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Having just had another look at AHD's aesthetically pleasing graphical display of the IE languages, it got me wondering about how long PIE lasted. Is there any evidence of how long it existed, and when it faded away, superseded by its daughter tongues?
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Dunno if this helps, but Britannica Concise Encyclopedia says:
Family of languages with the greatest number of speakers, spoken in most of Europe and areas of European settlement and in much of southwestern and southern Asia.
They are descended from a single unrecorded language believed to have been spoken more than 5,000 years ago in the steppe regions north of the Black Sea and to have split into a number of dialects by 3000 BC.
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It's a really good question without much of an answer. In a sense all of the present-day IE languages are modern PIE. Languages don't change at the same rate. Did PIE split into two daughter languages or more? Or did a whole bunch split off. There's no written record of PIE, and it's very difficult to associate archeological artifacts with languages. (E.g., there's some who doubt that the Celts occupied the wide area across Europe that they're usually thought to have. NB: I'm not saying this theory is correct/incorrect. I don't think there's enough evidence either way.) Take Latin, when it stopped be the official language in the western Roman empire, did it "split" into what became Italian, French, etc.? It remained in place and gradually started to differentiate into its daughter languages? Latin survived, but only as a kind of artifical language for academic / ecclesiastical discourse. A lot of ink (and ultimately blood) was spilled over which "race" speaking a daughter language represented the PIEs (Aryan) or which daughter language was closer to the ancestral to the mother tongue (PIE). Lithuanians today claim that there's is mainly due to some phonological, grammatical, and lexical claims made in the 19th century. Most IEists today don't buy it. There was a Flemish scholar named I. Goropius Becanus who figured out that the Antwerp dialect of Flemish (his language coincidentally) was the language of paradise. Chauvinism of this sort is still with us today. IEists aren't even sure where PIE originated, though many today have reached some agreement on the steppes of Central Asia. There's been some new work done at UPenn by Donald Ringe and some colleagues: it's based on algorithms from biotech called cladistics. But he just gives relative dates of splits between individual branches. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~dringe/home.html
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As a rule of thumb, speakers could probably understand each other perhaps 500 years apart, but not 1000 years apart. So labels like "Greek" over longer periods are for our convenience. They just continually change: you never actually get one language changing into another. A language doesn't last for a certain length of time.
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They just continually change: you never actually get one language changing into another.
Linguatones!
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Linguatonesthat may be stretching it a bit thin, eh, Jackie? 
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An Esperanto doo-wop quartet.
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An Esperanto doo-wop quartet I was in an acapella group called the "NoteTones". of course, if you say it fast...
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In reply to:
I was in an acapella group called the "NoteTones". of course, if you say it fast...
A friend is learning Panjabi, and I was intending to join her, until I learned that it has three tones, two more than I.
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Could someone give a short account of the evidence for the existence of a language of which there is no record?
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I defer to the scholars here, insel, but in a nutshell, PIE is a theory created through back-formation; sort of compare & contrast. Kinda like the big-bang theory of the creation of the universe (uh-oh!).
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We have a large group of languages that could not have the similarities they do without their having an unrecorded common ancestor.
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More like circumstantial evidence I suppose, but after some folks had noticed a whole series of systematic relationships between languages in Europe and South Asia, they started to compare these languages together mainly phonologically and semantically, deriving a bunch of rules of language change which when applied to the daughter languages led to the reconstruction of the hypothetical proto-language, Proto-Indo-European, from which they had descended. Not all folks believe in the genetic relationship between these daughter languages, appealing to other linguistic processes (called areal). The Russian prince, NS Trubetskoy wrote an engimatic article shortly before he died (as a result of an intense interrogation in Vienna by the Gestapo), but some think it was a joke (he had delivered it as a talk). Others, e.g. RMW Dixon, have pointed out that these areal processes fit some languages better, e.g., Australian Aborginal ones.
I personally hold that the IE languages are related genetically, i.e., that they are descended from a common ancestor, and that we have some idea of what that language's lexical element looked like. The comparative method works rather well with the Romance languages, which few would argue are not descended from Latin or something a lot like Latin.
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(Thanks, all). So that Indo European is a theoretical model? Now, is there a difference between Indo European and Proto Indo European? And, finally, in constructing such a theory, does one 'extrapolate?' That is, can one extrapolate backwards in time. Or, actually, can one extrapolate *in time* at all? (This isn't a bid at wit, I'm just wondering).
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Well, IE refers to the current and extinct languages that are descended from PIE. PIE has been also divided into earlier and later phase. When you look at the appendix in the A-H dictionary, the roots given are reconstructed PIE roots.
