Salmoneus wrote:Science also does not move forward much if we pick a pet theory and proclaim it regardless of evidence, decrying all criticism as an attack on the very principles of Western Civilisation. But, each to their own. Except to note that I was actually offering "we can never know" as a defence of your improbable hypothesis...
One moment. You may think I am a crackpot like Octaviano, and I admit that my hypothesis is speculative. Also, I should not have drawn medieval scholasticism into this discussion; I apologize for that. But what I state is just a
working hypothesis which needs to be tested against the available evidence. But we are getting into a metascientific debate here.
My general argument would simply be:
- time and time again, when we see rapid, massive expansion by a particular, homogenous genetic and cultural group, we also see areas dominated by large language families, rather than by a patchwork of local isolates and small families;
Certainly, such expansions lead to the establishment of large language families - I never claimed the opposite. At least two such expansions have affected the Iberian Peninsula: those of Celtic and Latin. There certainly were earlier ones. Yet, sometimes languages from earlier strata survive in remote pockets, which
seems to have been the case with Basque.
- Europe's history has been dominated by a series of exactly this sort of rapid, massive expansions by particular genetically and culturally homogenous groups
- therefore it is most likely that Europe's history has also been dominated by large language families.
Sure. But when half a dozen expansions of this kind happen in the same area one after the other, and in each case, remnants of the earlier landscape survive in residual zones such as mountain ranges or islands, the result can be quite some diversity. I don't speak of dozens of language families in the Iberian Peninsula, but of
one, two or three - dependent on whether the ancient peninsular languages are related to each other or not. And as you say, one, two or all three of those languages may have come rather lately from somewhere else.
It is, of course, possible that things were less uniform than they appear. It is certain possible to have languages spoken for unfathomable reason, despite the population histories of their speakers (although I'm not aware of any specific examples - the opposite (where there is more linguistic homogeneity than expected) is much more common (eg the Sami)).
However, such a claim, in my view, requires evidence.
Sure. As long as we don't know which of the three non-IE languages of the Iberian Peninsula is related to which, we don't know how many families they represent - that's a truism.
I said, and meant, test case
Perhaps this is a translation issue. Because from your other comments, I do not see what you think you are testing or how it comprises a test. I assumed that you were using neolithic diversity in iberia to test the hypothesis of neolithic diversity outside iberia. But apparently not. If you were just testing whether between zero and three non-IE language families are attested in Iberia, then yes, great, consider that tested, but I'm not sure such a narrow claim is particularly interesting.
Maybe I got the meaning of the English expression "test case" wrong. As you know, English is not my native language. The Neolithic linguistic diversity outside the Iberian Peninsula cannot be tested by comparing the three non-IE languages of the Iberian Peninsula in order to determine how many stocks they belong to. We would get some result about the minimum number of stocks in the Iberian Peninsula, which tells us nothing to rely on about the numbers of stocks elsewhere.
Which factors could have led to a uniform linguistic landscape in a Mesolithic setting?
The fact that the continent had been conquered by a genetically and culturally homogenous group that largely replaced the previous inhabitants. Languages can spread without massive demic replacement, but it's much less likely for languages to fail to spread even when massive demic replacement occurs.
Sure. But how many such expansions happened before the Neolithic? We don't know. There of course was one - when
Homo sapiens entered the continent. But more than 30,000 years later, that stock would have disintegrated long ago. Note that by "stock" I mean a certain range of time depth - 4,000 to 8,000 years. Things like Indo-European or Uralic are today. Another large expansion probably happened after the end of the last ice age, when Northern Europe was peopled for the first time as the ice receded. There thus were no
new stocks in the North, only extensions of stocks already existing in the central zone. Also, people probably moved from the Mediterranean peninsulas into the central zone but
not necessarily obliterated all the languages that already were there. Note that, as I wrote earlier today, the central zone was
not devoid of human habitation before the end of the ice age!
Not impossible, no, but not the default case. Certainly not when you want it to have failed to happen again and again and again everywhere throughout the continent. Maybe instead the new group comprised a number of different, unrelated linguistic groups, despite their shared genes and culture? Maybe. But again, this is not the parsimonious hypothesis in my opinon.
