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

Hallo!

Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>:
>
> [...]
>
> >      Gray and Atkinson address some "minor" problems with
> > glottochronology which they claim to have overcome with some
> > advanced mathematics they call a "Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo
> > model"; but I don't see how that can remedy the problem that the
> > basic assumption of glottochronology - that lexical replacement rate
> > was constant - is false.  It is still glottochronology.
>
> That's not what tey use bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo for. What they do is
> replacing the assumption of a constant change rate with the assumption that
> equal rates are the likeliest - if the likelihood penalty from varying rates
> than the gain from achieving a more likely topology, the model will produce
> unequal change rates in different branches.
>
> (I'm not saying this works; I'm not in a position to judge. What I can say is
> that if it does not work, the reason is not the mere fact that lexical
> replacement rates are not constant.)
Nor am I in a position to judge.  However, they arrive at a date for
the breakup of PIE that must be wrong.  See below.

> > 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.
>
> [snip]
>
> If their time-depth is wrong, it doesn't necessarily mean that their topology is
> wrong.
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.  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.

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.  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).

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.  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.

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.

It is possible that the European Neolithic farmers spoke languages
descended from some sort of "Pre-Proto-IE" spoken on the northern
shore of the Euxine Lake (the freshwater lake that existed in the
Black Sea basin before the ocean burst through the Bosporus)
around 6000 BC, and that Proto-IE proper was one of the daughter
languages.  (ObConlang: My idea is that Albic is a descendant
of this "Pre-Proto-IE" spread by the European Neolithic farmers.)

Greetings,

Jörg.

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