PIE Urheimat Discussion

[WeepingElf]

Here ( http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art247e.pdf ), Kortlandt says:

The rise of the ergative construction, grammatical gender and adjectival agreement can be attributed to North Caucasian influence and may have proceeded as indicated by Pedersen (1907).

PIE of course wasn't ergative, and even Pre-PIE was IMHO active-stative rather than ergative.

He also says:

claims that Proto-Indo-European itself already consists of two unrelated groups of elements, which he calls A and B (1933, 1934a, 1937b). Here A contains pronouns, verbal roots and derivational suffixes whereas B contains isolated words which are not related to verbal roots, such as numerals, some kinship terms, and many names of body parts, animals and trees. Uhlenbeck compares A with Uralic and Altaic and attributes irregular features such as heteroclitic inflection and grammatical gender to B, for which one might think of Caucasian languages. The relation between Indo-European and Uralic can be extended to Eskimo (cf. Uhlenbeck 1905a, 1906, 1907, 1934b, 1937a,

This makes sense. IE is something like "Para-Uralic" on a Caucasian substratum. Uralic clearly is the more conservative of the two branches of Indo-Uralic (if Indo-Uralic is a thing at all, of course), and in most of the points where IE differs typologically from Uralic, it resembles NWC and/or Kartvelian.

It is interesting to note that the chariot was invented by IE speakers sometime around 2500 BC, which is also when they started expanding significantly out of the steppes. A northern lobe of expansion became the Corded Ware culture, from where Germanic, Balto-Slavic, and Tocharian emerged. A southern lobe gave rise to the Hellenic, Celto-Illyrian, Italic, and Armenian subfamilies, and a western lobe became Indo-Iranian.

The chariot probably indeed played a role in IE expansion. But why do you attribute Indo-Iranian to a western lobe? Did you mean "eastern"? Also, I think Italic and Celtic are IMHO "northern lobe" languages related to Germanic. I see three main dialect groups within Late PIE:

1. Northern - Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic
2. Tocharian
3. Southern - Greek, Armenian, Indo-Iranian

[Terra]

This makes sense. IE is something like "Para-Uralic" on a Caucasian substratum. Uralic clearly is the more conservative of the two branches of Indo-Uralic (if Indo-Uralic is a thing at all, of course), and in most of the points where IE differs typologically from Uralic, it resembles NWC and/or Kartvelian.

Well, I'm curious what body-parts, animals, and trees he's talking about.

[Salmoneus]

II-Greek-Armenian-Phrygian-etc is an obvious grouping, of course. But what's the specific reasoning for dividing off Tocharian from all the others?

[I can't say I find the idea of PIE as a mixed-language very appealing. Mixed languages are very rare things, and generally smack of laziness in reconstruction. Also, if that theory is right (and it seems to amount to just 'everything messy is Caucasian'), Indo-Uralic must surely be wrong. Because other than pronouns, which aren't immune from borrowing anyway, all the basic and original stuff there is on the Caucasian side - body parts, kin terms, numerals, irregular inflections. Verbs, on the other hand, are really easy to borrow, as are regular derivations. So if that theory were right, surely that would mean that PIE was a Caucasian language with a heavy Uralic superstrate?]

[gach]

How well do we really know that assuming mixed languages is primarily just lazy reconstruction? William Foley has implied that language mixing isn't too uncommon in New Guinea and this is the reason why historical work on the Papuan languages is so hard.

... there are convincing case studies of contact between Papuan and Austronesian languages which have resulted in what would qualify as mixed languages (see Dutton 1976). As Austronesian languages are usually typologically very different from Papuan languages and comparatively well studied, these examples of language mixing are not too difficult to identify. Language mixing among Papuan languages, which are often typologically similar, is likely to be even more pervasive, but much more difficult to discover.

Then again, I haven't seen that much actual data supporting this claim and I don't know what he exactly qualifies as a "mixed language". Thus I don't know whether mixed languages would be more likely in the linguistic setting of neolithic Europe than today or whether this is just lacking analysis on the New Guinean side.

[Drydic]

I don't have anything solid to back this up, but it would not surprise me in the least if the Caucasus had New Guinea-levels of mixing in the past.

[TaylorS]

The chariot probably indeed played a role in IE expansion. But why do you attribute Indo-Iranian to a western lobe? Did you mean "eastern"? Also, I think Italic and Celtic are IMHO "northern lobe" languages related to Germanic. I see three main dialect groups within Late PIE:

1. Northern - Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic
2. Tocharian
3. Southern - Greek, Armenian, Indo-Iranian

WHOOPS, yes, I meant EASTERN!, my bad. I got the groupings from here:

http://indo-european-migrations.science ... uages.html

[WeepingElf]

Lexicostatistics is generally held to be unreliable. What regards this particular tree, I consider the close associations of Albanian with Celtic and Tocharian with Germanic unwarranted.