What DNA Says About Aryan Invasion Theory -2

[Husky]

(Split from previous)

Post 5





Oooh, I guessed it right - and how sad to be right (how sad to read the European mind so well): that India/Iran will be declared to be derived while only Europa gets to claim continuity from the Ur-Zeit (=prehistory).

They'll argue it logically of course - with reference to "internal PCT logic" (rules are bendable and rewritable only for Europa):



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talkaleolithic_Continuity_Theory/Archive1

Asian IE languages

This page is noticeably missing a PCT explanation for the placement of the Indo-Iranian and Tocharian languages. Does the "continuity" logic apply to them too, or are they explained away as a result of more recent migrations away from Europe? --86.135.181.234 (talk) 00:14, 25 April 2008 (UTC)



No, Alinei is silent on this point and when I asked him about it, he just said that he didn't have time to deal with everything.



Evidently, I think that this is a serious sin of omission (as is his failure to deal with Iberia, Greece, Iran and only cursory treatment of Turkey).



My own view, FWIW (and NOT Alinei's) - is that while I tend to support his premise about IE being present in Europe by the Mesolithic, there is no a priori reason for assuming that the same holds for India. This, however, is a logical consequence of his theory, since evidently, one of his key arguments is the absence of convincing evidence for a pre-IE substrate in Scandinavia. It must thus logically follow that if you find a substrate then PCT doesn't apply, and there's been some very good work done by Frank Southworth & Michael Witzel to demonstrate Munda and Dravidian substrates in the Rg Veda. In any case, you have an instant clue to suggest that an IE PCT in India is unlikely, simply because there's only one big IE family, Indo-Aryan - if IE had a palaeolithic time-depth, you would expect to find several.Jonathan Morris2 (talk) 03:31, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Oh but someone observes that the Indian version of a 'Palaeolithic Continuity' theory pre-existed the formulation of such a theory for Europe (which last has subrules to negate the Indian case), as accidentally indicated by slights in the following (does it count as some backhanded credit for inspiration? It's all that Indians can expect):

status of PCT

thanks for the 'review' link (more properly 'self-promotion' I suppose, since it is hosted on their own site and does not appear to have been published elsewhere (?)). Looking it over, I am now quite convinced that PCT can be dismissed as fringy nonsense. It appears to propose linguistic change with geological slowness miley: no matter what your take on glottochronology (error margin of 50% or 200%?), I don't think any self-respecting historical linguist would endorse anything like this: Renfrew's timeframe is already borderline acceptable, but this is completely bat-shit beyond the pale. PCT appears, after all, to be the European answer to "Paleolithic Aryan" nonsense in India. It is at least reassuring to see that crackpottery knows no boundaries <smiley in original> dab (ᛏ) 09:35, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

How do you derive the age of a proto language? How old is spoken language and how is the date arrived at? Is there any reading material available for non-linguist? --UB 10:59, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

try (the references at) historical linguistics and glottochronology. The accuracy of such estimates depends decisively on the age of the earliest sources. For PIE in particular, see Proto-Indo-European language and Proto-Indo-Europeans. The error margin is frequently admitted to be as high as 100% (i.e. a factor of 2). For PIE, dates between 8000 BC and 2500 BC are possible (10000-4500 BP, i.e. a factor of 2.2): 8000 BC is extremely early and 2500 is extremely late, most people will agree that a 6000-3000 BC range (factor of 1.6) still has a very high confidence. [color="#FF0000"]All we know with dead certainty is that the proto-language must have split up by 2000 BC, since our earliest text fragments date to shortly thereafter.[/color] [color="#800080"](= "PIE must have existed, since an 'IE' language has been attested afterwards." Well, uh, 'IE' languages have indeed been attested, duh.)[/color] Claiming paleolithic age of PIE simply amounts to rejecting wholesale all efforts at dating language change and taking an agnostic position of "prove that it isn't paleolithic". It would entail that languages stayed essentially unchanged for at least 10,000 years, over vast areas of Eurasia. All known language histories show that a language usually changes beyond comprehensibility (meaning it doesn't just 'change', it becomes a wholly different language) over 1,000 years, in rare cases of stability maybe over 2,000 years. Note that in this case, evidence for dating is not restricted to pure glottochronology. For example, since there is a very good reconstruction of PIE terms for "wheel", it seems evident that (late) PIE must post-date the invention of the wheel in around 4500 BC. The evidence for "metal" (Bronze) is less clear, it is possible that some branches had already separated before Bronze became known (after around 3300 BC): these dates dovetail perfectly with a 5000-3500 range of early to late PIE fully consistent with the (wider) glottochronological estimate. dab (ᛏ) 11:35, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

[color="#0000FF"]-It must be remembered that he is a distinguished academic at the end of his life (he's over 80), so age is a major factor in explaining why he has failed to discuss with certain key areas of IE (like Iberia, Persia, India). It also explains why he finds it difficult to get to grips with the intricacies of mtDNA.

