Re: Contemporaneous protolanguages

From:    "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
> Suppose you could go back in time to when Proto-Indo-European
> was spoken in the Caucasus or wherever we think it was these days.
There are still lots of people who think that PIE was spoken in
the Ukrainian steppe, or somewhat south of that, but these people
have never given a plausible explanation for how the language
actually spread. Maria Gimbutas' vision of patriarchal warlike
hordes sweeping off the steppes into the Balkans and thence to
Anatolia is thankfully dying off, but nothing entirely convincing
has arisen to replace it. IMO, the homeland must be somewhere
situated near the Caucasus to explain very early borrowings
into Kartvelian and Northwest Caucasian; these are convincing
enough that some people (e.g. John Colarusso) posit a Pontic
family consisting of PIE and PNWC. Of course Renfrew and Gamqrelidze
have said the Urheimat is in Anatolia about 7-9k years BP, but they
are still the minority.

> Would a quick trip down to the Middle East find a culture of people
> speaking Proto-Afroasiatic at the same time?  And what would the
> people in Eastern Asia be speaking at this point?
My understanding is that PAA is usually situated far to the South,
somewhere near the Red Sea.  It's clear that Akkadian started
arriving from southward into Sumerian-speaking lands, and the
overall center of gravity of PAA is along the Red Sea, but other
than these facts I don't know anything very specific about it.

As far as Anatolia, many people (most notably Diakonoff and Starostin)
have proposed connections between Hattic, spoken in or around Hattusas,
and NWC, and the same have suggested that Hurro-Urartean, spoken in
an area centered on modern Armenia, are related to NEC.  I can't
speak with any authority about the link between Hattic and NWC,
but I can say that the similarities between HU and NEC are rather
striking. To this protofamily, D-S have given the name Alarodian
after the Alarodii in Herodotos. OTOH, in a list of about 100 or so
putative cognates D-S came up with, many are weird semantically, and
it should in principle make an honest historical linguist uncomfortable
to posit the collapse of 80-someodd distinct consonant protophonemes
into about 25-30 of HU without very strong evidence to that effect.
Gene Gragg, Ilya Yakubovich and I came to the conclusion last year that
the best evidence comes from the morphology of the verb and from the
pronominal system.  If there is any reality to this proposal (and it
has drawn howls from Caucasologists), I think Alarodian must have split
into P-HU and then into PNEC, contrary to what D-S say. Given that
PNEC is usually said to be about as old as PIE, then that must put
Alarodian at at least 7-10ky BP.

Another family about which I am almost totally unqualified to speak
is Elamite.  All I know is that they say it's not related to any known
language (with the possible exception of Brahui).

> Presumably there wouldn't be anyone at all in the Americas yet . . .
I think others have already pointed out that they were probably there
for a long, long time.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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