I don't see how the hypothesis that there have been numerous demic diffusions that homogenized the linguistic landscape of Europe over and over again
without leaving residues of the old landscape in residual zones is more parsimonious than the hypothesis that the languages developed mostly
in situ and old stocks broke up more and more. But almost certainly, the truth lies somewhere in between. There certainly were significant migrations and language expansions between the first peopling of Europe by our species and the Neolithicization, but I doubt that any of these affected all of Europe and removed all old languages. The northward movements at the end of the ice age as the climate zones shifted and the animals they hunted followed the shifting climate zones probably were the greatest event of this kind that occurred in the meantime.
At least of Mediterranean Europe. I think diversity was less north of the Alps, and least in Scandinavia and northern Russia, each of which may have been covered by a single stock.
OK, that's certainly more reasonable.
Fine.
South of the Pyrenees, Proto-Basque was spoken in Navarre and east of that all the way to where now is Andorra
We don't actually know that, though, do we? I'm not sure there are any actual attestations. Our evidence is just that the Roman geographers thought that people called 'Vascones' lived there, and we assume that because this sounds like 'Basque' the Vascones must have spoken proto-Basque. But then, if we're trusting Roman geographers so much, we might also want to listen when they say that Iberians and Vascones spoken related languages...
This is the first time I hear someone doubt that the Vascones of the Roman Era spoke anything like Basque! The Aquitanian language is only known from names occurring in Latin inscriptions of the Roman Era, but these names are, as I have been informed (R. L. Trask,
The History of Basque, 1997), obviously Proto-Basque. Yet, I am no Vascologist and cannot evaluate whether Trask was right or wrong, but he was a major authority on the language. Is your knowledge of the relevant facts better than Trask's?
A few Iberian name elements can, as I said, be interpreted by means of Basque, but we don't know whether these interpretations are correct
Ah, so you're happy to resort to "skepticism" as you call it, in order to defend
your theories!
In reality
we do not know that they were not related. Therefore their unrelatedness cannot be used to "test" anything...
I
never said that we
know that Basque and Iberian are unrelated. Stop whacking strawmen all the time! Of course we don't know yet. Indeed, there is some evidence of relationship, but not enough to prove the relationship, and other explanations of the evidence must be considered.
Later, I read various negative reviews, and concluded that it is more likely that Tartessian was a pre-Celtic language
To be clear, I also assume that Tartessian was presumably not Celtic (or IE).
OK. So we agree on this point, though there is no proof yet either way.
I was drawing an analogy between the difficulty of demonstrating an IE family from limited data and the presumed difficulty of demonstrating a putative Tartesso-Basque (let alone Tartesso-Etruscan or Tartesso-Minoan or the like). Again, it is not clear that Iberian and Tartessan were not related - if they were related in any but the most superficially obvious way, we probably would still not have discovered this, so that possibility cannot be discounted. So again, our "test" shows only that there was at least one non-IE language spoken in Iberia after the IE invasions. I'm not sure what that test result is meant to imply.
As I have clarified above, by "stock" I don't mean any kind of relationship however remote, but a family
in a specific range of time depth, namely 4,000 to 8,000 years. Things like Nostratic or Dene-Caucasian, even if they were real, wouldn't be "stocks" because their time depths would fall far outside that range. It seems that we have been talking past each other here.
And that is why the Iberian Peninsula is IMHO so valuable as a test case: by examining the relationship between Basque, Iberian and Tartessian, we can arrive at an estimate how many language families there were before Indo-Europeanization.
a) what is it testing?
b) no, we can't, because our access to data about these languages is extremely scant (and in my case also because I'm not a historical linguistics genius, but I don't want to speak for your own prowess in proving the world wrong; maybe you are indeed the next Ventriss)
I don't seriously expect to be the next Ventris; I just like to think about these matters, do some research with my limited resources and contribute to the discussion. But I hope to be more like Ventris than like Octaviano. The difference is that Ventris kept in touch with other scholars in the field, and was ready to abandon a hypothesis that yielded no useful results, while Octaviano stubbornly clung to his ideas and, in doing so, went as far as to declare handbook knowledge wrong.
c) no, we can't, because we know nothing about how many language families there were before Indo-Europeanization.
