Linguistic diversity in prehistoric Europe (was Re: Ambiguity)

Hallo!

On Thu, 8 Jan 2009 20:59:50 -0800, Roger Mills wrote:

> This very interesting msg. was referenced on Cybalist yesterday; it's
> relevant to this question, and perhaps of general interest to all of us:
> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=980
> The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe By Don Ringe
Thanks!  It is a very interesting read, and largely compatible
with my personal opinions about the matter.  Before the Neolithic
revolution, Europe was linguistically more diverse than now,
with about a dozen different stocks; diversity was highest in
the south and lowest in the northeast.  Pre-colonial North
America is probably indeed a servable model for pre-Neolithic
Europe.

Things changed in the Neolithic.  In the Mediterranean basin,
it is widely assumed that Neolithicization was by cultural
diffusion, i.e. local people adopted the new economy from
their neighbour, without large-scale migrations.  This
cultural diffusion did not change the linguistic landscape
qualitatively - some people took over their more progressive
neighbours' language, but many didn't; at any rate, the old
diversity shows up in the written records of antiquity, with
three apparently unrelated non-IE languages (Basque, Iberian
and Tartessian) in the Iberian peninsula alone.

North of the Alps, the Neolithic cultures are very homogenous,
and a demic diffusion is suspected: people moved in, bringing
agriculture with them, and absorbing the Mesolithic population.
Where did they come from?  It appears as if they were refugees
from the Black Sea Flood about 7500 years ago.  These farmers
would have spread a single language family across Central
Europe, and indeed, such a family seems to have left its traces
in the "Old European hydronymy", a fairly homogenous network
of river names stretching from the British Isles in the west
to the Baltic countries in the east.  Some scholars believe
that this language was Indo-European, but I doubt that.
Proto-Indo-European could hardly have been spoken more than
6000 years ago, as it has terms for wheeled vehicles,
domestic horses and metals.  I assume that PIE was spoken
6000 years ago in what is now Ukraine.  The language of the
Old European hydronymy could, however, have been a sister group
of Indo-European.  I consider it likely that the speakers of
Proto-Indo-European were also descendants of Black Sea Flood
refugees.

The Neolithic linguistic landscape of central Europe would
have been characterized by the predominance of a single
family, that of the Old European hydronymy (which I call
"Hesperic"), but many patches of pre-Neolithic languages
probably still survived, especially in mountainous areas.

Indo-European began its success story in the Copper Age,
starting about 4000 BC.  There were two main waves of
expansion, the first about 4000 BC and the second about
1000 years later.  All modern IE languages are from the
second wave; the Anatolian branch was the last survivor
of the first.  The Baltic and the Adriatic were reached
by 2000 BC; the Atlantic coast by 1000 BC.  The British
Isles were only Indo-Europeanized by Celtic tribes about
500 BC, and could have been the site of a flourishing
Hesperic-speaking civilization for long enough to inspire
Celtic and Germanic traditions of Elves as well as the
Greek tales of Hyperborea and Atlantis.

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