Neanderthal and PIE (Long!)

Andreas Johansson skrev:
> Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:
>
>> "Neanderthal" is too well-ingrained for me to have a problem with it,
>> as I've known the word for over 30 years.  I still automatically
>> pronounce it with a /T/ instead of a /t/, though..
>
> Tangentially, the Swedish is _neandertalare_, with a suffix that, among other
> functions, forms gentilics, like _stockholmare_ "Stockholmer". As a kid,
> however, I misanalyzed it as a compound ending in _talare_ "speaker" (same
> ending, here agentive).
Small minds think alike!  My German-speaking mother
quickly took me out of the misconception, however!

> I don't remember if I had any theory of what a _neander_
> might be or how one goes about speaking it,
It was the name of their language of course!
In my young mind the necessity of linguistic
diversity over a vast expanse of time and space
hadn't emerged.  After all whole planets had one
language each in the comic books! :-)

> but I certainly took for granted
> that neander-speakers must have had a language!
And I still do!

In my teens I made up a con-historical scenario
in which Modern Man developed in Atlantis and invaded
Eurasia and the Americas only when Atlantis began to
sibmerge due to the geological effects of tectonic
drift in the mid Atlantic, but once they did they
quickly overwhelmed the Neanderthalers -- I even
anachronistically had the Atlanteans call the to
them newly discovered Neanderthalers 'New Men',
a name which they had accidentally reapplied to
themselves in modern times when their remains were
discovered in a place named after a man named
Neumann (Graecized Neander)! Incidentally I also
made up some further even more improbable ingredients,
so that hybrids of Atlanteans and Neanders were
usually infertile (like horse/donkey or lion/tiger
hybrids) but also had their biological clocks
severely messed up, so that they may mature or
age extremely quickly or slowly, or have extremely
short or long lifespans -- these two factors of
aging and lifespan being independent of each other,
so that some may e.g. become senile early and then
live on in that state for centuries, while others
were sempijuvenile.  Also they could have different
degrees of Atlantean or Neandrian physical features,
or even features exaggerated in one or the other
direction.  These sterile hybrids -- by necessity
decimated through the centuries once the Neanders died
out, although some found they could interbreed
with humans but not with each other -- of course
became the Elves, Dwarves, Trolls and gods of the
later human mythologies.  To ensure the dying out
of the Neanders and hybrids alike I had the god-
emperor Dyaus (translated Wôdon in the dominant
Neander language!) outlaw interbreeding, because
he didn't want any more competing 'immortals'
created, as well as launching a genocidal policy
towards the Neanders, whom he renamed Gigantes.
All this in spite of himself being a hybrid
(Titan).  All similarities with a certain
modern dictatorial 'world-conqueror' were
non-coincidental -- only Dyaus was unfotunately
successful in his suprematist policies!
I even had a South American intelligent species
developed along similar lines as humans but from
feline rather than primate stock. They had the
habit of dispatching their dead in a cannibalistic
fashion, which explained the rarity of skeletal
remains -- bones being crushed and burned.
Of course these Jaguar-men survived only in
remote places and only if they were more human-like
in appearance...


Jim Henry skrev:
 > On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 4:03 PM, Michael Poxon
<mike@...> wrote:
 >> Possibly silly way out of this (almost equally
 >> silly!) mess? Make what we call Neanderthals a
 >> stranded group of aliens - hence the
 >> anthropological discontinuity as well - who
 >> live an awfully long time and breed only after
 >> a long time as well, so language change is much
 >> slower and more gradual. At the same time it
 >> would be an opportunity for a SF scenario,
 >> quite popular I understand. that posits we
 >> ourselves are alien offspring!
 >
 > To make that halfway plausible, you would have
 > to posit that the aliens terraformed themselves
 > to be able to live in Earth gravity, atmosphere,
 > etc., digest nutrients found in Earth plants and
 > animals, etc; borrowing a heap of DNA from the
 > smartest animals they could find, improving on
 > it and making sure the resulting brains had
 > enough room for their minds.
 >

So?  Once you've allowed for such a vastly
improbable thing as interstellar travel you
might allow for any amount of genetic engineering,
including extreme longevity in order to be
able to perform interstellar travel
within one lifetime, which would explain how
the aliens could pose as divine and impose their
language on Terran humans.

Such engineered longevity would also explain
an extremely slow rate of linguistic change,
though that is doubtful, given the amount of change
we now know a person's linguistic habits undergo
within one human lifespan.

Tolkien actually
adressed the issue how the language of quasi-
immortal beings could change similarly to those
of mortal Men, and concluded that although the
rate of change was normally slower in Elves'
language language was by nature changeful, and
that Elves actually progressively forgot their
own earlier linguistic habits and remembered
their past experiences as if they had already then
spoken as they did at the time of recall!  He
even hints at the surprisingly modern view that
the rate of linguistic change increases in times
of social upheaval, migration and war -- which
probably was observable to someone who had studied
the history of English as deeply as he had!

Once you have allowed for interstellar travel
and genetically engineered longevity you may as
well allow that the aliens actually seek out
destinations that are geophysically and ecologically
similar to their home world.  In fact I have a
good hunch that life on earth-like planets will
be similar exactly because the planets are
physically similar -- indeed that life will
naturally emerge on any planet with similar
conditions to earth, and that that life will
be vastly similar or even with necessity similar,
and very probably that life is only possible
under earth-like conditions.

Disclaimer: I'm not a scientist, and this is
not science. (However I'm a Buddhist, and the
Buddha is said to have stated that there is
life similar to that of our world in distant
worlds within the astronomically large spatial
domain called a 'Buddha Field' -- a galaxy or
something even larger?)

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
  à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
  ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
  c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)