As I said above, "test case" may have been a misnomer on my side. All I meant was that by examining the relationships between the Paleo-Hispanic languages, one can get an idea of how many stocks there were, which could be helpful in guiding estimations of the linguistic diversity at least of the other two Mediterranean peninsulas.
Consider three scenarios:
1. Iberia is inhabited by 32 language families. Indo-Europeans invade and overwhelm most of the peninsular. IE technologies are passed to some native groups, who take advantage of the weakening of other groups to assimilate some of their neighbours. We end up with IE and between 1 and 3 surviving pre-IE families.
2. Iberia is inhabited by between 1 and 3 native families, covering the whole of the peninsular. Indo-Europeans invade and overwhelm most of the peninsular. The non-IE families have their ranges drastically reduced in scope, but nonetheless survive in some areas. We end up with IE and between 1 and 3 surviving pre-IE families.
3. Iberia is inhabited by between 1 and 32 native families. Indo-Europeans and proto-Vasco-Iberians (and/orTartessians) invade and overwhelm most of the peninsular. Almost all native families are wiped out, leaving only Tartessian, or possibly Vasconic (or Iberian, if not Vasconic) as the only survivor. Or there are no survivors. We end up with IE and between 0 and 3 pre-IE families.
All three of these scenarios are eminently plausible. Well, maybe not 32 language families precisely, but a dozen or more could easily fit compare California).
I see what you are getting at. Indeed, many scenarios are possible, and the number of stocks resulting from examinations of the relationships between the attested Paleo-Hispanic languages may have little to do with the actual diversity of the pre-IE Iberian Peninsula because a) entire stocks could have disappeared completely and b) some or all of the attested non-IE languages may have moved in later. But I don't see how b) could be the "null hypothesis"; and addressing a), the "null hypothesis" would be that perhaps one or two further stocks were eradicated (in the northwestern part of the peninsula where only IE languages are attested), or if the three attested non-IE languages happen to turn out to belong to one stock, it would seem likely that the rest of the peninsula was covered by the same stock as well.
Indeed, this is probably more likely that imagining that all the pre-IE languages survived into historic times - there's no particular reason to imagine Tartessian extending up to Galicia, or Iberia extending across to the coast of Portugal, after all.
Certainly, the northwest of the peninsula was occupied by languages that were
different from those we find attested in the south and east - no Tartessian in Galicia or Iberian in Portugal. But were these lost languages related to Basque, Iberian and/or Tartessian or not? We simply do not know.
On the other hand, that's also certainly a possibility. And on the third hand, given the general chaos of the era and the fact that there's between 1000 and 500 years between the time of the conquest of most of Europe by IEs and the time of the attestation of Tartessian - and another half-millennium or more before Iberian and then Aquitanian enter the scene! - it's far from implausible that they could have been other migrations into the area from the north, the east or the south and that some or all of the attested palaeo-iberian languages are not in fact Old European in origin.
Your objections are valid. The languages are attested from different time periods. Tartessian ceased to be written some time in the 6th century BC, which I conjecture to be the time the region became Celtic-speaking. The Iberians took over their script from the Tartessians, but the community remained intact until about 200 BC when the Romans conquered them. Aquitanian is only known from the Roman Era, which began, in Aquitania, around 50 BC. Basque proper is known only from the Late Medieval onwards, though Mitxelena managed - by applying the comparative method to dialects and Latin loanwords (comparison between their modern forms and their known Latin antecedents allows to retrace the sound changes the language underwent) as well as internal reconstruction - to reconstruct what the Basque language looked like 2,000 years ago, and this is in broad agreement with the Aquitanian evidence.
So this "test" tells us nothing, unless I've entirely failed to understand what you think you're testing and how this test is to be applied.
OK, so not a "test". I apologize for this misnomer. I don't know what to call it, a "probe" or a "sample"? My idea was simply to get an
idea of the linguistic diversity of a Mediterranean peninsula by comparing the three non-IE Paleo-Hispanic languages.
Proposing that they are not autochthonous is the same kind of speculative scholarship you accuse me of and consider illegitimate.
No -
assuming that they are not autochthonous and using the "result" of that "test" as evidence of a wider hypothesis about Mesolithic Europe (which, let's not forget, was
thousands of years and a massive population replacement prior to the era we have evidence for) would be the kind of speculative "scholarship" that I find tendentious...
Surely, a lot of things happened between the Mesolithic and the time when the people of the ancient Iberian Peninsula started writing their languages, and it is hard, if not impossible, to reconstruct
what was going on.
How is that less speculation than what I did in my post two days ago? Where is the evidence of "kurgan people" incursions into Britain "long before it is feasible to imagine the Celts [...] being there"? Where is the evidence of Basques as allies of the "kurgan people"? You are putting speculation against speculation.
Of course it's speculation. And it's entirely legitimate to put speculation against speculation. In a trial, if the prosecution suggests a theory of what happened, it's entirely legitimate for the defence to offer an alternative plausible theory. The whole point is that if both theories are plausible, you can't in good conscience convict. The defence doesn't have to prove that the defendant
didn't do it, only that there exists reasonable doubt.
Of course. Note again that I am
not convinced that my ideas are right. They could be utter hogwash.
That said, the bit you focus on is not particularly speculative. We know that that the neolithic population of Britain and Ireland was almost entirely replaced by a completely different, "Bell Beaker" population from central or eastern Europe. We know that this new population was essentially genetically indistinguishable from the later Indo-European population of the islands. We also know, however, that this occured at a time when it seems implausible to imagine Celts being in the Isles.
What you say is actually quite in accordance with my own hypothesis of the languages of the Bronze Age British Isles, which in my hypothesis were not Celtic but part of a sister group of Indo-European I call "Aquan" - the language of the Old European Hydronymy. I am not sure of the Bell Beaker connection I proposed earlier, but grew doubtful of for the reasons I have already stated in this thread. But if the Bell Beaker people originate from central or eastern Europe, are genetically related to Indo-Europeans and were more than just a diaspora, that's perfectly fine from the standpoint of the Aquan hypothesis.
Archeologically, the Celts are assumed at that time to have been in central or eastern Europe. Linguistically, Celtic does not look sufficiently distinct from other IE branches to have split off at such an early time; nor do the surviving Celtic languages look sufficiently distinct from one another (relative to their demonstrable changes since the split!) to make it attractive to see their original differentiation as having occured so early (though it would still be possible to, say, suggest two celtic migrations into ireland).
On this point, I whole-heartedly agree with you. Celtic, unlike Anatolian, doesn't look like a particularly early breakaway from the rest of IE, and the degree of diversity of the attested Celtic languages points at a Proto-Celtic no earlier than about 1000 BC, probably to be associated with the Hallstatt culture of Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age southern central Europe. (I fancy the "P-Celtic" shift *k
w > *p to have spread through the Celtic dialect continuum as a fashionable shibboleth of the more sophisticated La Tène culture, failing to reach the outliers in Ireland and the Iberian Peninsula.)
So, we're left with a non-Celtic steppe invasion of the Isles. We could call these proto-Celts, but then there's no actual reason to do so (rather than calling them proto-Italics or proto-Germans or whatever). We could call them an unattested IE branch. We could call them a sister of IE that also partook in the migrations. Or we could call them a neighbouring tribe who went along with the PIEs when they invaded but originally spoke an unrelated (or distantly related) language.
Again, these hypotheses are all plausible, so we can't really say which one is true.
Fair. This is also what I think of the matter. And I am not alone. Francisco Villar said something similar in his book
Los Indoeuropeos y los orígines de Europa - he considers the language of the Old European Hydronymy to be an early breakaway from PIE that was later clobbered by the historically known IE languages. That language would be a centum language (thus not Balto-Slavic) which merged PIE *o into *a (thus not Italo-Celtic) and did not shift its stops (thus not Germanic; the last point seems uncertain to me, though I am sure for other reasons I shall immediately come to that it wasn't Germanic). In my opinion, the dominant /a/-vocalism in the OEH is a problem here. Villar's idea raises the question:
Why is everything in o-grade? To me, it looks like a language group that
broke off before the rise of the PIE ablaut system, and preserved the pre-ablaut 3-vowel system. My ongoing work on a substratum dictionary seems to corroborates this hypothesis.
Alas, all that is speculation and I am not sure that I am right.
However, since we can say that there was a language family in Atlantic Europe with no known children, and since we can say that there is now a language family in Atlantic Europe with no known parent, and since the genetics of the two groups seem similar, and since the earliest cultural data we have for the later family makes them look not dissimilar from the presumed culture of the former family, it is at least an appealing hypothesis that the later family is actually a descendent of the former.
Fair. It is not unlikely that Basque once had relatives that were spoken in a larger area; yet, Vennemann's evidence for a Vasconic family extending as far east as Poland and the Baltic countries is not very convincing.
But sure, it's speculative. There are reasons to like the idea (it explains neatly why the Basques look like Bell Beakers - because they are - and doesn't require the Basques to be two different survivals at the same time (a genetic survival of the BBs and also a linguistic survival of the pre-BBs)), and reasons not to like the idea (it requires us to believe that the kurgans were at least two genetically and culturally homogenous but linguistically seemingly highly distinct groups, which is certainly possible but not the simplest hypothesis).
An interesting idea - Basque coming from the east together with Indo-European. But why, then, don't we find other Vasconic languages elsewhere in Europe?
[Now, if those Vasco-Caucasian crackpots could prove their case, that'd make it very interesting...]
Actually, Vasco-Caucasian may be
correct - only the evidence adduced by people like Octaviano is shoddy. Basque and the two North Caucasian families may be the last remains of the same old layer of languages, alas, there seems to be no way knowing, and the hypothesis is based on superficial resemblances such as ergativity which prove nothing.
The Bell-Beaker people seem to have originated from the Iberian Peninsula, where the oldest C14 datings have been found. Also, they seem to have been a diaspora rather than the majority population in the area where they are attested, probably merchants, as they travelled a lot (as strontium isotope analyses show) and are often found at copper, salt and other mineral production sites. That means that they probably had rather little impact on the languages of Central and Western Europe.
It's true that the earliest physical remains are from the Atlantic. However, genetically they appear to have originated from central or eastern Europe, and to have completely replaced the majority population in the area where they are attested.
You could, of course, say that these are two different groups - that a migrant group from the east and a pottery group from the west just happened to have coinciding areas. That's possible. Although I'm not aware of any reason to think that your 'isolated merchant caste' hypothesis would be plausible, rather than plain spread of culture into a new group.
Now that I think of it it makes perfect sense. There may be a merchant caste, and it may have originated in the Iberian Peninsula, but they may be of a racial stock that spread from the east earlier. This also explains why their range is roughly coterminous with the Old European Hydronymy - they travelled where languages closely related to their own language were spoken such that they could make themselves understood among the locals, and no farther.
But where are the relatives of the Paleo-Hispanic languages in Italy, on the Balkan Peninsula, in Central Europe?
Gone, obviously. These areas have all been bulldozed by IE, so we can't legitimately say what was or wasn't there before then.
After all, we know that Aquan, if it existed at all (my hypothesis may be utterly wrong!), did not leave attested descendants.
Nowhere such a language is spoken now (unless Basque is one, but then Vennemann would be right and the family unrelated to IE), nor have inscriptions in such a language been found.
Of course, Etruscan could have been related to Palaeo-Hispanic languages (given the lack of knowledge, a distant relation wouldn't be readily apparent). Minoan or Eteocypriot (if they're not related to one another) might be related to Palaeo-Hispanic - we couldn't possibly know, until a lot more success has been had with those scripts. And of course a pre-IE language may have survived on Sardinia right the way into the historical era, but no attestations are known. Absence of evidence, however, is not evidence of absence.
Concurred. All that is possible.
I never claimed that all of Europe was ever as diverse as the Iberian Peninsula!
Then, again, what on earth are you "testing"? If you accept that the situation in Iberia tells us nothing at all about the situation outside of Iberia, how can Iberia be a "test case" of any theory?
This is the
fourth time you ask this question in one single post
But note that the Central Zone was not devoid of human inhabitants during the last ice age; in fact, it was rich in big game to hunt. Surely, more people moved in from the south when the ice age ended, the climate zones shifted and people followed their game northwards. So we have at least two linguistic layers - and at least two language families - in the Central Zone.
There have actually been several phases of replacement. As I understand it:
There were several phases before the glacial maximum. The earliest phases appear completely genetically unrelated to modern Europeans (more accurately: they are no more related to Europeans than to East Asians). Before the ice, Europe appears to have been genetically diverse.
When the ice came, the tundra region became more or less entirely depopulated, and the groups immediately preceding the ice do not appear to have had any genetic continuity with later groups.
As the ice receded, the big game hunters entered the region in much larger numbers. If there were any inhabitant before them, they became obsolete, leaving no apparent trace. The big game hunters were from Iberia (or southern France), and were related to one of the earlier groups, but not closely related to their immediate predecessors in the north.
The big game hunters brought about complete homogeneity in Europe, replacing the earlier diversity. At this point, remains everywhere from Spain to Hungary (although I don't know about the Balkans) became effectively genetically indistinguishable. The same culture was also rapidly spread over most of this area. It seems extremely plausible to me that this invasion spread a single language family, or at least no more than a couple, across the whole continent.
OK; I didn't know that. This would limit the linguistic diversity of Europe at that time.
Later, however, at the transition into the Mesolithic, another group arose. This group had some sort of connection to the Middle East, although it's too early to say whether they were immigrants, or emigrants, or just cousins. This new group rapidly spread throughout the whole continent; the earlier group left some traces, but were clearly genetically overwhelmed. Again, this new group brought with them their own distinctive culture. After this latest invasion and population replacement, Europe was again culturally and genetically homogenous. Again, it seems reasonable to suspect that it was also linguistically homogenous, or nearly so.
I see.
A few thousand years later, two big invasions occured from the middle east, associated with the introduction of farming. Although there were two invasions, the two groups seem genetically very close together. The earlier Mesolithic groups were marginalised; they left a substantial trace in most areas, but were clearly overwhelmed and replaced. [for one thing, Mesolithic Europeans were black (by modern standards), and Neolithic Europeans were not]. So again, after these invasions, Europe was genetically and (in two parts) culturally homogenous. It's not unreasonable to suspect that, perhaps outside of a few isolated Mesolithic holdout areas, it was also linguistically homogenous.
Indeed, I consider it likely that perhaps two language families spread across large swathes of Europe in the Neolithic, one north of the Alps, one in the Mediterranean, corresponding to the LBK and Cardial cultural lineages, respectively. The "LBK language family" could have been related to PIE and may have been my "Aquan" family.
Partway through the Neolithic, it seems like bad things happened. It was once thought that perhaps there was another invasion at this point. People don't think that anymore, I don't think - at least, if there were invasions, they were not massive population replacements. Maybe there were raiders? Probably more likely it's just that as the farmers spread out, they lost their cohesion and began to fall into conflict. From this point on, the genetic influence of the Mesolithic actually increases a little - some have suggested a "fightback", but it seems more likely this was just the gradual assimilation of the last holdouts, and that once they were assimilated they were actually sexually quite succesful.
Fair.
Then metalworking comes along. Some time later, there was a massive invasion from the Steppe by the Yamna (or a related group), who were partly distantly related to the mesolithics and partly not. Although their influence is less extreme in western and southern Europe (particularly in the Basque Country, where there is an unusally high level of mesolithic ancestry), the Yamna (or "kurgans") effectively overwhelmed the entire continent (apart from Sardinia). Again, Europe became fairly culturally and genetically homogenous (although not to the extent of earlier invasions). And Europe also became linguistically homogenous, so far as we can tell (and eventually it became almost entirely linguistically homogenous). This doesn't prove, of course, that the more complete earlier population turnovers didn't produce less linguistic domination, but it does seem, on the face of it, to strengthen the case somewhat...
This is just what most Indo-Europeanists think about the matter, and I am in full concurrence with them. Of course, the "Kurgan people" weren't much like Mongols, as is often popularly assumed. At least in the western part of their homeland, they were farmers, we have PIE words for the plough, and architectural terms which probably referred to more permanent structures than tents or yurts, also two words for pigs, an animal quite unsuitable for pastoral nomadism. And of course, the country they inhabited is famously suitable to agriculture, after all, Ukraine has been called "the granary of Russia" as long as it was part of the Muscovite empire and its "Communist" successor state.