Talk:Paleolithic Continuity Theory/Archive1

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Contents 1 Pseudo-science or no science 2 PCT - Interdisciplinary Conception 3 earlier debate 4 some memory problem in continuity 5 arbitrary break 6 Bad joke 7 Chomsky? 8 Did Indo-European Languages spread before farming? 9 Old random comment 10 an observation 11 status of PCT 12 Scope, Format, References and NPOV

Pseudo-science or no science

What if the paradigm of a not-so-early common origin of the Indo-European languages is met with serious inconsistencies, some of which are shown, for example, by Colin Renfrew in his book on the puzzle of Indo-European origins? Are we left with the choice of not trying any research at all or of resorting to pseudoscience? The proposal of the PCT that the dialect boundaries of today Europe go back to Mesolithic times at least might eventually turn out to be wrong, but is argued with the linguistic and archeological competence of an expert of European dialects and of an expert of European prehistory. Guparra 20:37, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

This article is self-contradictory. First it says PCT is the theory that Indo-European languages have been in place since Paleolithic. Then to contradict the theory in the last paragraph there is a statement that goes something like since language changes are now known not to be due to migrations, PCT must be pseudoscientific. Balazs 20:14, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

you misunderstand. The article is making the point that language spread is not connected to noticeable genetic shifts (i.e. 5% of people may migrate, and cause a change in the language of the other 95%), therefore the argument of the 80% genetic consistency is worthless. They may argue with expert competence on European dialects, but if you ask me, if they apply that competence to the Paleolithic, the outcome is still pseudoscientific. dab (ᛏ) 20:56, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

People have to get used to the new theory. Alinei is not some pseudoscientist to make such elementary faults. PCT is VERY VERY deep theory.

Cheers

I wish to point out some facts on the article, that make me believe that the article should be rewritten.

1. Alinei's theory is not based on arcaeogenetical studies, much less on those of Brian Sykes, who is not even quoted in the two volumes of "Origini delle lingue d'Europa"

It is based on other, linguistic and archaeological points, which I try to resume.

• From internal evidence from the European languages and dialects that shows inconsistencies in the usually assumed opinion dialects are late, Middle Age, phenomena.
• From evidence that linguistic chnge is rather due to contact than to an internal mutation clock: for example, the differences between American English or Spanish and their European counterparts are to be asciribed to the languages spoken in the regions where most emigrants came from rather than to later evolution.
• From the well known fact that geographically and culturally isolated isolated languages are conservative.
• From these, and many other facts, Alinei formulates a principle whereby languages change only if compelled to do so, because of contacts, but in absence of contacts they tend to be stable.
• So the distribution of languages can be much older than believed.
• Internal evidence shows that the common core of Indo-European language shows an Upper Paleolithic culture. Words that belong to later cultural ages are innovations coined out of a common stock, but innovations nevertheless. Therefore, common Indo-European is much older than believed.
• The borders of Mesolithic cultures are more or less well reproduced by the borders of modern European dialects.
• Genetics. The results of Cavalli Sforza and collaborators, of Sokal and others (not of Sykes) show that linguistic borders grossly correspond to "genetic borders". They are of course taken into account, as evidence to be added to the linguistic and archaeological evidence. But the PCT does not relay upon genetics.

1. If a theory about the origins of a linguistic group is deemed to be not scientific if it cannot be tested against records, no theory of the origins of IndoEuropeans, or Uralic peoples, or whatever else, is scientific. We can only maintain that Greek was spoken in Greece about 1200 BC, or German in parts of Germany about 800 AC. If instead we allow for the use of internal linguistic evidence and archaeology, used with the proper techniques of linguistics, Alinei theory is scientific. In addition, it explains facts otherwise unexplained, which is an excellent test. Of course, it might be wrong, in the same way that many other theories of hystorical linguistics and anthroploogy have turned out to be.

Oddly enough, it is the second instance in which I find criticisms of Alinei's theory motivated with statements that he did not issue. Here genetics being the basis of his theory, the other instance is to be found in the discussion of Etruscan language. Apparently, his theory is too new to be accepted easily. A review in English (his books are in Italian for now) is that og Jonathan Morris in Mothe Tongue [1]. Guparra 20:45, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

An amendment. I found Alinei's reference to Sykes' work. It is in the introduction to the Continuity Theory in the website {http://www.continuitas.com], which is linked to in the article. It is the website of the group of linguists and prehistorians who support the PCT.

• The work of Sykes quoted is printed in 2001, while the two books by Alinei were printed in 1996 and 2000.
• For sure, Sykes' work is relevant to Alinei because it gives him further arguments to criticize the Neolithic Farmers Wave Immigration, modelled by Ammermann and Cavalli Sforza and used by Renfrew. Renfrew hypothesizes that the IndoEuropeans were Neolithic farmers coming from the Levant who settled in Europe and by demic prevalence absorbed the scarce Mesolithic native population.
• It seems to me that the introduction to the PCT provided in the website, should make apparent that the theory relies on linguistics and archaeology, genetics being concurrent for some points only. Guparra 16:05, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

well, by all means fix the article then. It is still just a stub hacked together from online sources, so somebody who has actually read the book is sorely needed. dab (ᛏ) 18:22, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

what I shall gladly do. I only need some time because I am in the process of learning how to use wikiediting and, most important, I have to go through the books again. Guparra 20:38, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

I understand that language change is not neccessarily connected to genetic shifts (that is 5% genetic shift can change the language of the other 95%). But does it neccesarily contradict (provided that there is other evidence, which seems to be the case)? Alinei's website talks about another better established continuity theory (the Uralic one). There is also the issue of what is meant by pseudo-science vs. science (Feyerabend thought that neither is there a distinction nor would it be advantageous to have one). Balazs 16:31, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

I apologize that I shall be incommunicado for a few months. A comment about your comment. In Physics the border between science and pseudo-science can be very thin. Am example is the Superstring theory, which any physicist considers to be Science; nevertheless, we do not know when nor whether it can be actually tested, which would put it in the pseudo-science realm. Guparra 07:41, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Alinei's judgements on Uralic are entirely untrustworthy. There is no established continuity theory for Uralic. Wik's belief in a Uralic substrate, for instance, have been dismissed by most Uralicists. The people whom Alinei generally cites whenever he mentions Uralic languages are a couple of archaeologists without meaningful training in historical linguistics. Alinei is a very deceitful writer and you should follow his footnotes sometimes to see how much he strays from reputable linguistics. CRCulver 19:00, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

I would appreciate some references in any language that suggest that Alinei is a quack (which is roughly what you are saying). My limited understand is quite the opposite. Alinei appears to be a respected scientist with considerable accomplishments and acknowledgement behind him. Doubtless his continuity theory is contreversial... but I am yet to see any evidence beyond random anonymous english-speaking internet strangers that he is considered a disreputable or intellectually dishonest man by any group of people or scientific organisation. --70.49.192.75 00:31, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

The greeks (judging by the wikipedia page) do not seem to consider the theory quackery either... Paleolithic Continuity Theory, translated from Greek --70.49.192.75 00:41, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

And what is that link supposed to indicate? All it shows is what one can already infer from other internet sites, etc.---that there is a portion of the Greek population that is ready to swallow up any jargon that may lend credence to the idea of proto-Greeks being autochthonous to Greece (this is not directly connected to the issue of ancient Greek->Modern Greek continuity, but a very different topic), which is a relatively popular idea among them, I have noticed. Alinei is still very deep in the fringe. He has all kinds of whacked-out ideas, like Etruscan being an early form of Hungarian; that the Slavic invasion never occured; that the ancient Thracians were Slavs (he actually states this). If those Greeks you cite realized that, I think they would think differently of Alinei. Alexander 007 22:51, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

The fact that you even resort to making such a pathetically puerile generalization as "the greeks (judging by the wikipedia page) do not seem to consider the theory quackery" indicates that your mental level is at the 12 year old stage, which explains your taking to Alinei in the first place. Alexander 007 23:04, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

I am surprised how easily a scientific theory can be branded as "pseudoscience" only because its results are in contrast with the mainstream. And without even having read the book! Linguistics is not my field of expertise, but I think I can discern science from pseudoscience, and Alineis method is not any more speculative than other linguistic studies, and his reasoning is sound. I would hence like to eliminate the sentence about the pseudoscientific character of Alineis theory, unless there are objections, or a reference can be provided. Pcassitti 12:51, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

I would object. PCT is generally not submitted to the same level of peer review as reputable theories, nor is it published in reputable venues. Indeed, much PCT "scholarship" is self-published. CRCulver 23:42, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

The lack of translation into english is indeed a problem, but papers related to the continuity theory have been published in a number of scientific magazines, and presented at international linguistic conferences. I fail to see any element which would objectively put this theory close to the "realm of pseudoscience", as the wikipedia article states, apart from the fact that the results are in contrast with established linguistic theories. But it is the method, not the result which defines science.