Well, I suppose that PIE itself is an extrapolation from the recorded IE languages backwards in time to about 6000 BCE. Some folks (today usually called Nostraticists) try to extrapolate further back in time from PIE and Proto-Semitic (the reconstructed parent of Hebrew, Arabic, Ethiopian, et al) and other proto-languages to Nostratic. Others say that 10,000 years BP is about as far back as the historical-comparative method can take you. The enmity between these two groups is rather intense. [Full disclosure, I fall into the anti-Nostraticist group, but try not to get drawn into flamewars with the pro-Nostraticist group.]
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Enjoyed reading this thread; thank Max for starting. jheem, is Nostratic the supposed Ur language then? What does Nostratic mean? And now that you have come clean, I suppose it is all right to ask why you are anti-Nostratic!?
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That is, can one extrapolate backwards in time. Yes--unless I am mistaken, that's what archaeologists do. If you can extrapolate backwards from artifacts that can be seen and touched, I don't see why it could not also be done for things that can be heard.
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IIRC, Nostratic has some tie with noster 'our' in Latin. I don't think the evidence that I've seen supports their position. OTOH, most of what I've read on it is rather popular accounts and anti-Nist's rants with the pro-Nists. I've been meaning to get the pro-N book by the late Russian linguist who started it all. Begins with an 's'; let me get back to you on it.
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<<backward in time>>
Thanks, Jackie. To be honest, something was bothering me, when I asked that -- but I'm no longer sure what. ;)
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Illich-Svitych and Dogopolsky were the Russian proponents. Then there was Greenberg, who had a similar and overlapping proposal for Eurasiatic, covering most of the Siberian langauges. I'd like these things to be true, though I'm sad there probably never will be enough evidence to be convincing.
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they seem to be a bit hazy on the details. Perhaps we could send an AWAD delegation?
In case they're not quite as hazy on the details as they could be? We could give them some coaching on the process?
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Good find, Bingley! Too bad the small Massachusetts paper can't afford a fact checker to catch this and other problemettes:
...used articles like thou, thine and thy
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articles like thou, thine and thy
They probably got confused by the articles þa and þone.
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Thanks, jenet. There's a merry band of linguists stretching back to Humboldt who are concerned with the typology of language: dealing e.g. with default word order for subject, object, and verb, noun and quantifier, etc. Greenberg and his students did much of the modern-day work on it. Here's a picture of Illich-Svitych and a reconstructed poem in Nostratic: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/6623/nostraticist.htm
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Thanks again jheem; ....I know nothing about Nostratic and the controversies it engenders; however, am curious...is the argument about, there having been ONE language that was the progenitor of all the others? Or, (as I am assuming) about Nostratic being that one.
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I don't think anybody's saying that Nostratic is The Ur Language, merely that it is ancestral to the Indo-European languages and the Afro-Asiatic languages. There are plenty of languages that don't fit into either of these groups.
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I'm not sure that even the pro-Nostraticists argue that it's the proto-language. I guess it boils down to whether you think Neanderthal spoke or not. You're probably better off asking a pro-Nostraticist than me. There is a book called Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence edited by Joe Salmons, that I've been meaning to read. (And the Russian linguist whose name I was trying to remember earlier in this thread is Vitalij V. Shevoroshkin.)
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Leaving the Neanderthals out of this...Surely language must have been present in *some form when our first sapiens ancestors wandered off from Africa into Eurasia?
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And, finally, in constructing such a theory, does one 'extrapolate?' That is, can one extrapolate backwards in time. Or, actually, can one extrapolate *in time* at all?
Insel, something bothered me about this too; but, I got so carried away by Nostratic that the post slipped my mind.
One can extend the inferences of biological evolution, to the somewhat similar process of reconstructing the evolution of language and extrapolate therefore. What is probably nagging you, is the "exrapolating backwards" bit. Extrapolation is neither backward or forward, but is certainly a comparative/relative process
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Surely language must have been present in *some form when our first sapiens ancestors wandered off from Africa into Eurasia?
Yup. But I don't see anybody reconstructing a 45K plus old proto-language.
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Must say, that it seems, quite certainly, an impossible task, jheem.
EDIT:
Is there anything like fossil evidence in language? Vestigeal remnants or the like..
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fossil evidence in language
Well, there's writing, but that's pretty recent. There's also loanwords, like the Germanic and Iranian lexical items in Finno-Ugric. Heard a Finnish professor deliver a paper on it once. Interesting. I'll try to find the handout. I've seen some alleged PIE loans into Archaic Chinese (or whatever it's called today): word for horse ma was one of them.
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I found only a tantalizing hint, maahey:
About 40,000 years ago, with the appearance of the Cro-Magnon culture, tool kits started becoming markedly more sophisticated, using a wider variety of raw materials such as bone and antler, and containing new implements for making clothing, engraving and sculpting. Fine artwork, in the form of decorated tools, beads, ivory carvings of humans and animals, clay figurines, musical instruments, and spectacular cave paintings appeared over the next 20,000 years. (Leakey 1994)
Even within the last 100,000 years, the long-term trends towards smaller molars and decreased robustness can be discerned. The face, jaw and teeth of Mesolithic humans (about 10,000 years ago) are about 10% more robust than ours. http://talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/species.htmlIf they made tool kits, they surely talked about them! The comment about reconstructing the language made me try to find out about skeletal makeup: perhaps we are physiologically different enough from them that we could not make some of the sounds, even if we knew what they were?
