Re: Neanderthal and PIE

On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 1:53 PM, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

> I've always thought that where hobbies like conlanging is concerned the only
> relevant question is not "Is it true?", but "Is it fun to believe?". That
> sounds like something that would be a lot of fun to believe. :)
OK, let's try it on as a conworld scenario.  What would it imply?
A conworld can vary from the real world in any number of odd ways,
but it needs to be internally consistent.

It seems to me to imply that something caused a massive slowdown
in the normal linguistic changes that would have been happening
in (let's say) NPIE between 30K and 6K years ago.  Hypothesis:
a small number of Neanderthal survivors discovered something
around 30K years ago that made them immortal or at least
extremely long-lived.  The small community made a habit of
cremating its few casualties, which is why there are no Neanderthal
fossils or skeletons more recent than that.  About 6K years ago,
they were wiped out, but not before their ancient language had
been picked up as a hieratic language by a neighboring group
of Homo sapiens.  What with one thing and another, the hieratic
language had a massive influence on the vernacular, and Bob's
your uncle.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/

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