But apart from that, I think that branding something as "pseudoscience" in an encyclopedia needs at least a reference to substantiate the claim. Pcassitti 21:13, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

PCT - Interdisciplinary Conception

cut from the article:

Comparing, Colin Renfrew [specially 1990, 1999] and Mario Alinei [1996, 2000], Xaverio Ballester prefer the second due to agreement with interdisciplinary data: ... the emergent interdisciplinary consensus is playing a very important role in the consolidation of these new postulates. This consensus is represented by archaeologists such as Poghirc [1992], climatologists such as Adams [1999 with Otte], historians such as Häusler [1996, 1998], or prehistorians such as Otte [1997, 1998, 1999 with Adams, 2000]. Given the convergence of their data, we should also add some genetists such as Richards [2000], Semino [2000] and their research teams, as well as Sykes [2001], whose studies support the Palaeolithic origin of the genes of most Europeans. [THE FIRST GERMANIC ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Xaverio Ballester URL:[2] ] ... Now as on 2007 the number of citation grow rapidly [Google scholar count 3400 and showe the highest dynamics comparatively to other concurent therories.] is larger in English language papers. Perhaps some English-only speaking linguist learned Italian language.

apart from the appalling language and formatting, this is problematic because it is apparently a vanity citation of some paper (incredibly including a self-googling link), harping on an "emergent interdisciplinary consensus" about the "genes of most Europeans". this is completely irrelevant. PCT isn't about "genes". it is completely undisputed that the "genes of most Europeans" have been in situ since the paleolithic, we don't need Alinei for that. The relevant article for this is Genetic history of Europe. The alleged google scholar hitcount is counting completely random occurrences of "continuity" in conjunction with "paleolithic". The actual count is 14. --dab (𒁳) 08:24, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

The passage quoted is not about genes, either. It is about an interdisciplinary consensus among archaeologists, historians, climatologists,and genetists, although it doesn't explain what exactly they agree on. I suppose it is the cultural and fisical continuity of european populations from the mesolithic, which is indeed a strong argument in support of Alineis theory, but that would need to be stated in a clear way, possibly by including additional passages from the quoted paper. Pcassitti 12:48, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

the passage mentions the "Palaeolithic origin of the genes of most Europeans", so you can hardly claim it isn't about genes. I think that Alieni's theory is fringy nonsense, and this paragraph is calculated to conjure up the appearance of a consenseus that does not in fact exist in the best tradition of pseudoscholarship. This is best done by wild and erratic mixing of genetics, archaeology, linguistics and anything else that might fit the bill (also known as WP:SYN). The Ballester paper is hosted on continuitas.com, and apparently not peer-reviewed. It quotes Alieni as arguing that the Germanic word for "island" is derived from a PIE word for "height", and hence supports a context of "deglacialisation" for the environment of Proto-Germanic. This is a funny joke, but if presented in seriousness, it's just sad. This is just another confirmation that continuitas.com and consequently PCT itself should be considered as pseudoscholarship not worthy of serious attention. dab (𒁳) 13:16, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Genetics is indeed cited amongst other discplines, but the passage is not about "the genes of most europeans" as you stated. I don't wish to enter a debate about the merits and demerits of PCT, but the consensus about the general continuity in european populations is more than just an appearance. And the contrast between the more recent historical models and classic linguistic theories is also real. It is the method, not the conclusions which define science. I Branding something as "pseudoscience" because it doesn't conform to traditional models is not very scientific itself. Pcassitti 14:55, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Leaving aside the 'pesudoscience' issue, could you say what the 'consensus' is that is shared by "Poghirc [1992], climatologists such as Adams [1999 with Otte], historians such as Häusler [1996, 1998], or prehistorians such as Otte [1997, 1998, 1999 with Adams, 2000]. Given the convergence of their data, we should also add some genetists such as Richards [2000], Semino [2000] and their research teams, as well as Sykes [2001].." These various individuals form various disciplines are portrayed as agreeing on something, but it's not at all clear what they are a agreeing on. I think we need clarification of that before we can judge the relevance of the claim. Paul B 15:21, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

The consensus is about a general continuity in european populations, which for the proponents of the PCT is an argument for a general continuity of their respective languages as well. The quoted section of the paper was poorly chosen, but if additional paragraphs where included I think the meaning would become clear. Pcassitti 19:12, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

So essentially the consensus is that most Europeans descend from Paleolithic populations. As far as I know this is not disputed by proponents of the standard model. Paul B 23:26, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, it's not about descendance, but cultural and ethnic continuity, and since language is not a separate entity in PCT this is seen as a strong argument for a linguistic continuity as well. The interdisciplinary aproach now common in historical disciplines means that for the important events and developments in our past a number of concurring evidence is observed, which together adds to a more complete picture. The problem with the traditional linguistic theories, as far as I understand them, is that no other discipline is able to contribute any evidence to substantiate them. It is actually more the contrary. And PCT is trying to bridge this gap. It may have its faults and inconsistencies, like any other theory about such controversial thematics, but I believe it should be taken as a valuable cotribution, instead of bashing it because it doesn't conform to traditional models. Pcassitti 07:50, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

in PCT this is seen as a strong argument for a linguistic continuity — this is the point: it is not the premise which is disputed, but the conclusion. So what is the point of harping on the completely undisputed premise? The task of PCT proponents is making their conclusion palatable to skeptics, not in harping on what everyone agrees with anyhow. The shortcomings of PCT are not such as those of "any other theory". PCT is a leap of faith concerning linguistic continuity over periods beyond of what any linguist will be prepared to admit as plausible, and no amount of genetic continuity is going to change that. dab (𒁳) 21:11, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Your trying to reduce the PCT to genetics, which it really isn't about, makes it look like you just wish to discredit a theory you don't like, instead of discussing its merits and demerits. You keep quoting single phrases out of context and pretending they define PCT. In the specific case "argument for linguistic continuity" does not mean it is the only or predominant one. It is all right not to know the theoretical and methodological assumptions of a theory, but any critic of that theory will then be difficult to motivate. Pcassitti 06:39, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

my likings don't enter into it. If it isn't about genetics, stop discussing genetics. If it has merits, discuss its merits. To the best of my understanding, this is all about linguistic continuity. If I am mistaken, by all means correct me, and remove the reference to Indo-European languages. All I am saying is the arguments regarding linguistics as presented at present is bogus. If that's not really what PCT is, so much the better for PCT. dab (𒁳) 07:50, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

earlier debate

see support of "Dbachmann theory" in W.pedia in support of the "dbachman" revision

