Re: new book on the spread of IE


"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
On Feb 20, 12:38 pm, ekk...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

It's therefore heartwarming to see that so much research is happening
in mainland nowadays, for people to find out their own past. Let us
not forget what this thread was originally about: the original Indo-
European people. The same is true for Chinese: they have their
languages, and many of them would like to find out more about the
original speakers of the roots of their languages.

[...]

The original topic of the thread is a new book on the spread of Indo-
European LANGUAGES. There is not and never was such a thing as "Indo-
European people."

Let's assume there was once a language which the linguists' "Proto-Indo-European" is a pale approximation of(though, admittedly, not everyone agrees that PIE isn't just a linguist's idealisation, and never actually existed as a human language, which is maybe what you're getting at (?)).

Then, like every other human language, it must have had a community of speakers (at least two people). In recent times, the usual situation among people not influenced by "civilisation" has been for each "tribe" (numbering from a few hundred to some thousands) to be associated with its own language. There's no reason to think this wasn't the case way back then.

So, what would you call the tribe that spoke PIE before it split up into "dialects", each spoken by a different tribe? OK, ekkilu could have said "the group of people who spoke PIE as their tribal language". But what's wrong with "the original IE people" as an alternative way of saying exactly the same thing? What else could it possibly mean?

John.

.

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