Re: another language reconstruction question

En réponse à Florian Rivoal <florian@...>:

>         Your answers makes it more clear. Yet a couple of questions
> remains. How can the case of english in USA, or latin in western europe
> be similar to PIE? Those two are conveyed by One single civilisation or
> empire. the whole area is influence by one culture. Was there such a
> Proto-indo-european empire reigning over an area as vast as the whole
> indo european area? I think it is hard to believe without a writing
> system or a more or less advanced technology, which is important for
> maintaining coherence on such a big area for a long time. I do not doubt
> some comunities had the colonial and dominating style at that time to, i
> just think their influence was restricted to smaller areas.
>
Of course, but there were a lot of them. Of course, there wasn't a big PIE
empire. But there was an origin of PIE people (wherever this was, nobody's
sure) and those people decided (or had to) expand. And the difference they made
with others is that they did have a more advanced technology than the others.

>         If the langage did not have the support of such a big
> civilisation how could it manage to replace allmost everything around?
A language needn't have support from an empire to replace the languages around.
The Indo-Europeans were probably quite numerous and moved in big groups. Even
if they were in minority in some places, their language could very well have
conquered people without those people being conquered by the Indo-Europeans
themselves. Those things happen.

> And it seems that if it is just spreading around, without any control,
> by the time it reaches areas quite distant from the original location,
> there could hardly be anything left from the original language.
Of course. Nobody discusses the fact that when the Indo-Europeans arrived in
Europe, their language(s) had little to do with the one(s) of their cousins in
India! But the whole point is that reconstruction allows us to get a good idea
of those intermediaries, but also of the original language itself, the one
which was spoken originally by the first tribes of Indo-Europeans before they
began to spread!

> And how can there be only one "winner" on such a wide area? Wouldn't it
> be more reasonable to think that this reconstructed root comes from one
> proto-indo-european language, and that other comes from a distinc
> language, potentialy non related?
>
We would recognise it. The only reason we talk about *one* PIE is because of
the uniformity of the reconstructed forms. When not only phonetics, but also
morphology, syntax, all those things fit a single system, there's no reason to
think that they came from different languages. Different dialects is possible.
But even with dialectical variations (and we do have hints of this dialectical
variation), one language stays one language.

>         As for the number of language in the early world, i agree partly
> with what you say. Now adays, the world's population is around 6
> bilions, with more or less (i believe) 3000 languages. that is an
> average 2 milion speakers per language.
Nope. You have to take into account the fact that 11 languages in the world
take up half of the population. Those dissymmetries existed also in those
times. It is very probably that the Indo-Europeans were extremely numerous
compared to neighbouring tribes (this would explain why they began to spread:
to find place, and why they weren't stopped: they were the most technologically
advanced and they submerged the natives with their number).

 and if you consider only the
> "major" languages that are likely to survive in the future, the you get
> an much higher average number of speakers.
>
Of course, but the increase in population we have right now is unprecendented
(there were less than 1 billion people at the beginning of the 20th century)
and thus is not very good to use as example.

>         At the time when the world only had, let's say 10 milion
> inhabitant, it was a rather prehistoric world. the prehistoric
> civilisation nowadays have around 1 language for  thousand people.
Nope. Like for us now, there were already discrepancies. And probably the 30-
odd language families we know exist in the world (there are maybe more or less,
I'm taking an average number) come from 30 ancestral languages which, like our
11 right now, were spoken by a majority of the world population.

 So
> that still makes 10 thousands languages. This is purely hipotethic, and
> rather simply calculated, but i think i gives a routh idea. I guess you
> have to get back much farther in time to find a moment when the number
> of languages decreases. I am not even sure this time exist, because
> there is no way to know at when people started to talk, and how wide
> spread mankind was at this time.
Well, we're sure (through genetic studies, proving that the genetic variation
among human beings is much less than most other species - we know for instance
that compared to our near cousins the chimpanzees, we have only 1% of their
genetic variation. Our species is extremely uniform -) that humanity passed by
a moment where the number of people was in the order of 10000 or so. If we
guess that language developped at that moment or short after that (which seems
plausible IIRC), it couldn't have possibly been more than one language, or two,
maybe.

>
>         Just as a final word, i want to make one thing clear. I am not
> stating that i am right and every body else in the world is wrong. I am
> just giving my view so other can comment on it and tell me where i got
> wrong. And i hope not every thing is wrong ;)
>
The thing is that we know for sure that all IE languages come from a single
ancestor from one reason: that's the basic requirement of comparative
reconstruction. You cannot do reconstruction between languages which don't have
a single common ancestor. The very fact that we manage to reconstruct a PIE is
a proof of its existence as a single language. It was not a uniform entity,
full of dialects and the form we reconstruct was already on the verge of
splitting, but it was a single language. If it wasn't, the comparative method
wouldn't have led us to it. It's actually a surprising result, and people were
astonished that so many languages had a single common ancestor (with so few
loans from other languages), but it cannot be otherwise, since it's if it was
we just couldn't have reconstructed it.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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