Lactose Intolerance/Renfrew

JoatSimeon at aol.com JoatSimeon at aol.com
Wed Apr 18 00:04:55 UTC 2001


In a message dated 4/17/01 5:37:20 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> But again why couldn't Hattic be intrusive?

-- doesn't fit the evidence.  Hattic influence on Hittite bears all the marks
of a classic substrate language; and one with a higher degree of
social/technological development than its successor, at that.

>    Any other language you find in Anatolia could have just as easily
> intruded on     Anatolian.

-- no.  There are usually fairly clear indications of the direction of
influence.  The vocabulary Hittite acquired from Hattic relates mainly to
"high culture" items; government, urban life, religious cult, etc.  (Words
for throne, lord, queen mother, libation, etc.)

But the area that later became the Hittite heartland had had urbanism for a
very, very long time.

To suppose that Anatolian was indigenous and Hattic intrusive, one would have
to postulate a series of migrations and counter-migrations involving the
Hittites first vacating the area, losing their vocabulary for these items,
and then coming back to territory occupied in the interim by the
Hattic-speakers and picking up a different vocabulary.

It's inherently implausible; the phrase "Rube Goldberg" comes to mind.

A simple succession of Hittite over Hattic explains all the observable data
with much greater parsimony.  The alternative is another "solution without a
problem".

Hattic also shows some relation to the North Caucasian languages, which is
exactly what one would expect, since it's geographically close to them.

>   So now there's not even evidence in the Ukraine.  So, as far as I can tell,
> there's no evidence of "horse-riding" in all of Europe much before around
> 1500BC.

-- this is ridiculous.  Apart from the fact that radiocarbon data from the
Dereivka horse (the skull, specifically) dates to around 3000 BCE, the
domestic horse is widespread in Beaker culture contexts in Europe, 2500 BCE
and earlier, and throughout the Eurasian steppe zone rather earlier than
that, with full-blown chariots before 2000 BCE.

The spread of the horse of  course involved both domesticated horses being
moved, and local wild horses being domesticated.

> The wheel just plain seems to go the other way.  The Near East, Poland, the
> Danube, then into the Ukraine.

-- the diffusion of the wheel is simply too rapid to determine where things
started.

Again, why keep trying to torture the evidence this way?



More information about the Indo-european mailing list