====Autochthonic theory==== The autochthonic theory holds that the proto-Slavs are native to the area of modern [[Poland]], where they are supposed to have lived before the [[5th century]]. The theory was postulated by [[Wincenty Kadłubek]] in [[Cronicae et gesta ducum sive principum Polonorum]]. Other notable proponents of the theory are [[Józef Kostrzewski]],<!-- Trubaczow, Martynow, --><!-- Please provide their first names as well. --> [[Witold Hensel]], [[Konrad Jażdżewski]], [[Witold Mańczak]], [[Janusz Andrzej Piontek]]<ref>Janusz Piontek, [http://www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~anthro/slavia/f6.html ''Archeologiczne rekonstrukcje procesu etnogenezy Słowian a ustalenia antropologii fizycznej'']</ref> [[Robert Dąbrowski]], [[Tadeusz Makiewicz]] <ref>Tadeusz Makiewicz [http://www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~anthro/slavia/f2.html ''Problem kontynuacji kulturowej pomiędzy starożytnością a wczesnym średniowieczem w świetle nowych materiałów ceramicznych z Wielkopolski'']</ref>, [[Tadeusz Malinowski]] <ref>Tadeusz Malinowski [http://www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~anthro/slavia/f3.html ''W sprawie dyskusji o praojczyźnie Słowian Zakład Archeologii WSP'']. Quote: "...Kierując się rozmaitymi danymi przede wszystkim archeologii, językoznawstwa, antropologii oraz paleodemografii, stwierdzam, iż najbardziej prawdopodobna wydaje mi się hipoteza, że praojczyzna Słowian znajdowała się w dorzeczu Odry i Wisły..."</ref>, [[Henryk Mamzer]],<ref>Henryk Mamzer, [http://www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~anthro/slavia/f4.html Archeologia etniczna versus kulturowo-interpretacyjna]</ref> [[Zofia Kurnatowska]], [[Stanisław Kurnatowski]], [[Stanisław Tabaczyński]] and [[Lech Leciejewicz]], [[Aleksander Brückner]]. Several arguments are used in support of the theory: *No remains or traces of [[Germanic peoples|Germanic tribes]] were reported on [[West Slavs|West Slavic]] territory, neither enclaves nor medieval historical records.{{Fact|rather the opposite; show who when reported those enclaves or remains|date=April 2007}} Instead Slavic tribes slowly disappeared from the area. [[Polabian Slavs]], for instance, had become extinct in the [[18th century]], after having lived in the area for over a thousand years. Upper and Lower [[Sorbs]] still live in the area, and have a distinct language and distinct customs and traditions from their non-Slavic neighbours.{{Views needing attribution|date=April 2007}} *"Autochtonic historiography" written in the [[12th century]].<ref>[[Cronicae et gesta ducum sive principum Polonorum]] by [[Wincenty Kadlubek]]</ref> Which scholar uses this as an argument for the autochthonic theory? *Medieval authors, who refer to the [[Vandals]] from [[Wendland|Vandalia]] as ''Slowianie''.<Ref> [[Annales Alamannici]] ([[795]])</ref><ref> [[Annales Augustani]] ([[1056]])</ref><ref> [[Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum]] ([[1075]]) by [[Adam of Bremen|Adam Bremensis]]</ref> There are no listed references to when medieval authors identify [[Vandals]] from [[Wendland|Vandalia]] as [[Teutons]], before Teutons conquered their lands. I'm sure that the three works refer to the Vandals as Slowianie. But which scholar uses this as an argument in support of the autochthonic theory? If this is merely a point that might illustrate why the autochthonic theory might not be all that bad, it violates WP:OR. Aecis : Some allochtonic(scholars) make complicated combinations to overword the simple fact. If all people call you mr Smith are you mr Smith ? probably even not but to prove that you are not mr Smith lays on the disaproving side. Bear in mind that 'in the case' you call yourself also mr Smith ::Please answer my question. Which scholars or politicians use these medieval authors as evidence for the autochthonic theory? Aecis * The early medieval border between the Frankish/Teutonic empire and Slavic territory matches the border of the Roman conquest. The West Slavic tribes remained on territory that wasn't conquered by the Romans. The Teutonic tradition draws from the [[Holy Roman Empire]]. :* [[Venedi]], [[Wendish]], [[Vandals]]. Lugi, Ludzie, Lyngels, Lenkes. 'If' Teutonic medieval 'authors were wrong' "moving names" Venedi to Vends ; then alltochtonic want us to believe that numerous nations for centuries were also wrong especially: Magiars, Lotwian, Litwian, Ukrainian, Russian, Turkish, Armenian who ancient roots of Lugi use till today in names Lahy Lyngel or Lynkes. *Genetic marker [[R1a1]] related to Western Europe [[R1b]], most numerous in [[Sorbs]] )<ref name=Behar2003>{{cite journal | last = Behar | first = DM | coauthors = Thomas MG, Skorecki K, Hammer MF, Bulygina E, Rosengarten D, Jones AL, Held K, Moses V, Goldstein D, Bradman N, Weale ME | year=2003 | url=http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJHG/journal/issues/v73n4/40097/40097.html | title = Multiple Origins of Ashkenazi Levites: Y Chromosome Evidence for Both Near Eastern and European Ancestries | journal = Am. J. Hum. Genet. | volume = 73 | pages = 768–779 | id = PMID 13680527}} also at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/tcgapdf/Behar-AJHG-03.pdf </ref> *The suspitius disaperence of 'manuscript sources' edited by [[Theodor Mommsen]], [[Getica|De origine actibusque Getarum]] in the highht of German imperializm. Almost forgoten book of another [[Johann Christoph Jordan|Jordan]] who wrote 100 years earlier [[De Originibus Slavicis]]. <ref>title: [[De Originibus Slavicis]], author [[Johann Christoph Jordan]] </ref> There is also unnknow reason what for Mommsen edited ''Goth History'' since the works was supposedly edited, printed and published by [[Konrad Peutinger]] 300 years before. see the entries in Konrad Peutinger and disscusion i [Getica] * Rex 'Sclavorum Gothorum sive Polonorum' title of Polish king. --> * Creolization of germanic languages versus gramatical reachnes of slowianic languages close to indoeuropean originators. * [[Microsatellite]] variance, the distribution of genetic marker [[R1a1]] and Slavic [[kurgan]] traditions. *[[Germanic languages]] are more similar to [[Slavic languages]] than to [[Baltic languages]]. This would imply that in prehistoric times, Slavic languages developed between Germanic languages and Baltic languages.<ref>"Zachodnia praojczyzna Słowian" Witold Mańczak http://www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~anthro/slavia/f5.html</ref> Comment * The hydrotomponyms in Poland do not have Germanic languages properties; what has to be observed if ancestors of Poles, (as 'allochtonic' postullte), had to learn from conquered tribes speaking Germanic languages. (ref 15) :Hidden comment 1: the same as above :Hidden comment 2: You mean Witold Mańczak? I've hidden this point, because grammatical and spelling errors make this barely comprehensible. Please also remember to avoid Original Research: Wikipedia is not the proper place to post arguments that might support a certain theory; Wikipedia is only the proper place to post arguments used in Reliable Sources to support a certain theory. They should be referred to as such. For example: "Witold Mańczak states that ... " - Aecis The allochtonic theory thesis are now included with newly formed [[Paleolithic Continuity Theory]] caled also [[indigenism]]. Which not only debuke allochtonic flase ideas but extend Słowian autochtonism in Central Europe to [[paleolithic]]. ===Allochthonic theory=== In scholarly community nobody today hold the allochtonic theory views, new data rejecting it completely. It may be however describe it from historical point to show how data may be manipulated to fulfill political goals of panagermanizm. The allochthonic theory holded that the Slavic peoples immigrated to the area of modern Poland during or after the 5th century. The theory was first expounded by [[Theodor Mommsen]], with his republishing of [[Getica]]. (other sources are rare or not available) please provide the a qoute from other, not Moomsen related, edition of 'Getica'. (not secondary reference but biblioggraphical record of the publication containing text of 'Getica') Other notable proponents of the theory were [[Gustaf Kossinna]], [[Bolko von Richthofen]], [[Hans Schleiff]], [[Kazimierz Godłowski]], [[Michał Parczewski]]. *[[Tadeusz Makiewicz]] writes: ''Great migrations of the 5th century did not bypass the Polish lands. (...) In effect an almost complete depopulation of the Polish lands took place. This void was quickly to be filled with new arrivals''.<ref>''U źródeł Polski'' p. 113, [[Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie]] 2002, ISBN 83-7023-954-4 </ref> The depopulation theory <!-- actualy Mńczak did not adress author of this book so this text is auto-hiden was form in responce to: "The hydrotomponyms in Poland do not have Germanic languages properties" but is, acording to Witold Mańczak, a weak conception. The basic thesis of the theory was: *In great migrations of the 5th century Germanics run out of Central Europe *Almost complete depopulation of the Polish lands took place *This void was quickly to be filled with new arrivals *Since emerging from their original homeland in the early [[6th century]], they have inhabited most of eastern [[Central Europe]], Eastern Europe and the [[Balkans]]. Is perhaps worth to note now comon polish vocabulary phrase "actors from burn up theatre" was coined when Moomsen published his [[Getica (jordanes)|Getica]] unders name of 'Actores Anigue' and based on Manuscripts burn by him couple yeras before. The book is still defended by Germans like holy bone but most probably contains invention of Mommsen authorships. He was activ politian verbant suporter of falen pangermanizm. ====references==== <references/> —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.15.123.48 (talk • contribs)

Mr. 24.15, if you insist on reverting to your coatracking formatting and grammar nightmare, I suppose we will just have to semiprotect this article. Please be reasonable. This isn't the place to discuss Slavic and German nationalism. dab (𒁳) 08:57, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

some memory problem in continuity

This article is seriusly harased by cynic data pervert. Most of the empty {factd} sencteces are inserted as you can see here. The cynism is that he laudly demading cleaning "the mess" he .

So dbachenn do you rely pretend that the other yours entries in edits history are invisible or tu tedious to brouse ;| ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.15.123.48 (talk) 18:24, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

I trust you are not conscious of the hilarity of this. I do not pretend to even understand your "English", but "seriusly harased by cynic data pervert" might just make it to my hall of fame. --dab (𒁳) 18:49, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

arbitrary break

thanks for your reply, Jonathan (I've only just seen it).

This, for me, is a cardinal virtue of PCT, it just says that the first people into a territory tend to dictate its language

for me, that's its cardinal flaw. It's an axiom pulled out of thin air, fuelled by the desire to "reconstruct" paleolithic language no doubt, and once you accept it, of course, everything becomes very simple. Simple, but completely out of touch with reality.

why don’t you argue that PIE broke up in the 20th century, since all the daughter languages probably have the same word for ‘computer’, etc.

