IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Dr. John E. McLaughlin]

> Rick Mc Callister
> 	You're talking about massive upheavals triggered by the arrival of
> major imperialist powers possessing overwhelming technical
> advantages. This
> was not an everyday occurrence. Of course there were major migrations in
> South Africa and the Americas after Europeans arrived --but because of
> extraordinary events.

> Responding to Joat Simeon

>>>Myself, I'd say that since population movements of various sorts (conquests,
>>>folk-migrations, refugees, colonizations, etc.) are common as dirt in the
>>>historical record as far back as we can see, and since they're also common
>>>in preliterate societies whenever these come under the observation of
>>>literate observers (18th and 19th-century Africa is full of them, for
>>>instance) then we have to assume that this was the case in prehistory.

Rick is right and wrong in responding to Joat.  He is right in saying that
massive migrations and conquest are often related to technological
developments and are not everyday occurrences.  After the introduction of
the horse into western North America in the 18th century, the Comanche moved
from Wyoming to Texas and wiped out the Plains Apache there.  After the
introduction of the gun into northeastern North America, the Ojibwa expanded
to the west driving everyone else before them--the Dakota, the Cheyenne, the
Arapaho.  When these displaced exiles ran into the sedentary tribes along
the Missouri River and the Kiowa in the central Plains, they drove these
tribes into smaller and smaller agricultural settlements and out of the area
entirely (the Kiowa wound up being caught in a vise between the Comanche and
the northern Plains invaders).  In a nonconquest development, the Iroquois
confederacy virtually depopulated the regions north and south of Lakes Erie
and Ontario to the point that linguists have no clue as to who lived south
of the lakes and along the upper Ohio River just before the arrival of the
Europeans.

Rick is incorrect when he tries to tie this only to "overwhelming technical
advantages" and linking it to the modern era.  There are many premodern
examples of a people overrunning and overwhelming an older people--the Aryan
invasion of India, the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, the Roman conquest
of southern and western Europe, the movement of the Southern Athapaskans
from Canada to Arizona where they drove out native Pueblo and Papago
farmers, the movement of the Aztecs into Central Mexico, and the spread of
the Bantu in sub-Saharan Africa.  These were all violent conquests that
involved massive displacement and assimilation of older populations.  None
of them can be considered to have happened in modern times.  Most of them
involved no overwhelming technological advantage.

While not necessarily and "everyday occurrence", conquest and depopulation
is not a strictly modern event.  The events have become more global in scale
as transport is easier, but that is only a matter of scale, not of whether
or not similar things have happened in the past.  There are various kinds of
evidence that demonstrate these events--the Pygmies still exist in Central
Africa, but they now speak Bantu languages; there is an identifiable layer
of substrate vocabulary from the Baltic Coast inhabitants in Germanic; there
are historical records of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England and the Roman
conquests; there are archeological records of the Babylonian expansion in
the ancient Near East and the spread of Aramaic with it; there are folklore
accounts of the invasions of the Aryans and Aztecs; there is linguistic
evidence for the invasion of Bantu and the Athapaskan move south.  The only
difference between modern man, ancient man, and prehistoric man is one of
scale.

NOTE:  In an earlier post, someone mentioned "Lois and Clark".  It should be
"Lewis and Clark" of course.  "Lois and Clark" was an hour-long U.S. TV
series in the mid-1990s about Superman and Lois Lane.  It was also a cartoon
strip in the newspapers.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
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