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

On Thu, 22 Sep 2005 16:15:24 -0400, Paul Bennett <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> > "Some of the ethnic groups were not native to the area they inhabited",
> > which seems self-evident to me. How many generations of continuous
> > inhabitation are required to establish nativeness, or must one merely be
> > first to populate an area?
>
> I think a fair rule of thumb would be to assume that the first group
> documented in a location, whether by archaeological or historical
> evidence, constitutes the autocthonous population.
I think this is the only workable definition.

> I'm not sure what linguistic, archaeological, or historical evidence
> exists to suggest that the Urartians, the Hurrians, or the Hattic speakers
> were not autocthonous to Anatolia.  There is, however, evidence that the
> Hittites, and later the Armenians, were relative newcomers.  Furthermore,
> FWIW, a substantial portion of the placenames in western and south-central
> Anatolia are unanalyzable as Indo-European.  Mallory compares Parnassos
> (the root of which is allegedly parna, "house") with Hurrian purni.
This is all rather circular, though, as much discussion of completely
unknown substrates is.  Mallory says Parnassos comes from (or is related to)
Hurrian _purni_ not based on soundlaws (because there can't be any),
but little more than linguistic handwaving.  The bottom line is that
we have next to no understanding about what kind of languages were
spoken in much of pre-IE Europe and Asia, so pointing to placenames
like this is of extremely dubious help.

> Furthermore, the Hittites and the Luwians borrowed a number of terms
> related to the material culture of the region, and other terms which have
> been reconstructed for PIE (such as the aforementioned wheeled vehicles
> and horses) were not introduced to Anatolia until the fourth millennium or
> even later.
As I tried to argue in my previous post, the "wheel"-argument that
Mallory-fans get so excited about is not all that it's cracked up
to be.  So, it's not clear to me what value it has one way or
the other in this debate.

> Renfrew was trying to propose a simple model of Indo-European migration,
> which could be observed through the archaeological record.
This is true, but trivially so.  That's what everyone involved
in the question is doing, unless they're simply ignoring the
evidence.  (And of course, plenty of people in many fields
do just that.)

> If we accept
> his theory, that Indo-Europeans were indigenous to Anatolia, and also
> accept (with most linguists) that the only attested Indo-European
> languages spoken there, such as Hittite, Luwian, and Armenian, were
> latecomers to Anatolia, we must assume that they had migrated into
> formerly Indo-European territories from which speakers of otherwise
> unattested Indo-European languages had been displaced, which seriously
> complicates his model.  I'm not sure what justification we have for
> adopting such a complicated model.
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.

Look, I don't know where the Urheimat was located, but most of the
arguments put forward for the Kurgan hypothesis are weak at best,
and very crucially they make no attempt to actually integrate modern
sociolinguistics into the question, to see what motivations the
pre-IE peoples might have had to adopt a new language.

 =========================================================================
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