I am glad you ask -- since the English word is computer and not hamfuther as it would need to be if the term had been inherited. This illustrates that PCT pretends to be a linguistic theory, while being informed by archaeology and genetics but completely devoid of any linguistic argument. Language is just conveniently frozen for 50,000 years. I am sorry, but to my mind this is not so much a theory buyt a simplistic cop-out, discarding 200 years of linguistic scholarship with a shrug. I seriously doubt that PCT will receive the support of a single conscientious Indo-Europeanist.

It will be interesting to further scrutinize genetic evidence for population movements and 'miscegenation' in the European Bronze Age to be sure, and we may be able to learn a lot about the nature of language contact and transmission, but only if we do not throw up our hands and turn to simplistic solutions like PCT. Regarding substrates and miscegenation, I admit the comparison to the New World is flawed. Your 'miscegenated' populations are the result of some 15 generations, corresponding, in the Kurgan model, to Europe in, say, 2500 BC. At that stage, indeed, you would expect to see "Kurgan Y-chromosome lines" and pockets of pre-IE languages. That was full 4 millennia past in AD 1500 when for the first time the linguistic map of Europe becomes reasonably complete. Try to find your "European Y-chromosome lines" in Brazil in AD 6000. We do have amazing pockets of pre-IE with the Basques and perhaps Rhaetic and Etruscan. If only the Romans had taken an interest in field linguistic in the 1st century BC, they could have collected treasures for us that are now lost forever (although that would still have been "Brazil in AD 4500", 1,500 years do make a huge difference (never mind the 50,000 years, which you have to assume were linguistically eventless)).

PCT in my view is intellectually dangerous because of its appeal to the "paleolithic language" enthusiasts. There appears to be a certain willingness to discard method and criticism as the only way to be able to claim "reconstructions" of paleolithic (or even neolithic) speech. That's postmodernism at its worst. Roll your own "Nostratic", never mind if it is "true" or methodologically sound, what is this obsession with so-called "truth" anyway, all scholarship is speculation, so let's go all the way and speculate, never mind plausibility or falsifiability. I think this is the way back to Renaissance obscurantism before the "age of reason" tempered the desire to know into science. Postmodernism has done great damage to that achievement, and Alinei seems much indebted to this unfortunate regress of the later 20th century.

dab (𒁳) 12:29, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Just seen your post, dab. Frankly, I’d take major issue with most of it.

1. On the ‘first into a territory’ point – I find your comment ‘simple, but completely out of touch with reality’ laughable. We don’t have detailed documentation of movements of peoples in the Neolithic, but we do know quite a lot about movements of Germanic peoples across the Rhine since the 2nd C. BC – Despite all the movements, how much ground did Germanic make at the expense of Latin in France/Spain – etc. ?– a few valleys in Switzerland and that’s it. I contend that if a language is dug in, this evidence shows how hard it is to replace. You may raise England as a counterexample, but the more thoughtful commentators are reconsidering the view that England was Germanic free until the end of the Roman Empire – since you don’t have much Celtic evidence in E England, you don’t find the specific Germanic marker genes (but older lines – I’m referring to Peter Forster’s paper in the MacDonald series), etc., etc. And yet the traditionalists claim in the face of this that 3-4 millennia before, PIE swept Europe so completely that it obliterated all traces of a pre-IE substrate - despite the fact that the genetics shows that they were only a minority of the population – The lack of substrate is (IMHO) an insuperable obstacle for this theory in Europe – in complete contrast to India, where the work of such scholars as Southworth and Witzel show a very clear substrate and a relatively undifferentiated presence of IE - i.e. only one family. In pretty much any country you can think of where language replacement takes place – it is never 100% - there is always a substrate. One of the virtues of Alinei’s theory which makes it much more sophisticated than its rivals is that he allows explicitly for social stratification from the Neolithic onwards, with the elite speaking one language and the peasantry another. Celtic disappeared from Central Europe in his view, precisely because it was the language of a temporary elite and not of the peasantry. It is thus similar in kind to French in mediaeval England or Latin in N Africa or Arabic in Spain.

2. There is a basic confusion in your thinking regarding Alinei & the Nostraticists – Alinei comments on N. only briefly and has never been interested in reconstructing protolanguages, only in demonstrating the early entry of PIE into Europe. For their part, Nostraticists like Bomhard & Dolgopolsky have pretty much diametrically opposed views on time depth & prehistoric distributions of languages to Alinei – this is a completely misinformed assertion.

3. ‘Discarding 200 years of linguistic scholarship’- how on earth can you claim this? There has never been a unitary position, just a few people like Gimbutas and Mallory who picked up a late 19th century nationalist ball and ran with it. Where do these 2 centuries of scholarship put the PIE homeland ?– pretty much anywhere from France to India. Note that by far the most intelligent of the classical linguists, Karl Brugmann, was notoriously reluctant to commit to a specific location.

4. “I seriously doubt that PCT will receive the support of a single conscientious Indo-Europeanist” – you remind me of Dixon with his absurd claim that no reputable scientist upholds Nostratic (in the Rise and Fall of Languages) – and then defines reputable as meaning tenure at a US/Europe university – not only is this a gross slur on E European linguists, he also excludes himself as an Australian. Of course, if Indo-Europeanists define their ‘reputable’ status by their rejection of Nostratic/upholding of the 6,000 year rule then you are formally correct, but this will change as their views are shown to be increasily untenable by the growing body of genetic/archaeological evidence. I talk to a number of geneticists who are very interested in the language correlations with genetics but are frustrated with the arrogance/stupidity of such reputable linguists. There’s a growing consensus that their days are numbered.

5. “Try to find your "European Y-chromosome lines" in Brazil in AD 6000” –they will be as clear then as they are now, unless Brazil suffers a massive influx of new population from elsewhere – for the simple reason that the DNA is non-recombinant – you don’t appear to understand the difference, so let me spell it out for you. Let’s imagine you have a European conquistador group who kill the native men and rape/seduce the native women – you get a half-cast population with native mtDNA, but European yDNA. Let’s assume that a few centuries later, the country is ‘democratic’ and the natives or mestizos are no longer actively persecuted/prevented from breeding – most of these have European yDNA. So when this population starts to reproduce itself, it too will be propagating European yDNA even though it is phenotypically native for many characteristics – and since there’s no recombination, the transmission of yDNA becomes an all-or-nothing event. If you have a relatively isolated population, there’s absolutely no reason why the European gene frequencies should fall precisely on account of the non-recombinant nature of the DNA in question.Jonathan Morris2 01:49, 25 September 2007 (UTC) 6. Your computer/hamfuther point doesn't prove anything either - if a word goes through a set of phonological changes, all you can claim is that it was in the ancestral language before the changes took place, but it could still have entered through borrowing. Think of a word like wine (probably a loan word) - does the similarity across IE mean that PIE didn't break up until after the Kurgan brigade had learned how to make wine? - Not necessarily -they could all merely have borrowed it from the same source. Not so fanciful, if you believe in prehistoric tradeJonathan Morris2 02:37, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

well, we can agree to disagree, I hope. just to point out the most glaring fallacies in your post, the hamfuther example was in reply to your question "why don’t you argue that PIE broke up in the 20th century, since all the daughter languages probably have the same word for ‘computer’" -- to which question my reply was the correct one. The presence of "hamfuther" would prove there was something called *komputor in pre-Germanic. The presence of wine or computer (i.e. the absence of an inherited word) doesn't prove the inverse. That's elementary logics, and reliance on such evidence is the harvest of the 200 years of scholarship you so quickly dismiss as "Gimbutas and Mallory". Second, I am perfectly aware of the nature of Y-DNA. I don't expect it to recombine over the next 4,000 years, I expect it to either disappear, or spread over the whole continent, so that it becomes unusable as a marker. --dab (𒁳) 13:30, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Without wishing to get deeply involved in this, or to insult anyone involved, Dbachmann, you don't seem to have answered most of Jonathan's points. I'd be really interested in your doing so, if you can, because I do feel there are problems with Gimbutas' model, some extralinguistic but some linguistic. Not least of these is the question how a small elite managed to compel whole populations to speak its language, in most cases without much discernible substrate, whereas those in historic times either could not or did not unless they emplaced very large numbers of their fellow speakers or killed a great many of the locals (which we have little evidence of, as Jonathan notes). (Contrasting the Normans, who did not compel the local French to speak Norse, nor the local English to speak French with the Spanish, who spread their language fairly comprehensively in central America, seems instructive.) You seem to wish to consider Indo-European in a vacuum, and it seems to me that that is the only way you can stand up hypotheses such as Renfrew's or Gimbutas's. (That's not to say that PCT is correct at all. It seems to me that Alinei has found a bunch of issues with the more commonly accepted hypotheses, and hammered a theory together to answer them, as much as anything else.)

