Anatolians

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>Renfrew's 7000 BC is too early [for PIE], Mallory's 4000 BC is
>too late [for Anatolian].

-- nope to the latter.  We know Renfrew's 7000 BCE is too early for PIE
because of the absence of the late-Neolithic innovations recorded in PIE in
7000 BCE.  However, that vocabulary _is_ there in Anatolian.

Therefore we can simply assume that Anatolian broke off from PIE around 4000
BCE.

Occam's Razor.

>The earliest we can push steppe influences in the Balkans back is
>c. 4200 BC.

-- that's perfectly sustainable for Anatolian.  After all, the pace of
linguistic change is scarcely uniform.  Look at Lithuanian and Sanskrit.

>As I have tried to explain in another message, the Germanic verbal system is
>highly archaic

-- or highly innovative.

>Proto-Germanic speakers assimilated a sizeable non-IE
>population, while B-S did not [the famous pre-Germanic
>substrate].

-- dubious in the extreme.  Eg., the First Vowel Shift in Germanic can be
securely dated to after 700 BCE, because Celtic ironworking loan-words in
Proto-Germanic underwent the shift.  They must therefore have been borrowed
before the shift took place, and couldn't possibly have been borrowed much
befoe the 7th century BCE because ironworking technology didn't penetrate
Central Europe until then.  QED.

The evidence would seem to indicate that Germanic only became really
distinctive after the late second millenium, and prior to that was still part
of a largely undifferentiated Late West Indo-European.

>It worked in the Balkans (as well as for instance the Indus-Ganges system)
>where population densities were high

-- and in the Iranian plateau, Afghanistan, etc.

>but too scattered and too disorganized economically and politically to
>provoke invasion.

-- or to resist drifting folk-migration motivated by internal division and
desire for territory.  IE-speaking tribe moves in, there are a few local
scuffles, then differential assimilation because the IE-speakers have social
mechanisms for assimilating outsiders as individuals. Migration =\= invasion,
if we think of the latter as rapid and organized.

>The situation in Europe differs from that in India in that the invadors, like
>the invaded, spoke IE languages

-- violently unlikely.  Since PIE is securely datable to the 4th millenium,
you've got it spread far too widely far too early.

Again, the steppe-origin theory accounts for all the observed facts and does
so with greater explanitory parsimony.