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

Leo wrote:
> > Except that it's not noticeably more complicated than the other
> > major alternatives.  In fact, Mallory's, which is only a more
> > sophisticated version of Gimbutas' (crazy) theories about
> > "Old Europe" (in which the evil warlike patriarchal Indo-Europeans
> > overran the peaceful agrarian matriarchal mother-goddess worshipping
> > pre-Indo-Europeans -- I'm actually not exaggerating here even for
> > effect; read her works) involves all sorts of invasions and movements,
> > so in some sense Mallory's view, which predominates, is the more
> > complicated.
>
> I'm familiar with Gimbutas' theories, thank you.
>
> I'm not even sure whether you're a supporter of Lord Renfrew's theory or
> if you're just playing advocatus diaboli here.  I suspect that your
> enthusiasm for it is only lukewarm, in any case, because I haven't seen
> you making any arguments in favor of it, only a lot of critique of the
> arguments against it.  I don't know where the IE "homeland" was, or if
> indeed one can be identified, but it strikes me that Renfrew's theories
> require a lot of special pleading.
I am indeed not entirely against his theory, but this is only relative
to what I consider the sociolinguistic naivite of Gimbutas et al.  The
basic problem is that we know that Voelkerwanderungen do *not* always
result in language replacement, and since it is language replacement
that is precisely at issue here, that is highly relevant.  However, it
is known that in far larger majority of cases, if you can simply
demographically overwhelm the conquered/annexed/settled territory,
either by introducing new individuals or by exterminating the original
population, then the urlanguages that have suddenly acquired minority
status very frequently have difficulty hanging on, for economic reasons.

That is certainly not all there is to language replacement; the language
ideologies of all the communities are also involved, but IMHO even a
cultural tradition that attaches great importance to the language as
such rarely succeeds in preventing its eventual death when faced with
strong socioeconomic incentives to get rid of it.  E.g., no one would
suggest the Jews in antiquity did not attach great importance to Hebrew,
but it is believed to have become extinct certainly by the late first
millennium BC in the face of much stronger competitors like Aramaic and
Greek.  (Partly because the two Kingdoms were obliterated and their
populations deported to Mesopotamia.)  So, the point I'm making is that
if you advocate Voelkerwanderungen, you have to say something about
the social makeup of the area that would favor language replacement.
Neither Gimbutas nor Mallory do so in the way I'm suggesting here.

Joerg in his other email has cited a few examples of Voelkerwanderungen
that ended up in language replacement, such as Anglo-Saxon England,
the Roman Empire, and the Indo-Aryans.  The first though can be explained
simply: the antique cities of Britain with their partially Romanized
population were all essentially wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, or their
populations ethnically cleansed westward (as into Wales).  The Romans,
practice some of this too, but they also had an active policy of settling
retired Roman soldiers in colonies in the provinces, starting with
Augustus who founded quite a few of them, mostly in the poorer, less
densely populated western half of the Empire, and it is precisely in
these regions where Latin took its strongest hold.  I don't know enough
about the Aryan conquest to speak about it.  These examples illustrate
precisely my point, though:  the deciding factor usually ended up being
to what extent a given introduced language predominated demographically.
And that is precisely what Renfrew is trying to do, though without the
additional need to specify large unitary migrations such as the
traditional argument presupposes.  I think Renfrew cannot be right in
the absolute with this;  I cannot see how his 'demic wave' can account
for the dialectological similarities between Tocharian and some western
languages (e.g., Latin and Tocharian both have the -r- passive).  But
this rather helps Renfrew, in a sense, if you don't interpret him
literally:  the demic wave was spreading all the time as agriculture
enabled communities to expand demographically, and sometimes, but only
sometimes, this was accompanied by invasions a la Mallory.

Concerning Andreas' question about the two kinds of spread model:
the motivations for two spreads is primarily archaeological in nature.
We know the Steppe-peoples did spread into the Balkans and other parts
of Europe around the time suggested as by the one-invasion model of
Mallory.  It is also known that farming communities spread out of
Anatolia much earlier.  The question is what these two waves spoke.
In this sense, it would make sense if as Andreas says the demic
wave of farmers formed what later became the centum languages,
while the satem-languages resulted from the Steppe invasions. This
would imply that the earlier centum languages of the Balkans had been
wiped out by the satem-speaking invaders from the steppes.

Anyways, as an addendum, I would like to add that just yesterday I was at
a party at the Oriental Institute for new students (not me), and was
talking to a guy over there who works on the Chicago Hittite Dictionary,
as well as Theo van den Hout, the primary Hittitologist at the OI.  When
asked, they seemed to think that it was entirely unclear what population
was autochthonous in the most ancient times in Anatolia.  They said,
though, that the Hittites called themselves based on the Hattians whom
they considered to be autochthonous, much as modern people in Britain call
themselves Britons, although they mostly now speak a language not (originally)
native to Britain.  And it was also noted that the Kaskians, the northern
barbarians who inhabited the area north of the Halys River, have names
that are almost entirely Hattic in origin, and that the Hittites also
have few names that are ultimately Hittite in origin.  These facts suggest
that the Hittites indeed were perhaps not autochthonous to the central
Anatolian plateau, but whether they came from somewhere else in Anatolia,
or somewhere outside Anatolia, is completely unknown.

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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
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637