And could you explain why you expect Y-DNA to disappear? You think someone else will invade Brazil before then? I suppose that's possible. And why would it become useless as a marker if it spreads over the whole continent? Maybe you're not clear what it's a marker of? Grace Note 04:57, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Grace Note, Dab refers here to the principles of genetic drift. Your comment on the credibility of a minor elite being so few that they could not be attested, genetically nor by any clear archeological marker, and still could change a complete language, is perfectly valid. Dab refers here to "Kurganization". The only one who thinks kurganization permit us to assume an invisible "elite" is Dab. Any reputable linguist would confirm this is crap, and archeolists still fail to trace a Kurgan elite to western europe. Rokus01 16:06, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Dab, just seen your post. You claim "just to point out the most glaring fallacies in your post"- frankly you haven't pointed out any fallacies in my post, or given any coherent rebuttals to my points: Anyway: -Hamfuther. Firstly, if this word existed, it would show that this word was present in the earliest stages of Germanic, but not necessarily in PIE, since it could still be a loan, and furthermore, you can't nail down your point with phonetic analysis alone - you have to know what the word actually meant in PIE since the whole case for PIE having emerged in the Neolithic is based on the words actually having 'Neolithic' meanings. This is not an idle point. One of the problems I have with Renfrew is that not only does he refuse to provide any linguistic evidence for his farming theory, but no-one else does. Well actually, Comrie provides one (that's right, one) etymology - melgh (in the green volume) - claiming that milking animals is a neolithic innovation. This is probably true, but it doesn't mean that melgh is a Neolithic root - in fact it's a widely attested root (e.g. proto-world) for suckling, licking. In fact, I find this idea that vocabulary always follows a technological innovation extremely silly. Hunter-gatherers probably knew every edible plant in the landscape (think survival) and probably performed most of the activities which went on in the Neolithic, albeit not in the systematic way which characterises the Neolithic. As such, they would have had vocabulary to describe any neolithic innovations in the Palaeolithic. If you argue that a common word for say 'pot'or 'ceramic' incontrovertibly ties PIE to the 'Neolithic' then it seems to me that you are a priori claiming that the PIE peoples cound't even conceive of any kind of container prior to that, which is preposterous. - Point 2 is that I see many linguists forgetting that PIE is a hypothetical language constructed from daughter languages - hence it is probably closer to them than the real PIE. It's easy to think of counterexamples - e.g. liver in Romance - if you look at the daughter languages you would reconstruct ficatus but not jecor - so it is a possibility that you may reconstruct the very last stage of an ancestral language (although not a given), but it may not correspond to earlier stages. For some reason, you never see any arguments for PIE homelands discussing how long the PIEs spent in the homeland. - Point 3, if you're going to argue for Neolithic or later origins for PIE on the basis of technology words (I wouldn't but the supporters do) then presumably you're vulnerable to the kind of inversion of this argument which ALinei uses to good effect. I.e. if you find that a given concept has different words in all the daughter languages, then presumably that concept/institution arose after the breakup of PIE. Hence, how do you explain the fact that the modern languages by and large have conserved the word for die /morire/smert' etc. but have no common word for burial, which emerges at the end of the Palaeolithic.

As for disrespecting 200 years of scholarship - as I've said, this scholarship still hasn't reached any consensus on where the homeland might have been, or when the PIE speakers were there. I don't think anyone takes Gimbutas seriously because the archeo evidence for her Kurgan claims is non-existent. As for Mallory - judging by his recent book (PIE), he is so vague that it's very hard to know what his theory is. About the only thing you can say is that he disagrees with Alinei and that he believes in linguistic archaeology as a basis for locating PIE in time and space.

"I don't expect it to recombine over the next 4,000 years, I expect it to either disappear, or spread over the whole continent, so that it becomes unusable as a marker" - Not sure what you mean here. If you refer to my point, you'll see that I was referring very specifically to a disproportionate presence of non-European mtDNA lines in 'white' males in NE Brazil. European Y chromosome lines are already 'all over the continent'.

I have a suggestion to make: before you write another logically incoherent post, why don't you go and read Alinei.Jonathan Morris2 20:34, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Bad joke

I don't think it is funny to associate a serious archeologist like Alexander Hausler to the extreme nonsense of this article. Rokus01 21:37, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Alexander Häusler ist listed among the members of the PCT workgroup [3] Pcassitti 11:33, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Ok, then the problem of this article is just the quality. The theory should be presented as is, a new way of thinking rather than a set of proposals to reconstruct a fixed model. The article needs to be rewritten. Rokus01 08:53, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree, the article gives a distorted view of PCT. I have been intending to make some changes for a while now, just couldn't get round to it. 138.232.148.41 16:25, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Chomsky?

Rokus has added the following uncited comments:

"Its [sic] draws on the consequences of innate grammaticality as exposed [??] by Chomsky's principles of generative grammar, that defines conservation as the law of language and languages, and change as the cline of grammaticality provoked by major external factors such as language contacts and hybridization, as well as ecological, socio-economic and cultural events."

I am unaware of any specific connection between this theory and Chomsky. Perhaps Rokus can enlighten us. Furthermore, I can barely make any sense of this statement. As far as I am aware there nothing specifically "Chomskian" about the view that language changes because of "factors such as language contacts and hybridization, as well as ecological, socio-economic and cultural events". How is his specifically relevant to PCT as opposed to other models? Paul B 13:38, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

In fact, the grammaticality of Chomsky breaks down in very special circumstances ("by major external factors such as language contacts and hybridization, as well as ecological, socio-economic and cultural events"). It is true this - including the change of language provoked by such a "cline" of grammaticality - has been described better by other linguists. If the way I put both phenomena together here is confusing, I could try to improve the phrase. Note, PCT stress convervation of language - defined by the linguistic laws of grammaticality, not change. The theoretic plausability of conservation in language is a prerequisite to assume paleolithic continuity. This does not mean Chomsky's theory, or the current foundation of linguistics, is perfect - I already mentioned the observed cline of grammaticality. Also, linguistic internal productivity would contradict the possibility of a theoretical eternal unchanged language (at least, I wouldn't expect a new IE language in the jungle of South America). As such, PCT is just another model that draws on an assumption that might need some moderation. However, you can't say PCT is wrong without saying as well that the very theoretic foundation of linguistics is wrong.

How this is relevant to PCT as opposed to other models? Quite so, since other models assume other evolutionary constraints to the development of languages. The Kurgan hypothesis assumes the sheer impossibility of proto-Indo Europeans before the fifth millennium, and try to fit archeology by insisting on migration patterns that at least would have crossed Kurgan territory once in the past 5000 or 6000 years - no matter how enduring or realistic such contact would have been.

By the way, my mistake to assume knowledge of Alinei's introduction paper and not to source some basic linguistics here. This can be done. Rokus01 22:07, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

As usual, Rokus, you seem to be stating the bleedin' obvious in mystificatory language in order to cover your ideological tracks. Plus ca change. You have still not said why Chomsky is relevant beyond the almost meaningless assertion that "other models assume other evolutionary constraints to the development of languages". Paul B 00:24, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

You have a pretty insulting attitude for somebody pretending a simple question to start a honest discussion. Why should Chomsky NOT be relevant in ANY discussion on linguistics? Don't you even have the slightest idea what is the importance of Chomsky to the linguistic sciences? Rokus01 23:40, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

...WP:SYN by any other name. Wake us up once Chomsky does in fact tke any sort of position towards PCT. dab (𒁳) 08:45, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Quote: "Since language is innate—as claimed by Chomsky and now demonstrated by natural sciences—and Homo was thus born loquens, the evolution of language—and all world languages, including Indo-European (IE)—must be mapped onto the entire course of human cultural evolution, in the new framework provided by the Palaeolithic Continuity Theory (PCT)."(Darwinism, traditional linguistics and the new Palaeolithic Continuity Theory of language evolution - Mario Alinei, 2006)

Being so very well informed about Chomsky, you'll know that according to Chomsky's "Universal Grammar" the conditions on grammaticality are innate and universal. Alinei: "conservation is the law of language and languages, and change is the exception."

