Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE)

[Sean Crist]

On Sun, 17 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

>>  ... Verb conjugations, etc. only spread when speakers move.

> This is precisely the position which Renfrew attacks.  And, to be fair, it is
> not difficult to point to cases in which prestige languages have spread,
> displacing earlier languages, without massive population movements.

I'm wondering what cases you've got in mind; in all the ones I can think
of (Prussian, Oscan, etc.), the area to which the language spreads is
under some sort of political domination by the area from which the
language is spreading.  And this, in turn, involves some kind of military
movement, which is a sort of movement of speakers.

> But Renfrew has expressly argued that many of these words are not substrate
> words at all, but rather late borrowings into Greek long after Greece had
> become Greek-speaking.

I could potentially buy that in the case of words for cultural items, but
not in the case of the large number of non-Greek toponyms in Greece.

>>  -Most importantly, placing the initial dispersion of the Indo-Europeans at
>>  the beginning of the Neolithic around 6500 BCE in entirely incompatible
>>  with the reconstructed Indo-European vocabulary.  Words such as yoke,
>>  wheel, etc. are reconstructed for PIE, but this technology is not attested
>>  until much, much later- namely, not much after 4000-3500 BCE, which is the
>>  date which Mallory and others put forward as the final date of IE
>>  linguistic unity.

> This is exactly the point which troubles me the most.  But Renfrew has in
> fact met it head on in his latest paper on the issue, presented at a
> symposium in Cambridge last summer and due to be published in the proceedings
> early next year.

Well, I'll look forward to reading it.  It isn't available online
anywhere, is it?

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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