Re: Family project

Amber Adams wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 01:12:02AM -0500, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> > How about toying with the palaeoclimatological toggle?  What would
> > happen, say, if the Black-Sea-Basin had not flooded around 7000 BC?
>
> Ok...  I'm clueless about palaeoclimatology, I'm afraid, but
> I'm curious just the same.  What would happen?
Well, that's anyone's guess -- but that's the neat thing for us conlangers!
I mean, it would definitely have had different affects on both macro- and
micromigratory patterns of people going to and from the Near East. Just
to review what happened historically:  before 7000 or 7500 BC or so
IIRC, the Black Sea was a vast inland freshwater lake.  For thousands of
years prior to that time, the world's icecaps had been melting and this
had been causing all sorts of changes climatologically all over the world,
causing the Mediterranean to rise 300 feet or so, and then spilling over
first into the Sea of Marmara and then to Black Sea.  We know that
around that time there had been settlements along the shore of this inland
lake, because just this year, the man who discovered the location of the
Titanic discovered some remains on the bottom of the sea floor, which
could not have gotten there except during a time when the sea was much
lower.

Now, think about this in terms of an issue in IE linguistics:  the Urheimat, or
original homeland of the IE peoples. This is a question fraught with controversy,
but there are today two main theories that get attention. The first claims that
the IE peoples were pastoralists who lived on the steppes of far eastern
Europe and Central  Asia; those that believe this theory locate the homeland
somewhere around the lower Volga near its mouth into the Caspian sea.
The second, newer and more controversial position is that the Indo-Europeans
were, essentially, the first agriculturalists, and that their spread to other areas
was aided by the immense demographic advantage of a constant food supply
that agriculture would bring them.  Renfrew, the primary proponent of the latter
view, claims that this expansion happened many thousands of years earlier than
those of the opposing theory, perhaps as early as 7000 BC or so.  There's a
lot of fudge room on both Renfrew's and his opponents' dates, but here's what
all this means to us:  if the Indo-Europeans were in fact located somewhere
closer to Anatolia (and in my opinion, they have to have had some contact
with that region to account for the linguistic similarities, due either to borrowing
or inheritance, with some Caucasian protofamilies), that means they could
easily have been affected by the flooding that we know happened.  In our historical
Earth, this flooding probably ended one route of direct contact with Eastern
Europe, and therefore enforcing  a certain linguistic break as well.  What would
have happened had that break not happened?

The issue is general though for any attempt at creating a language family.
Language is a social phenomenon, and you can't divorce it from events that
happen to people in their social setting. If a catastrophe comes along
and obliterates entire geographic regions, that's going to affect the ability
of language families to live and die and spread.  I also tend to agree
with Dixon's theory of the punctuated equilibria that languages develop
in:  for long periods of time, languages are fairly static when transportation
is extremely limited and slow.  Then, something comes along, like massive
climatological changes, and that makes whole peoples get up and move,
because they have to or they'll die.  (This is sometimes credited with the
Völkerwanderung that overtaxed and eventually killed the Western Roman
Empire.)  Such movement often means contact between people speaking
different languages, and perhaps also language replacement outright (as,
say, happened when the Magyars settled in what is today Hungary).
These are all issues, then, that could be taken into account when making a
language family and its offspring.

===================================
Thomas Wier | AIM: trwier

"Aspidi men Saiôn tis agalletai, hên para thamnôi
  entos amômêton kallipon ouk ethelôn;
autos d' exephugon thanatou telos: aspis ekeinê
  erretô; exautês ktêsomai ou kakiô" - Arkhilokhos