IE and Substrates and Time

[Lena Pechorina]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

> 1. Why do we assume that the IE languages would not act precisely like the
> non-IE languanges and splinter into extremely local variations?

That's a very good question.

> The theory that says that either PIE or the standard IE protolanguages were
> being spoken in Europe in even 2500BC requires a very small number of
> language groups to put a hold on localization for a millenium while Hittite,
> Sanskrit and Mycenean were just getting ready to rear their heads as the
> first historically identifiable IE languages.

> What was holding them together as one language or perhaps a set of no more
> than what?, four or five proto-languages for a thousand years?

It strikes me that the Indo-European-speaking peoples must have had
some advantage in terms of time or resources to have become so
dominant on the European continent. If they arrived relatively late
and from the steppe, would they have had the numbers to colonize
(conquer) all of Europe in the subsequent 1000 years?

I think the view (I think it's one of the traditional views) that IE
matured in the Danube Valley makes a lot of sense and may partially
answer your question regarding linguistic integrity. The Danube River
Valley is a fairly extensive region, but it is semi-steppe with
excellent lines of communication. If the Neolithic and Copper Age
really did take root here at an early period (7000-4000BC), then the
area might have supported a fairly large and advanced culture by the
time the first horsemen arrived from the steppe. The population of the
Danube River would have been disproportionately large compared to the
rest of Europe, thus providing mass for later migrations.

Suppose the Indo-Europeans arrived around 3000 BC, with horses, and
were able to conquer this proto-civilization. Even if the arrival of
horses meant greater instability and the subsequent decline of Danube
culture, the conditions would have been in place to maintain a single
language (or at least related dialects), and pass it on to a much
larger population. Factors favoring linguistic stability would include
natural geographical borders of the Danube Valley itself, extensive
trade, and the common ancestry of the ruling elites. Some satellite
Indo-European tribes might have maintained their nomadic existence
both in and off the Danube Valley. These might have included such
groups as the Indo-Aryans. With horses, they could have easily crossed
the entire Ukrainian Steppe to Asia in one generation or even in one
year. Wide-ranging mobility has always been a fact of horse-raising
steppe cultures, and steppe chronologies which show gradual movements
over thousands of years do not convince me either. Their incentive to
do so might have been the gradual breaking up of the Danube
proto-civilization. The same could be true for other migrations:
rising competition for resources in the overpopulated and increasingly
violent Danube Valley could have been responsible for many of the
subsequent migrations which established new cultures in Asia Minor,
Greece and the Alps.

I'm not a linguist or an archaeologist, so if something I said seems
far-fetched, I'd be interested to hear why.

Steven Zettner