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Yes, its is supposed that ancient africans-(bushmen,of the kalihari, it would seem from dna evidence) moved out of africa and populated the world.. but PIE seems to be much later!
this is based on certain words(like tree names, and animal names, and weather words) that suggest PIE or what ever you want to call the UR language was from a people who lived in a temperate (not tropical) climate.
bushmen have a very interesting language-- its the only surviving one with clicks (!) and whistle like noises.
interestingly, wild animals are spooked by human voices, but not by clicks or whistles (and many birds are not spooked by a bell round the neck of a cat!) there hasn't been enough time (or animals are not smart enough to recognize a pattern in a whistle/click noise but humans can and do! --so bushmen language is especially good in a hunter/gather environment.
its is speculated the the first languages made more use of these type noises. (aboriginal austrailians, surprizingly, are the closest genentic link to the bushmen... with almost no 'intervening' populations! because of changing water levels of the oceans, most of the 'path' of the first 'great migration' is now under water.
there was a 6 part PBS special about this (the genetic proof of migration, with just a comment or two along the way on languages!) last year, (there is a 'companion book')
exploring the migration of 'people (genetically with DNA markers) gives surprizing insite into 'language groups' too!
the centeral plains of asia extending into eastern europe seem to have been a great reservoir where population grew, and from there migrated to many other places, (south to india, where they displace the sparse population left over from the first great migration), west to europe (where they got isolated for a while) East to all of asia (in the meanwhile, older (first migration people) had moved into indoneasia, and were gettting ready to move to polyasia--
the last places 'explored' were the americas.. (and DNA/blood typing proves there were at least 2 major, seperate migrations. (languge groups support this too!)
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bushmen have a very interesting language-- its the only surviving one with clicks (!) and whistle like noises.
Not knowing what the proto-language was, I can't say for certain whether Khoisan languages preserve clicks or innovated them after the others left. We use clicks in English, just not as phonemes in words: e.g., kissing sound, gee-up, and the interjection transcribed as tsk-tsk.
The interesting thing about the Australian Aborigines is how they seem to have left little behind genetically while traveling to Oz. As I remember the PBS special, the South Indians are not that closely linked with them. Later arrivals?
There's a danger in equating "race", language, culture, and material artifacts that makes me nervous given the nature of the century in which I grew up. How much genewise did the Romans contribute to the Gaulish population? We know their impact linguistically. Then look at the Franks. They left loanwords, but French is still basically Neo-Latin. Or the Vandals in Northern Spain or the Lombards in Italy.
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geez, guys. didn't none of you read Clan of the Cave Bear?
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The Proto-World theory is the one that claims to be able to detect traces of the ur-language, from before our migrations out of Africa 50 or 100 000 years ago. So they (one proponent is called Donald(?) Ruhlen) think they can see TIK for finger/toe, MILK/MALK for milk/throat/suck/breast, in language families all over the world.
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I once had the opportunity to listen to a couple speak a Guatemalan Indian dialect. The overall impression I had was that it sounded much like birds twittering. It was really quite fluid and beautiful.
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One thing that is problematic, for me at least, is that unlike phonology which is pretty well understood and for which workable models in historical change exist, semantics has never been formalized in a way that allows one to investigate one lnaguage standing still in time, let alone track change over the period of 40K to 100K years.
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It was really quite fluid and beautiful.
Phonaesthetics is one way to judge a language. Some folks love simple syllabic patterns that are basically CV-CV, etc. If you listen to incidents of glossolalia (speaking in tongues), this is what a lot of people do when making up a language. I've often wonder what Georgians (and other speakers of Kartvelian languages) do when they make up nonsense syllables. Their language abounds in all kinds of difficult (for us anglophones) consonant clusters, including glottalized stops (see below). One of those languages, Kabardian, is alleged to have only one vowel (with a couple of allophones).
When listening to how folks react to languages unknown to them, I've found that tone makes more of an impact than vowels and consonants. If you were in the lowlands and the language happened to be one of the Maya ones, then it probably had tone and a series of stops that are glottalized. To pronounce a glottalized 'p' for example, pronounce the voiceless bilabial stop as you would usually, but after closing the lips, lower the glottis and release. Lots of languages have them in their phonological inventory, but only Armenian in IE lgs does.
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To pronounce a glottalized 'p' for example, pronounce the voiceless bilabial stop as you would usually, but after closing the lips, lower the glottis and release.make a sound file?
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cool! thanks!
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