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Re: Contemporaneous protolanguages

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Saturday, September 25, 2004, 7:51
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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Rodlox <rodlox@...>
Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>