of any
prehistoric (reconstructed) language is not even pseudo-science.
It is just drivel.

>Ur-Hans:  What was it that whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote?  Oh,
>here it is... <<Is it possible that Germanic peoples are simply
>conservative by nature, resisting change with a fervor...>>
>Although we will have to wait for re-contact with Greek culture
>to develop terms that have -ology in them, I'd bet my handshoe
>that is "pop sociology".

Generally speaking, conservatism is not a sociological phenomenon,
but a psychological one.  It refers to a certain type of mindset
that resists change.  If an entire culture is conservative, it
can become a sociological factor, but by and large cultures are
made up of conservative and non-conservative elements in varying
proportions (there are notable exceptions).  Some segments of a
society tend to be more conservative than others.  For instance
religions and the legal profession are usually conservative
(particularly in language usage, but frequently in other areas as
well), while merchants often are not (always looking for
something new to buy or sell and someone new to buy it from or
sell it to).  Those with a vested interest in the status quo
(e.g., hereditary nobility) tend to be conservative.  The "haves"
are almost always conservative; the "have-nots" are usually not.
Politicians are either conservative or ready for change depending
on whether they are in office at the moment or not.

Conservatism is almost always a conscious choice -- a refusal
to accept change (although it often also arises from simple
inertia if change requires action and no change doesn't).
Linguistic change is almost always unconscious.  That is, the
users of a language usually do not realize that a change is
taking place.  If a language retains a disproportionate number of
archaisms, it indicates that something in the speech community is
acting to block change.  Now it doesn't matter what it is that is
blocking change, because if conservatism is resistance to change
then a language that does not innovate is conservative by
definition.  But since language change is for the most part
unconscious and conservatism is a conscious choice, a
conservative language must be so by the conscious choice of its
users (simple inertia would allow the change to go through).
Therefore an archaic language implies a conservative speech
community.

>Ur-Fritz:  Or worse, Hans-someday.  If I'm right, we may actually
>be Ur-Danes and we Danes will learn not to like that "ubergeist"
>kind of talk.  But more importantly, Germanic is not
>conservative.

If Proto-Germanic has more than its share of archaisms then
Germanic is conservative by definition.  But some elements of
Germanic are more conservative than others.  It has been noted
elsewhere on the list that High German preserves the old case
system almost intact while all the other branches have innovated
it away in varying degrees.  That makes High German conservative
by definition.

It was also noted, quite correctly, that "the Pennsylvania Amish
did not feel they 'had to conform' and make English their native
tongue."  Again, resistance to change is conservatism, and while
this is not the only example to be had of a small language
community that has refused to adopt the language of a larger
language community by which it is surrounded, it is an example of
what is possibly the most conservative type of society one could
imagine.

So while it may be true that Germanic is not conservative in all
its present-day branches, there is clearly a conservative element
in Germanic that has been observable from prehistoric times down
to the present day.

>Even we know the functional difference between archaic and
>conservative.

It will save a lot of time if you will never claim that you know
what a word means or that you know the difference between the
meanings of words.  As a hypothesis, this simply does not account
for the observed facts.  Just use the words in a sentence that
has context and then we can tell if you know what they mean or
not.  But even if you know the difference between archaic and
conservative, you obviously don't know what the connection
between them is.  So again to the Webster's:

     conservative: tending to prefer an existing
     situation to change.

     archaic: surviving from an earlier period.

So, again, conservatism leads to archaism.  Being archaic and
conservative basically means being old-fashioned and liking it
that way.

Now "archaic" also has a meaning "of, relating to, or
characteristic of an earlier or more primitive time," so I can
see how you can come to the conclusion that "archaic" equates
to "primitive" and archaeological evidence of a "primitive"
culture accounts for the "archaic" nature of Germanic because
"primitive" cultures have "primitive" (= "archaic") languages.
And this conclusion would have been right in the mainstream in
the 18th or 19th century when nationalistic fervor had more to
say about language and culture than linguistic evidence did.
But it really won't make it at the end of the 20th century.

>Ur-Hans:  And us being poor and cut-off by the Celts from the
>south, isn't that sociology?

>Ur-Fritz:  No, it's called hard evidence about what happened in
>pre-history, proto-Hans.  It may explain certain features (but
>not handshoe) in Germanic -that whiting at cc.helsinki.fi doesn't
>care to address - in terms of "mutual contact" or lack of it.
>Cultural anthropologists, historians, archaeologist and linguists
>use the term.  Although sociology can use hard statistical
>evidence, you have to be rigorous or you'll end up saying very
>unscientific things like  <<Germanic peoples are simply
>conservative by nature, resisting change with a fervor...>>.
>That's pseudo-science.

I rather like your opposition of sociology and hard evidence, but
even the existence of hard evidence doesn't prove that something
is not sociological.  But then again, conservatism is not really
a sociological phenomenon unless it is a characteristic of a
society as a whole.  On the other hand, there is certainly no
shortage of examples of conservative societies.

>Ur-Hans:  Sounds like that could cause some trouble in the days ahead.

>Ur-Fritz:  Oh, it will, Hans.  It will.

>That's the latest [irony] from Ur-Steve Long

Unless you actually meant the opposite of what you said, it is
not irony.  But, sadly, I get the impression that you actually
did mean it, so it is just sarcasm.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi