Re: new book on the spread of IE

On Feb 21, 11:38 am, ekk...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Feb 20, 3:00 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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."

"... The Horse, the Wheel, and Language:
How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern
World"

You mean "riders" are not people. You mean "horse", "wheel" are just
linguistic terms that have nothing to do with people?

The riders are people, and the ancestors of those words were people,
perhaps even people who spoke something of which PIE is a very rough
approximation. They were not, however, "Indo-European people."

"... Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from
a
shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were
the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they
manage to spread it around the globe?"

You mean "who", "they", "speakers" are not people?

They were members of a variety of speech-communities that used
languages that were similar in broad outline to reconstructed Proto-
Indo-European. We have no way of knowing what they called themselves,
and we certainly have no reason to believe that all the people who
spoke those languages believed themselves to be speaking the same
language, let alone to be the same people.

We need look no further than Serbs and Croats, who speak "the same"
language by any but political criteria, but who deny vehemently that
Serbian and Croatian are "the same" language.

(Your little corner of the world, where the Chinese insist that at
least eight different languages, not mutually comprehensible, are a
single language "Chinese," is unique.)

" Until now their identity has
remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even
Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and
Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original
Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses
and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization."

You mean "original speakers" are not people? You mean "their identity"
is not the identity of a people? You mean "domestication of horses,
use of the wheel" are not done by people?

"Identity" here is the creation of a Public Relations advertising copy-
writer.

If you are so unhappy with the word "people", make it "peoples", and
be happy.

That would be an improvement, but "peoples" are not coterminous with
speech communities.

I understand your point of view: to you, linguistics is the end. But
you have to understand that to other people, linguistics is just the
means, in the sense of the "holistic" four-field anthropology. Both
approaches are valid in their respective realms. But don't get all
surprised when people talk about archeology, genetics and
sociocultural aspects in conjunction with linguistics. You are
interested in languages only, that's fine. But other people are
interested in peoples. I always admire those creators of the four-
field approach. To really understand people, you can't just come in
from one single angle. From those archeologists that found the chipped-
pebble tools, to social-cultural researchers like Ling Shun-Sheng, to
linguists like Benedict/Schmidt/etc., and then finally culminating
with people like Cavalli-Sforza, you can see that they had to base
their knowledge on the findings from other fields, and there is a nice
sequence of development that arrives at the irrefutable DNA evidences.
But if you asked people like Ling Shun-Sheng (if they come back to
life), they would tell you: "But I already knew all that 60 years ago!
And I did not need any DNA!"

Your name-dropping isn't very impressive. (Paul Benedict,
incidentally, was not a linguist, but an attorney; it took a linguist,
Jim Matisoff, to whip his materials into a shape that could be taken
seriously by the linguistic community. He usually connected
Austronesian roots with roots in other phyla by reconstructing forms
where the first part of the reconstruction yielded the An root and the
second part the root in another phylum. If you are referring to
Wilhelm Schmidt, he tried to make the most bizarre associations
between linguistic typology and cultural traits. Cavalli-Sforza fell
into bad company and came up with utterly worthless "correlations"
between genetic dendrograms and fallacious linguistic dendrograms.)
.

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