Re: Vinca script, cross bar angle - Ki Ri Ke

"Franz Gnaedinger" <frgn@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...

John Atkinson wrote:

Not to mention that in foraging and early agricultural societies, 100 km
is
enough to change the language a good deal more than that. It would be
_extremely_ surprising if pre-10 000 BP Europe (with a population of a
million or less) didn't contain several hundred mutually unintelligible
languages each spoken by a few hundred to a few thousand people. These
languages would have belonged to a dozen or more language families so
different from each other that it would have been impossible for a
linguist
to find _any_ cognate words between them.

The language of Marseilles wouldn't have been that of western
Switzerland,
though they _might_ have belonged to the same family. Austria and
Czechia
and Hungary would have spoken unrelated languages, and the same for GT
and
Gilgal.

We

Speak for yourself mate.

have a wrong understanding of the Upper Paleolithic
societies. Can anyone believe that the elaborate cave
paintings in the Franco-Cantabrian space were just local?

OK, let's compare it with the Upper Paleolithic society I'm most familiar
with -- Australia. (Pre-invasion North America would be just as good an
example, I'm sure).

Items of indigenous Australian art attract bids in the hundreds of thousands
of dollars at auction. You speak of "Franco-Cantabrian" art? It has
nothing on the Bradshaws, the Mimi paintings, the Xray art, the cave art of
the Nullarbor Plain. All of which was produced, over the course of
thousands of years and thousands of km, by people speaking 300 different
languages from, according to one reckoning, 26 different language families.

Those people exchanged ideas,

Of course they did -- just like the Australians -- ideas and songs and
ceremonies and even material goods. In Australia, songlines and
trade-routes criss-crossed the country for thousands of km. But no single
language was spoken by more than a thousand people (and most by much fewer).

and I have reasons to
believe that we can call the society of the Guyenne just
that, a society. The birdman in the pit of the Lascaux cave
represents the river system of the Guyenne, his head the
region of Bordeaux, his eye Bordeaux, his beak the Gironde,
by then shorter, as there were marches, but the beak as
the Gironde makes sense, for the Paleolithic dwellers of
the region had been diving for mussels as do the seagulls.
Here you are with two comparisons of the birdman and the
river system of the Guyenne (note that the phallus of the
birdmann corresponds to the river Vézère and Lascaux,
from which I derive that the lovely valley of the Vézère
and the region of Lascaux were the center of a summer
festival, where shamans and aspiring tribal leaders were
meeting):

Next time you're in Paris, wander down to the new museum of indigenous art
(on the Seine, right near the Eiffel Tower). Ask someone what the paintings
on the ceilings and walls of the administrative building represent. You'll
be told that they were painted by eight famous Australian artists, brought
across especially for the job, and that they're maps of the dreaming tracks
of ancestral beings across northern Australia, and that everything in them
represents a particular place and what happened there. So what else is new?

The druids had been wandering from tribe to tribe,
and I assume the same for the Guyenne and the whole
Magdalenian space, from northern Spain to at least
Hungary: arch-shamans, represented by the giant stag
megaceros in the cave art, have been wandering up and
down the rivers and visiting tribes all along their way.
This kept language in shape, as they have been the
lords of language, the ones who had the say.

Funny, that's not the way things happen in every Paleolithic society we
actually know something about. Each little "tribe" has its own language,
which they're careful to keep distinct from those of their neighbours.
People travel, sure, especially men of high degree, for religious or
economic or political reasons. There were (and still are) big ceremonies at
special places where people gather from all over. Where necessary, people
are bi-, tri-, multi-lingual. But everyone always has one special language
which they own, inheriting it from one or other of their parents, just as
they inherit their personal hunting-grounds and the ceremonies that go with
them.

Do you really think the Europeans were so different?

John.


.

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