Lactose Intolerance/Renfrew

JoatSimeon at aol.com JoatSimeon at aol.com
Tue Apr 17 23:18:23 UTC 2001


In a message dated 4/17/01 5:09:10 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> My original point was of course that, under those circumstances, there would
> be plenty of good reason to expect Anatolian IE to "look intrusive", but not
> actually be intrusive.

-- no.  The pattern of relationships between Anatolian and non-IE languages
in Anatolia is that which one would expect from an intrusive language.

Eg., the pattern of Hattic loan-word distribution in Hittite/Neshite; and
Hittite can be shown through the historical sources to have replaced Hattic
in a clear case of language succession.

What's more, the further you go back with the historical sources, the smaller
the area covered IE languages in Anatolia; the replacement of Urartian by
Armenian, for example, and of most of the Hurrian-speaking areas by
Indo-Iranian. (Or Semitic, further south.)

The historical data doesn't go all the way back, but what we do have
indicates that Anatolia in the early Bronze Age was largely non-Indo-European
speaking; and that historically attested IE languages came in from the west
and east via migration.

Furthermore, PIE lacks vocabulary to describe common Anatolian plant and
animal terms; olives and lions, just to take two examples.  If Anatolian were
indigenous, one would expect to find it with a native vocabulary for these,
and that vocabulary to be preserved in areas (eg., Greece) with similar biota.



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