Quote Dab: Wake us up once Chomsky does in fact tke any sort of position towards PCT. Tell me, what did you hear through the grapevine? And does it really matter what Chomsky (would have) said (according to Dab), once Alinei came to his conclusions? Very funny, it is not the first time Dab accuses scientists of WP:SYC. Rokus01 23:40, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Rokus, Chomsky is mentioned precisely twice in the reference you have given. Both references are to the very general claim that "language is innate", not to any any of the stuff you say here or in your additions to the article. Since Chomsky is not saying "Indo-European is innate" (or even innate to the 'Nordic race') I still fail to see the relevance of this stuff. Paul B 23:16, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Ok, this is better. Language being "innate" is central to PCT. Any university degree linguist would understand an Alinei quote like "conservation is the law of language and languages, and change is the exception" refers to innate grammaticality. Rokus01 23:40, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

wtf? how is "language is innate" "central to PCT"? Chomsky's claim is that Language as a faculty is innate, not a certain specific language. This has zilch to do with PCT. I happen to be a "university degree linguist", and I say Alieni's statement has nothing whatsoever to do with UG. Alieni is dismissing glottochronology completely, as he has to do to even begin arguing his theory. Diachronic stability or instability do not follow from UG at all. Rokus01, please stop trying to take other editors for morons. I have serious doubts you have ever sat through an introduction to historical linguistics, and yet you are confident you know what "any university degree linguist" would or wouldn't accept. How about you remember WP:SYN and just go back to reporting on direct reviews of Alieni's stuff. dab (𒁳) 18:03, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

And I have a Ph D in linguistics, and I completely fail to see the sense and logic in what Rokus01 is trying to sell here. Chomsky's theory concerns the sudden evolution of a language faculty which would have happened far back in the evolution of man and to ancestors of all mankind! It is completely irrelevant to PCT.--Berig 18:35, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

A possible sudden evolution of the faculty would be nothing but the onset of a continuous and native evolution of language, "if any". Rokus01 14:40, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

btw, "since language is innate—as claimed by Chomsky and now demonstrated by natural sciences[?]... the evolution of language—and all world languages, including Indo-European (IE)[??]—must be mapped onto the entire course of human cultural evolution" is hair-raising nonsense and firmly places Alieni in the crank camp. Beginning your sentence with "since language is innate" merely places you as a hardboiled Chomskian disciple. Confirmed by dropping Chomsky's name in the following phrase. The "and now demonstrated by natural sciences" chucked after it already rises crank alarms. I can only assume Alieni has heard about FOXP2 on Discovery Channel and thought it would sound good to mention "natural sciences". "the evolution of language ... must be mapped onto the entire course of human cultural evolution" is again uncontroversial. But now note how the crucial passage is inserted between mdashes, "and all world languages, including Indo-European", and is a complete non-sequitur to the otherwise rather harmless statement. So from the tenet that "language is innate" it follows that "all world langauges" must be "mapped onto the entire course of human cultural evolution". Wow. I am not sure what a "world language" is, but assuming we are talking of any of the world's languages, it would follow, according to Alieni that the evolution of the Romance languages "must be mapped" over this impressive time period. Wow. Paleolithic Italian follows from Chomsky's "language is innate". Well done, Mr. Alieni. I doubt you will convince many linguists. If crank tactics are used in touting your groundbreaking hypothesis, the only people you are likely to convince will be cranks. dab (𒁳) 18:33, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

The etnocentric Italian PC is indeed his weaker point. He totally ignores the Beaker cultures, that definitely didn't have their center in Italy and, according to Volkert Heyd, also heavily influenced Romania.Rokus01 14:40, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree that Alieni's argument is total nonsense. It would presuppose that all past, present and future languages (including their vocabulary) were hard-coded, in Chomsky's innate language faculty. Moreover, the linguistic community is still waiting for any evidence that Chomsky's theory on syntactic structure is accurate, which makes it even more spurious to use Chomsky's theory as a "scientific" basis for the PCT.--Berig 18:44, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

You are just saying here you have a personal view against the work of Chomsky and for this reason choose to resort to hypercritic arguments that are all but scientific (Chomsky theory has been the subject of many linguistic investigations that include model evaluation, I hope you don't insist on "proving" the model since models, by definition, can only be verified, accepted or rejected within a context of investigation). WP is not for personal views.Rokus01 14:40, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

indeed. Chomsky has to be validated in the light of diachrony, not vice versa. Diachrony was notoriously neglected by the GG people. Alieni appears to be blissfully unaware of the fact, of course. This isn't serious people. Any linguist looking into this will debunk it for the nonsense it is, and it is (of course) not our job to perform the debunking here. dab (𒁳) 18:55, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

This does not mean Chomsky has to be neglected by diachrony. To the contrary, Alinei is fully aware this should be done. A very ungrateful task, so it appears. Rokus01 14:40, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Chomsky basically equates language with the syntax of the modern English language and modern English syntax is really the only thing that his theory is about. He and his associates have been working for decades now on a theory for modern English syntax without much success. As Dbachmann says, diachronics could only be used to support Chomsky's theory and not the other way round.--Berig 15:34, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

So what is this whole deal about? You should do better than this. Why, based on one quote, diverge on senseless speculations about what an Emeritus Professor might have misunderstood of Chomsky? All PCT needs from Chomsky's "language being innate", is to facilitate native speakers to acquire a perfect knowledge of their language by the process of First Language Acquisition. Indeed, this would be more so in a, well, say "Paleolithic" situation where nothing really happens, and without external stimuli like the ones you could imagine from migrations, invasions or language contact and Second Language Acquisition. Nothing else is insinuated by the statement "conservation as the law of language and languages".

Don't get me wrong, I don't attribute Alinei with the capacity to come up with a clear and comprehensive, or even "convincing" (I mean to say here, to convince a goat would require sheer marketing skills and has nothing to do with being a scientist) summary of his statements, still I am less inclined than you are to take a professor of one of the worlds best rated universities as a "moron". Nobody needs WP:SYNC to compile the information necessary for explaining the views of an emiritus professor. Take notice there is a lot of investigation going on to the rules of change of languages, and most models depart from SLA where "language being innate" does not or hardly apply. I would be very wrong if this approach wouldn't add a few precious "archeologic" millennia to the timedepth for pinpointing the IE origins. Just because it probably takes some more awareness and knowledge to measure linguistic change by the proper speed.

Anyway, it seems the meanings of "innate" that are in current use in linguistics are not all empirically equivalent, and the currently hypothesized mechanisms of language acquisition do not fall under a definite concept. I'll take a look how this can be reflected and balanced in the article. Rokus01 01:08, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Did Indo-European Languages spread before farming?

M. Otte and J. Adams wrote an article together with the above title (date unknown). A link to the article:[4] If some of the other editors think it's worth while, could this be included in the collection of external links? Varoon Arya 22:12, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

"In press; Current Anthropology" -- if it does appear in Current Anthropology we should certainly cite it. Although it is beyond me why so many perfectly competent paleoenvironmentalists insist to make fools of themselves by dabbling in historical linguistics. --dab (𒁳) 10:19, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

it did appear: the reference is Current Anthropology, Vol. 40, No. 1. (Feb., 1999), pp. 73-77. Their "defeatist note" on "the fact that one can so readily add and interchange alternative hypotheses" really says it all — it is always easy to "interchange hypotheses" if one is willing to ignore the good sense and criticism that has gone into the preceding ones. dab (𒁳) 10:21, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

the common factor of all these theories is that they are motivated by non-linguistic factors (archaeology, genetics, paleoenvironment), and they only ever take note of linguistics in order to dismiss mainstream tenets as not, after all, set in stone, and propose a completely agnostic attitude to any linguistic component that would affect their scenario. In other words, linguistics is simply not taken seriously as having anything to contribute to the question of Proto-Indo-European. Linguists, otoh, scrupuously take into account non-linguistic findings to establish boundary conditions of their PIE scenarios. In this way, it is actually possible to come to unexpected conclusions (other than with these a priori assumptions that you then set out to prove to the world). dab (𒁳) 18:15, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Old random comment

I have edited this page of all crap wich have bias in decision makings.It is about theory and it is equal with the oponent theories.If someone want to point critics on the theory that must be made in seperate column-like rest of the articles on Wikipedia.I wish to notice that space used for and against theory must be equal. Edited by Admin. from "Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia".

sectionized by Rocksanddirt 22:00, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

an observation

I have an observation, that I don't have time or background knowledge to deal with right now, and that is that this thing reads like an essay argueing a point. From that standpoint, it really needs some editorial intervention. It is also one of those articles that gets the national mysitics involved with some original research and/or fringe studies of why thier ethinic/national group is the cradle of civilization. Please, regular editors of this article, keep those thoughts in mind when working on this article. --Rocksanddirt 17:08, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

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 :) 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 :) 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. 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. 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)

Nice to see some English-language interest and my article cited. If I could add a number of comments, as someone who has had some discussions with Alinei:

-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 - 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.

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.

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.

