Re: Neanderthal and PIE
| From: | Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Sunday, October 12, 2008, 18:49 |
|---|
On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 2:17 PM, Ollock Ackeop <ollock@...> wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Oct 2008 21:20:14 +0200, Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...>
> wrote:
>
>>Here is a better alternative: The Neanderthals didn't die out after
>>all, but mixed with the Crô Magnons, at least to some extent, and
>>brought some traditions and genetic material with them that
>>influenced the culture in the region that later came to develop IE.
> No dice. No explanation is given for the ridiculous lag in linguistic change that
> would be necessary for a language spoken by a predominantly Neanderthal
> society to have a demonstrable relationship to PIE.
I suppose you could do it, but you would need to devise a long
series of diachronic stage conlangs -- probably five to ten, maybe
twenty? -- each of which is obviously related to the next couple
and the previous couple, but where you couldn't tell, just looking
at the first and last, that they were related at all. Has anybody
ever created a diachronic family of conlangs with that much
time depth (20-24K years)? It would probably be a decade-long
project, if you wanted it to be at all plausible, with the basic grammar
changing unrecognizably several times and the vocabulary going
through 100% replacement-or-unrecognizable-mutation several
times.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article
Reply