Re: another language reconstruction question

>From: Florian Rivoal <florian@...>
>
>         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?
It didn't. Do you not know the theory about PIE? It was not supposed to
extend over all the area in Eurasia presently covered by IE languages, it
was believed to be a small area of the steppes of Russia. From there IE
peoples spread out over Europe, Central Asia and down into the Middle East.

>         If the langage did not have the support of such a big civilisation
>how could it manage to replace allmost everything around? 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.
Continuing from the above, it was not PIE that moved into the conquered
areas, it was the descendant IE languages: Proto-Celtic, Proto-Italic >
Latin, Proto-Hellenic > Greek, Proto-Indo-Aryan > Sanskrit etc. And you are
right that there was hardly anything left of the original language; they had
changed into new languages more dictant from one another.

>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?
It is part of the process Christophe described, that when peoples are
conquered they may have some influence on the subsequent language, but it
varies. When the Normans conquered England Norman-French remained the
courtly and aristocratic language for a couple of centuries but never became
the vernacular, and eventually died out in favour of the conquered English.
However, when certain Turkish tribes conquered Anatolia there were fairly
few of them, but their language came to replace the earlier Greek, even tho
they only added a small amount to the descent of the population. It depends
on the demographics, politics, terrain, further historical developments etc.

>         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. So that still makes
>10 thousands languages. This is purely hipotethic, and rather simply
>calculated, but i think i gives a routh idea.
TBH it is the wrong way to think IMO. You are trying to assess the size of
ancient simple cultures by the size of modern-day simple cultures. But the
whole point is that in the intervening time those ancient cultures have
broken up into many parts (tribes etc.) There is no reason to suppose there
were anything like that many languages in the ancient world. Instead, on
account of the factors I mentioned in my other reply, there would have been
little language variation and slow language change. So however many
beginnings there were to human languages, one or more, it was not many, and
the breaking up of all those cultures into smaller units has taken all this
time.

Mat


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