Hello Jonathan. It is nice to see someone with deeper knowledge of the subject. May i request you to please clear a few doubts about PCT to me.

1. When did PIE separated, is it 20000BCE.
2. What age is attested to Hittite language and Vedic Sanskrit.
3. According to PCT, where did PIE originated. (Is it Africa or PCT doesnt care about that.) nids(♂) 12:06, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Jonathan, I am afraid all you really manage to convince me of is that the theory has indeed no merit at all. All the genetics points are granted, and you present a reasonable outline of a discussion of Meso- and Neolithic migration. This, however, has nothing whatsoever to do with Indo-European. To develop a theory of "Paleolithic PIE" and ignore Sanskrit is ludicrous. (well, Paleolithic PIE is ludicrous in any case, but to confine it do a discussion of European genetics and Stone Age archaeology is simply pointless). Language is a part of culture, and is not passed on genetically. Genetic analysis may serve as a tool for tracing populations that may have been the vehicle of linguistic spread, but the tacit assumption that a population needs to be replaced for the language to be replaced is just silly. What proportion of "Portuguese Genes" will you find in Brazil, or what proportion of "English" genes will you find in the US? And regarding glottochronology, the language changes observed over the past 1,000 years make clear that it must be inexact, but "inexact" here meaning to an error of maybe 200%, not 1000% (50,000 years as opposed to 5,000). And, to cut this discussion short, if PIE had diverged before the neolithic, why can we reconstruct the PIE terms for "wheel" or "metal"? The fact that genetically, "80% is pre-farming" (in India as well as Europe) only goes to show that a Bronze Age expansion is as good as a Neolithic expansion to account for the imposition of a new language, that is, the fact that the Neolithic migration wasn't so massive takes away Renfrew's main argument as to why PIE expansion cannot date to the Bronze Age. The proposition seems to be that the Paleolithic hunters essentially spoke PIE in 40,000 BC and that their language remained frozen until after 10,000 BCE until virtually all of Eurasia spoke pure PIE, before history and language change kick in for some reason in the Early Bronze Age. This doesn't strike me as a reasonable scenario. dab (𒁳) 13:44, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi, everyone, unfortunately I have to go travelling but will sit down with Alinei's books next week and give you some answers. (23:04, 17 January 2007 (UTC)) Dab, you must be a professional linguist to assume a) that Alinei is automatically and comprehensively wrong on everything and b) that I'm a travelling salesman for the gospel of PCT. My motivation for writing the article was just to present an account of what seemed to me to be an interesting and radical theory but which wasn't available in the English-speaking world. Firstly, I'm not part of the PCT work group, and secondly while small, it's already very heterogeneous, including figures who are very highly regarded outside the PCT milieu (like Marcel Otte) and people who, from my conversations with academics in the field, don't appear to be highly regarded at all (e.g. Henry Harpending-and again, he's in there as a member but I'm not aware of him having made any specific pronouncements on the PCT itself). As such, you could say that there are various PCTs - Alinei has his, Marcel Otte has his paper on IE spreading from European glacial refuges - but the common axiom is that some form of IE was present in Europe by the start of the Mesolithic - which is evidently the major difference from Renfrew & the Classical/Gimbutas theories which insist on the notion that Europe was entirely free of IE speakers until at least the Neolithic. Anyway, more next week. (Jonathan Morris 23:29, 17 January 2007 (UTC))

OK, I’m back, sorry for the delay, but I have a business to run.

Nids: As you may be aware, essentially everything Alinei has to say on IE PCT is concentrated in a 2-volume work – the first one came out in 1996 and is more of a theoretical treatise. The second which came out in 2000 is the meaty linguistic archaeology tome (Continuity from the Mesolithic to the Bronze Age).

All in all, Vol. 2 is a solid piece of work which contrasts with a rather vague and fuzzy Vol. 1. Almost all of his views on the Palaeolithic are contained in Vol. 1 and in my view, many points require serious revision to account for the new advances in Genetics since then.

As I mentioned, Alinei devotes a great deal of space to lithics – which you might expect him to do, as you don’t have much else to go on pre-Aurignacian and he allows himself to be convinced of Matthew Dyer’s model which associates different kinds of toolmaking with different kinds of language, hence he argues the apparently enormous stability of E Asian lithics from Homo Erectus to the end of the ice age is correlated with the presence of monosyllabic languages there. In other words, if you buy this, you have to support the multi-regional hypothesis, which you could probably just about have done plausibly in 1996, but I think it’s now dead in the water since the consensus is for Out of Africa.

Now in my view, this doesn’t preclude H. Erectus or the Neanderthals from having language, it just means that if and when these earlier hominids came face to face with H. Sapiens Sapiens, neither would have understood a word of the other’s langauge due to hundreds of thousands of years of separation.

Returning to Alinei, he is aware of the Out of Africa vs. Multi-Regional Debate, so what he says, prudently, is basically, I really like my Schlegelian lithics-language model and that sort of tilts me in favour of the MRH but I’m aware that the Out-of-Africa supporters also have a good case, so I’m going to put forward 2 alternative versions, a long-run PCT and a short-run PCT and let time decide which is right, and in any case, if you’re only interested in the last 50,000 years, it doesn’t really matter which you choose because the end-result is the same.

In terms of dating, even for his short-run PCT, he appears to believe (and I don’t see an explicit statement), that the Nostratic phase was relatively short-lived and that PIE existed as an explicit entity in SW Asia as early as 80-100 kya, with Hittite splitting off at an early date (he explicitly agrees with Gamkrelidze/Ivanov here that the deep split in PIE is between Anatolian and non-Anatolian, and other PIE the remainder forms a Sprachbund which gradually crystallises into different families from then onwards.

This was his stance in 1996. I asked him about this a couple of years ago, and he seems to be prepared to bring his dates down but I haven’t seen him in print on this. His main argument is nevertheless that all the IE groups had differentiated from each other by the start of the Mesolithic (e.g there was already a discernable Germanic grouping different from a Celtic grouping) – based, as I cited in my article, on the fact that certain late Palaeolithic cultural innovations like burial have different words in different languages.

I would say that I support his end-point conclusion, i.e. that some form of IE was present in Europe by the Mesolithic, but evidently not his dates for the differentiation of PIE, which are way too high.

Dab, it’s you’re privilege not be convinced, but frankly I find your arguments for dismissing PCT to be seriously flawed.

Firstly, you cite examples like Brazil (actually Jamaica would be a much better example) where you have a genetically African population but they all speak English. Ergo, no link between genetics and language. But this blithely assumes that the social and demographic dynamics of the 17th-18th century can be extrapolated directly to the societies Neolithic – which seems completely ludicrous to me. On the one hand you have a highly hierarchical and sophisticated set of nation states capable of organising an intercontinental slave traffic and on the other a bunch of half-starved stone age farmers about whose models of social organisation (e.g. exogamy), we know virtually nothing. But you (and you’re by no means alone here) blithely equate the two and claim that this constitutes a plausible core assumption merely because it allows you to reject an idea which doesn’t agree with yours. Any half-serious historian would just laugh at you.

Secondly, it’s interesting that you choose Brazil as an example. You may be aware of work by Francisco Salzano who took a sample of men from the Northeast who considered themselves to be “white” [although Brazil has some very dark people who think of themselves as white]. He found that over 90% of them had European Y-chromosome lines, but 60% had African/native Indian mtDNA. I.e. the model of Portuguese men miscegenating with Indian women/slaves really does show up in the genetics. Furthermore, a similar pattern shows up at 1200 years in Iceland, where most of the women are shown to be of Celtic origin.

I suggest that divergent YDNA and mtDNA patterns are a genetic signature for miscegenation, and the bottom line is that there’s no evidence of this divergence in the European gene pool, which combined with the fact that we now know that “old” genetic lines predominate really does stack the deck against a Bronze age elite dominance model à la Gimbutas.

If you’re going to argue from the known past to unknown prehistory, then I suggest that what the last two thousand years shows is that unless an intrusive people settles in sufficient numbers to dominate an area’s economic and social infrastructure, their language tends to disappear without trace. The Romans achieved this by settling ex-legionaries, co-opting the local élite and probably massive displacement of slaves to latifundia, the Germanic tribes who didn’t do this singularly failed to impose their language on a single area which they held in Continental Europe, and in England, note that everyone is surreptitiously starting to follow Alinei and argue for a much older Germanic presence in Eastern England, simply because the genetics won’t support the view that the island was entirely Celtic before the 3rd-4th century. Even where invaders took over the country, this was not enough to ensure the triumph of their language in the long term (e.g. Arabic in Spain or Norman French in England). You could thus argue from this that the only people who managed to impose their language succcessfully were the Romans and this is precisely because they were as good as the English/Spanish/Portuguese in the 17th-18th centuries at shipping people around in the name of a grand economic design. This says to me that it’s actually pretty difficult for an elite to change the language of an indigenous people. However, the Renfrews and Gimbutas simply assume that what recorded history shows was damned difficult to achieve over the last 2,000 years with plenty of examples of plagues and marauding horsemen raping and killing sedentary farmers, was dead easy in the Neolithic/Bronze Age. But they advance no social models to explain this, there is no archaeological evidence for the rape and pillage and Renfrew has produced precisely zero linguistic evidence for his farming model (and while he’s evidently not a linguist, he has a lot of clout in academia and a big cheque book, so if it was such a great theory, he could presumably have persuaded at least one respectable linguist to provide a helping hand – and yet, he has to admit (p. 474 of Examining the farming/language dispersal hypothesis), that not only has he failed to show a connection between the spread of farming and IE, he hasn’t managed it for any language group anywhere in the world.

