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

Joerg wrote:
> > > Third, the age they assign to Proto-Indo-European is impossible.
> > > Any archaeologist will tell you that the wheel wasn't invented
> > > yet 8000 years ago.  Yet, a PIE word for `wheel' is reconstructed
> > > with as much certainty as is possible in this discipline.  And also
> > > words for `yoke', `wagon', `carry by wagon', etc.  This means that
> > > Proto-Indo-European can hardly be older than 6000 years.
I have always been skeptical of this argument.  First, it makes the
assumption that to have a notion of "wheel" you have to have the
technology to produce the kinds of wheels that came into existence
approximately ca 5-6k years BP.  That this is clearly questionable is
attested by the fact that in Mesoamerica, where as of 1517 no culture
had developed large wheels used for transportation whose linguistic
reconstruction is *kwekwlos, but they did have wheeled toys.  Moreover
you don't even need wheel-technology to have a notion of "circle".
It is e.g. not altogether clear to me whether the common IE metaphor "wheel of
heaven" = "sun" comes from analogizing wheels to the sun, or the sun
to wheels.   Thus the terminus ante quem suggested is not so certain
at all, and may indeed be spurious.

This does not suggest that people like Colin Renfrew are right, only that
the people using this argument against him do not have anything
like a clinching argument that they think they have.

> The idea behind the Anatolian origin hypothesis is that PIE was the
> language of the first Neolithic farmers of central and eastern Europe,
> who are archaeologically known to have spread across the area between
> 5500 and 5000 BC.  The hypothesis further assumes that they hailed
> from Anatolia - not because the Anatolian Neolithic is culturally
> particularly close to the central European (it isn't), but because
> it seemed the only place they could have come from.
Yes and no. Agriculture in its most ancient form supposedly
developed first in the Konya plain in Anatolia, not in Mesopotamia.
And I think you're discounting the ridiculousness of the alternative
hypothesis based on Voelkerwanderungen.  People like Maria Gimbutas
had a very naive notion about the relationship between migrations
and the kind of language contact that would arise, since she thought
migrations automatically replaced language and other social customs
into addition to the obvious changes of material culture.  There
are many obvious counterexamples (the Norman conquest, Mugal India,
Manchu China) in which invaders become assimilated into the indigenous
population, rather than do the assimilating.  (I wrote a whole thesis
on this subject some years ago, so I can send you the document if
you wish.)  The basic appeal of Renfrew's theory is that language
replacement becomes for him a function of population pressures:
the farmers are able to outproduce the hunter-gatherers in food
resources, and as a result are able to expand their population
base much more quickly.  And the more quickly the population base
expands in a given community, the more likely some members of that
community will leave, taking all their social and technological
capacities with them, thus founding new, related communities and
speaking, presumably, the same or a related language.

> Now, with the
> discovery of the Black Sea flood, which happened between 5600 and
> 5500 BC, there is an alternative to Anatolia, namely what are now
> the shallow northern extensions of the Black Sea.
This is a genuine alternative, but it doesn't really help identify
where a given language community was located.

> But the problem remains that those first Neolithic farmers of Europe
> did not use wheeled vehicles (at least, not a shred of evidence
> has been found for them), and probably also had not domesticated
> the horse.
These objections do not have the weight that you think they do.
(See above.) Concerning the horse, John Colarusso wrote an interesting
article a few years ago in a festschrift for my professor Howard Aronson
saying that the IE word for "horse" and IIRC "dog" were eerily similar
to analogs in NW-Caucasian languages, where all seem similar to some
root for "quick".

> There is ample evidence for both wheeled vehicles and
> domesticated horses at least in Common IE (by which I mean IE after
> Anatolian and Tocharian split off).
Not highly relevant (see above).

> Another problem with the Anatolian origin hypothesis is that the
> migration pathways become rather absurd.  There is lots of movement
> around the Black and Caspian Seas required, and it is not very
> likely that Anatolian simply stayed at home.
This is circular reasoning:  whether they "stayed at home" is precisely
the question at hand.  And you have said yourself, and this is true,
that the Black Sea was much smaller then.  The smaller size of the
sea would have made movement around it much easier than is currently
possible.

> The Hittites and
> their relatives evidently were newcomers on the Anatolian scene,
> having displaced or assimilated speakers of Hattic, Hurrian and
> other patently unrelated languages.
This is a genuine objection:  if Renfrew is right, we need to
explain why there are all these other languages in Anatolia in
historical times.  I will say, though, that I think at least
some of these ethnoi were not autochthonous: the NE-Caucasian
languages are believed to have originally been spoken *south*
of the Caucasus, somewhere in modern Iran, not north, and this
interestingly coheres with Diakonoff and Starostin's thesis that
Hurrian-Urartian are related to the NE-Caucasian languages.  I must
stress that this link is by no means widely accepted, especially
among Caucasologists, but if it's true, it might suggest that
Hurrian and Urartian are not urfolk.  The same might well
be said about the Hattic-speakers; they seem, afterall, to be
related to NW-Caucasian languages outside Anatolia.  Maybe they
migrated into Anatolia too? Who knows, really, but the whole
question is so unclear and backed up by so little empirical
evidence that one cannot make any certain judgements about
whether these other groups are original or not.


> Next (though this is not a particularly strong argument), IE and
> Uralic look uncannily similar for "unrelated" languages.  If PIE
> was spoken north of the Black Sea, it becomes easier to account
> for these similarities by assuming either a distant genealogical
> relationship or prolonged contact.
These similarities I think have been vastly overstated;  besides
a few potential pronominal forms that look like cognates, there
are a mere handful of lexical items that look related.  This is
less than 100 or so proposed cognates linking Hurrian to NE-Caucasian,
and even that link, as I said, is widely doubted (by e.g. Johanna Nichols).
It is also the case that no less an authority than Eric Hamp, whom
I see whenever he's not spending his time in southern France, Wales
or Albania (he's a Balkanist, afterall), has said that there are
aspects of Kartvelian that also look similar and that maybe IE
may be most closely related to that family. And note that Kartvelian
is, and probably always has been, spoken *south* of the Caucasus,
not far from the Urartian monuments in Armenia.  (There are some
thousands of Georgian speakers north of the Caucasus now, but
they moved there in the second half of the 20th century.)  So
these putative Uralic similarities are no more convincing to me
than any other branch of Nostratic/Eurastiac/(insert long range
comparison grouping here).  Why not say that IE was spoken in
far eastern Siberia? Afterall, Eskimo-Aleut are held by some to
be distantly related to PIE.  I am being facetious, of course, but
the point of my sarcasm is to introduce a sufficient amount of
skepticism into this debate.  You can say that PIE was spoken
around the Black Sea, but anyone who posits this or any other
homeland necessarily has some castles in the air to build, because
the amount of rock holding the castle up is currently very limited.

(What's my pet theory?  There were at least *two* waves of
Indo-Europeanization;  one following the agricultural expansion
into Europe, and another involving Voelkerwanderungen out of the
steppes. The Urheimat under this conception would have been in
parts now inundated in the Black Sea, but close to Anatolia,
perhaps in modern Bulgaria.  But this is pure speculation, based
on little more than a geographic center of gravity, and I don't
take this pet theory too seriously.)

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