Re: Indo-European family tree (was Re: Celtic and Afro-Asiatic?)

Andreas wrote:
> Joerg wrote:
> > Andreas wrote:
> > > That still leaves it unexplained i) what allowed the Celts to
> > > replace whatever preceded them in most of Gaul and Britain,
> >
> > What allowed the Anglo-Saxons to replace Celtic and Latin in Britain?
>
> Being the language of the new rulers, I suppose. That Latin was the language of
> the elite, but Celtic (presumably) that of most of the population may have
> helped by leaving the former without a demographic basis after the old elite
> was replaced and the later without prestige.
I'm sorry that I haven't been following this thread very closely;
I've been busy with a new job and a class to TA and I have a paper
due to the LFG people in Bergen in 15 mins.  Basically, I think I
addressed most of the basic sociolinguistic issues behind the two
primary schools of thought on the issue, and concluded that the
sociolinguistics behind Renfrew is less question-begging than
Gimbutas' theory.  I also specifically addressed what happened in
Britain:  it is more or less now accepted that the Anglo-Saxons
exterminated most of the Romano-Celtic population in Britain almost as
far as Wales and up into Mercia. IIRC,  there are some suggestions
to that effect in Bede, and the old Roman city centers more or less
cease to function in the fifth century, with a few exceptions like
Eboracum and Londinium. It is assumed IIRC that the populations therein
were either killed or ethnically cleansed westward. (There is an
excellent book on this subject:  _Arthur's Britain_, by  Leslie Alcock,
which despite the title has no patience for myth-mongering and is
very serious about all the primary sources and even more serious
about the archaeological data.)

As for Rome, to repeat myself from a week ago, it is precisely those
parts of the empire where the imperial government instituted military
colonies, which were concentrated more in the west than the East
that became most Latin-speaking. It is no coincidence that it was
also these areas that were less populous to begin with, and thus
more susceptible to demographic pressures from an introduced language
community.

> I wouldn't think that the Celtic immigrants to Britain had even the primitive
> state systems of the Anglo-Saxons, but I suppose the imposition of a
> prestigious warrior aristocracy (which the Celts by all accounts had) could
> have the same effect.
I have argued that this Gimbutas-style argument totally ignores the
real questions of language replacement:  it assumes (naively) that
pure force is sufficient, in any age, to achieve any real kind of
language change, whether that be prescriptive correction of their
own language, or imposing a wholly separate one on a conquered
population.  Things in known historical circumstances simply haven't
worked that way, so IMHO there's no reason to assume it would in
prehistory either.

> But this happening *consistently* over most of Europe seems to be a tad much to
> explain by the IEans simply being more aggressive. One'd be inclined to think
> it would require some more concrete advantage; some more efficient social
> organization, perhaps.
Social organization is part of language replacement, but only
part.  One could argue that the Arabs had less sophisticated
social and governmental institutions than the Byzantines, but
Arabic is now the dominant language in the Levant, Egypt and
Mesopotamia, not Aramaic or Greek.  Rather, Arabic-speaking
tribes had been increasingly inhabiting more and more of the
eastern frontiers of the Empire for centuries before the battle
of Yarmuk, since at least when Philip the Arab (briefly) became
emperor in the third century. And note that Arabic even then
only slowly predominated over the other languages;  Greek and
Syriac were the de facto language of administration for over a
century after the Arab conquest.

> > You don't need an empire to conquer your neighbours (unless those
> > neighbours are highly organized); bands of warriors can do so.
> > And the examples of Anglo-Saxon England and Indo-Aryan India show
> > that such conquests *can* lead to language replacement.
>
> What I feel needs some special explanation is that the IEans succeeded in
> inflicting language replacement over almost all of Europe; the Anglo-Saxons,
> after all, was close enough to the *only* Migrations Age Germanic people who
> succeeded in replacing the previous languages in the area they occupied.
It's possible that the Vandals also succeeded in replacing Latin as
the common language of north Africa, and the Slavs mostly did in Dalmatian
somewhat later.  In both cases, Latin may have been locally more of an
administrative language used by elites and Berber or some unknown Dalmatian
language (or languages) spoken by the common man. At any rate, I agree that
something more than conquest is necessary, and it is for that reason that
I so strongly disagree with Gimbutas et al.

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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
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