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From:
"Spruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 18 Sep 2006 13:06:04 -0400
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Herb,

If I remember correctly, in the early 80s Colin Renfrew proposed (on
archeological grounds) that IE was from Anatolia or Greece, rather than
the steppe location that Gimbutas argued for and that most linguists
accepted at the time. Is this "two step" expansion model incorporating
some of Renfrew's arguments, or is it mainly just from Gamkrelidze? I
confess I haven't been following developments as much as I should....

Thanks! -- Bill Spruiell

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2006 9:38 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Textbook for My History of the English Language Course

Johanna,

Common Indo-European generally refers, as you suggest, to a the stage
right before the "European explosion," that is, the sudden
differentiation into Baltic, Slavic, Italic, Armenian, Greek, Albanian,
Celtic, and Germanic, after Anatolian had split off.  Whether Tokharian
split off before this stage or as part of it isn't clear.  There is,
though, some very interesting computational cladistic work by Don Ringe
at Penn that suggests that Tokharian split off shortly after Anatolian
and before the rest.  You can find one of the papers at
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/Papers/NWREpaper.pdf.

There is general agreement that this was the order of the splitting.
Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, in some groundbreaking work in the 70s and in
their Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans, translated from Russian by
Johanna Nichols around 1995, propose a homeland near the headwaters of
the Tigris and Euphrates, which would work nicely for Anatolian and for
a lot of early IE borrowings from non-IE languages.  Then the rest of
PIE moved up to the steppe and became what is now called the Kurgan
culture, before it broke up into the European dialects.  Indo-Iranian
probably split off from the steppe culture too, although it might have
bee earlier.  Malory's In Search of the Indo-Europeans has an excellent
review of the problems and hypotheses.

The idea is not so much that Anatolian had a different parent but rather
that Anatolian simply split off earliest.  The sound correspondence and
sound change evidence is really pretty strong, and it would account for
the fact that while Anatolian preserves segmental reflexes of the PIE
laryngeals, the rest of IE has lost them, except for traces in their
efects on neighboring segments.

Herb


-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Johanna
Rubba
Sent: Sun 9/17/2006 12:28 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Textbook for My History of the English Language Course
 
Herb,

I've noticed that recently people have started referring to "Common 
Indo-European" instead of "Proto-Indo-European". Apparently, there's a 
theory around that the Anatolian branch of IE had a different parent 
language than most of the other IE families; I've also read about a 
proposal of "primary" vs. "secondary" homelands, with one likely in 
roughly the place that the original IE homeland was proposed, in Europe 
somewhere rather than in Anatolia or the Caucusus. Do you know anything 
about this? (I'm sure you read up on this in your spare time --  ;-)  )

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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