- At the same time, I think that the advances so far in mt/YDNA tend to bear him out. If you read Sykes book (good but lamentable for its lack of bibliography), he describes very clearly that Cavalli-Sforza violently opposed mtDNA and then seeing he was defeated, decided to start supporting it and claim the idea as his own. This marks a major change in favour of the PCT, in that if the mesolithic hunter gatherers were a tiny majority overwhelmed by a massive influx of farmers, the idea of IE speakers in Europe prior to the Neolithic would have been hard to believe. The consensus in genetics is now fairly solid that 80% of the population is pre-farming and if you study the models of diffusion advanced e.g. by Zvelebil, then you come to the clear conclusion that it was very much a piecemeal process. Hence, as Alinei points out, Renfrew has a real problem in explaining why there's no substrate in the last areas to be neolithicised e.g. Norway, why there's a long-standing linguistic boundary in N Latvia (i.e. why don't the farmers manage to impose IE on the "Estonians", etc. Furthermore, the theory is actually starting to creep in via the back door - a specific prediction of PCT is the presence of Germanic speakers in Neolithic Britain, and I see that Stephen Oppenheimer has mentioned this in his new book (unfortunately without citation). What you have to remember is that the world is Anglophone, IE studies is a sleepy field, so that anyone writing in a language other than English gets no "air time", with the possible exception of the Russians. There are some Spanish linguists doing excellent work, notably Francisco Vilar who has shown that the oldest toponyms even in Andalusia are IE[/color] [color="#800080"](:oooohhh: Je meent 't?)[/color] - but because he doesn't write in English, no-one is even aware of his work. For those people interested in PCT, the figure to watch, and the "heir" to Alinei seems to be Xaverio Ballester.

- Secondly, Alinei has a problem in that his method of linguistic archaeology only really works where you have peoples with defined territories, hence you have a paradox of someone proposing conjectures about the languages spoken during the Palaeolithic with a methodology which only really works from the Mesolithic onwards. As a result, when discussing pre-LGM, he tends to rely on other people's ideas and frankly hasn't chosen very wisely, appearing to be bogged down in a tool making equals syntactic structure equation which leads him to view Chinese as a kind of ur-language. This is the old Schlegelian bear-trap of the Monosyllabic/Agglutinative/Inflectional classification which captivated mid-19th century figures such as Haeckel and Schleicher, but had already been dismissed by e.g. Trombetti/Jespersen/Saussure in the early 20th century who realised that Chinese was the result of a long-process of simplifying an inflected language (see Classical Tibetan). Alinei seems to be obsessed by the stability of lithics in E Asia since Homo Erectus and imho is assuming without foundation that the original inhabitants of S China were Sino-Tibetan speakers. People who want to dismiss him seize on this older stuff and his claims that IE had differentiated 100,000 years ago. Indeed, the response to my Mother Tongue article was that most of the readers are interested in deep prehistory and Asia, so they assumed that what is actually a fairly marginal part of Alinei's work was the main part and dismissed all his extremely detailed linguistic archaeology relating to the mesolithic and neolithic.



[color="#0000FF"]In other words, I think that Renfrew and Gimbutas theories don't stand up at all, but if you modify PCT to take into account modern advances in genetics, you actually come up with a plausible theory.[/color]



Also: - I am not aware of Alinei ever suggesting that the PCT applied to India. I asked him about this and his comment was that he wasn't a Sanskritist and someone else should take up the torch. The PCT is purely about whether or not IE languages had differentiated and spread into Europe by the end of the ice age. - The comment above that the Thracians were Slavs is entirely inaccurate and I refer the person in question to pp. 222-223 of vol. 2 of Origini. What he actually says is that he thinks that Herodotus probably used the term 'Thracians' as a blanket term to refer to Slavs. He actually regards it as a third differentiated branch of a proto-Balto-Slavic family subject to influence from an Altaic elite. (20:39, 16 January 2007 (UTC)) - Jonathan Morris.

(And more dialogue - an interminable page - at the link)



(By the way, Brian Sykes was mentioned in that excerpt on Oppenheimer from Spiegel.de that was quoted for the nth time some posts back.)





[color="#0000FF"]But Oh isn't this just great? I love it!

- Everything can be rewritten. If PCT is right, rules on time for linguistic changes may well have to be rewritten etc. (As long as "Europe is oryan." And tomorrow the Basques too will be oryan.)

- Except the one constant: AIT/AMT on India.[/color]



So fascinating.

I have no issues with Alinei: if he's old and has no time to contemplate Iberia and Iran and I forget that other country's name - oh yeah India (or something). [Nice to know he was interested in China though. That's something isn't it?]

But it's amazing how that one rule remains constant. I'm not saying that everyone is consciously biased, but there is something. Anyway it doesn't matter. It's all about Europeans after all. Can't turn the camera to film anything else.



Now, based on my own logical reasoning - in Posts 1 and 2 of this set of spam - I personally think the Stone Ager from 7000 years ago bears out PCT*, well certainly more than the other PIE theories, but admittedly I'm not really familiar with PIE-ism. (*It says nothing about India of course. Which of course means the one constant will still apply - as it already was doing - but at least we have a better picture on Europa. And Europa is all that matters in the end, no? Am I wrong?)



Hysterisch.





En kijk hier 'ns:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_Continuity_Theory

Linguist Mario Alinei - University of Utrecht.

Utrecht? Niet Italië? Dat had ik dus nóóit kunnen raden...