Because of the above, I suggest, at the risk of repeating myself, that if these models were true, you would have some genetic evidence of miscegenation. And it ain’t there.

This, for me, is a cardinal virtue of PCT, it just says that the first people into a territory tend to dictate its language, that once there, they tend to stay there, and there wasn’t even the possibility of outsiders coming in and kicking them around until the Bronze Age. It has a very simple mechanism for explaining how a given language comes to be spoken in a given area (My own model is slightly different but I’m still working on it) whereas Renfrew & Gimbutas have advanced no mechanism.

Thirdly, your claim that you can have language change without full population change is just a non-sequitur. Both Renfrew and Gimbutas claim that IE speakers intrude into an area previously occupied by non-IE speakers, and somehow, whether by the seductions of farming or force of arms, within a few generations, all traces of the non-IE language have been obliterated. But where is the causal link between your claim that this process of language extermination is possible without ethnic cleansing and the proof that this is actually what happened? You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that proponents of the PCT are saying “we reject Renfrew and Gimbutas because we believe that their models only work with comprehensive ethnic cleansing and we don’t think that this could have happened”. No one is saying anything of the sort. Alinei is actually saying (and I agree with him on this point) that Renfrew and Gimbutas need to prove that there actually was a non-IE substrate for their theories to stand up and they can’t prove it a) because there are linguistic boundaries which are older than their invasions and b) particularly for Renfrew, there are fringe areas of Europe like the Norwegian coast where neolithicisation was very late or never happened, so according to Renfrew, these should be hold outs of the non-IE substrate peoples. The day you find non-IE fishing vocabulary in Norwegian dialect is the day that the PCT collapses, but Alinei’s point is that it’s not there, and furthermore, he’s not the first person to realise this – the absence of non-IE substrates in N Europe was perfectly clear to linguists the late 19th century. Let me further say that just as Europe fails the substrate test, India passes it. You have abundant evidence of substrate languages in the Rg-Veda (Munda, Dravidian, some unknown language) and only one real branch of Indo-European (as opposed to many in Europe). I’m currently talking about some other stuff with the Mother Tongue people which may show this more conclusively, but I want to point out that there are areas like India where the evidence does appear to support the opposite conclusion (note that Alinei has never suggested that PCT-IE applies to India, only to Europe – although he does believe in a PCT for Uralic and Altaic).

You also appear to have overlooked the fact that when you sever the link between language and genetics, you forge a double-edged sword. Hence I can turn your argument on its head and claim that you don’t need the survival of indigenous speakers to keep traces of a substrate alive. Brazil is again case in point. I’ve lived there on and off for 20 years and never met a native Tupi speaker, but Brazilian Portuguese is full of Tupi words for animals, placenames, personal names, etc. Until the Portuguese court cracked down at the start of the 19th century, it was the lingua franca everywhere in Brazil except the coastal cities (as its relative Guarani still is in Paraguay). Look at all colonies settled by Europeans (USA, Australia, Mexico, etc.) and you’ll find the same pattern of survival of indigenous languages, if only in place names, despite massive differences in technology, military force between the original inhabitants and the European intruders. Once again, however, Renfrew and Gimbutas insist on their intrusion theories without providing any evidence of a substrate [one person has tried to reconstruct a proto-nonIE langauge for Europe, Harald Sverdrup, but his work is so shoddy, particularly for his Basque-Etruscan cognates, that it really doesn’t stand up – if anything the one part which looks OK – his showing of links between Etruscan and Rhaetian, actually coincides with Alinei’s Hungarian model]. The PCT’s claim that the absence of a non-IE substrate indicates that IE was the original language family, seems to me to be absolutely logical.

As for glottochronology, the methods of calibration are so full of holes as to make the dates worthless. You can check out my post on Jess Tauber’s Amerind group if you like, but basically, the rate of divergence for modern languages is greatly exaggerated, and there are variants of the method (e.g. Starostin) which give deep dates (even if he rejects his own findings). There’s more to be said here, but it requires a full paper.

Finally, why don’t you argue that PIE broke up in the 20th century, since all the daughter languages probably have the same word for ‘computer’, etc. On what grounds can you claim that a cognate for a piece of technology isn’t a generalised borrowing and must be part of the original PIE vocabulary? Particularly when it’s probably a question of loans between related languages.

- Jonathan Morris.

I do not believe the lack of translations into English are a proof of anything (much valueable material is not yet translated into English and much valueable scholarship probably lies unknown to the English speaking audience).

But reading some of Alinei's materials on PCT I believe (as a non-professional) his theory is likely an artificial construct trying to answer some questions but raising many others. E.g. one obvious problem to his theory is that the linguistical map one gets for Balkan area in Antiquity doesn't match at all the Middle Ages map or the modern map. From Greek, Celtic, Illyrian, Thracian, Iranian we end up with Greek, Slavic, Hungarian, Eastern Romance, Albanian, Turkic (the lists are approximative). Therefore some additional equations must be built: Hungarian = Etruscan, Slavic = Thracian. And here I observe a laitmotif: the omission.

* Some ethno-linguistical realities are ignored - what happened to Celtic language in Balkans, for instance?

* An unfair perspective is given within the IE taxonomy - he notes Thracian, Baltic and Slavic are satem languages and based mostly on that he draws them together; but what about Indo-Iranian languages?

* The relevant scholarship is also missing (for Thracian language Dečev, Georgiev, Russu, Duridanov, etc.) while his position on Thracian = Slavic I find extremely thin and rather rhetoric than argumentative (from some hundreds of known Thracian words, names, roots he barely touches two on some unpersuading similarities: e.g. Thracian "diza" has much better parallels in other languages like Avestan).

* Alternative hypotheses - why the similarities he notices are not caused by common IE origins or neighbourhood?

I cannot say this is pseudo-science, but without a serious peer-review and with such shaky arguments, I don't find it trustworthy either. Daizus 13:28, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Daizus and anyone else. You're guilty of misreading Alinei. Admittedly, his treatment of Thracian is cursory, but this is not a reason to misquote him. As you know, a key belief of PCT is that it is only in the Chalcolithic that societies advance to the point of permitting stratification/inter-ethnic dominance. Hence his model is of a Europe consisting of differentiated groups at the end of the Neolithic, with the intrusion of elites speaking other languages from the Chalcolithic/BE onwards. Evidently, if the elite is displaced, its language disappears and the language of the peasantry re-emerges. Outside their home area (W Europe and notably France) he sees the Celts as an elite - so they simply come and go. He also sees an amorphous mass in E Europe which for want of a better word, we'll call Balto-Slavic, which differentiates into an archaic periphery (Thracian and Baltic) and an innovative centre (Slavic). On p. 193, he states that this explains the affinities between Baltic and Thracian toponyms, noted by Trubacev.

On p222-223, it appears that no-one has read the page in full, which concludes as follows:

• In termini più precisi, dunque, si può ipotizzare che il Tracio fosse una lingua di transizione fra Baltico e Slavo, parlata da un gruppo periferico della Slavia meridionale, e pendant dei gruppi baltici della periferia settentrionale. A differenza dei gruppi baltici, questa geovariante, particolarmente soggetta alle vicissitudini dei gruppi elitari altaici, sarebbe stata riassorbita nel 'mare slavo' e si sarebbe estinta'.

Tr: In more precise terms, therefore, it may be hypothesised that Thracian was a transition language between Baltic and Slavic, spoken by a peripheral group of Southern Slavia, the counterpart of Baltic groups on the Northern periphery. Unlike the Baltic groups, this geovariant, particularly subject to the vicissitudes of elite Altaic groups would have been reabsorbed into the "slav sea" and would have become extinct.

This is not the same as saying the Thracians were Slavs, as my previous comment on Herodotus points out. Alinei does not assert this and merely tries to trace the Thracians to pre-Slavic cultures of the Neolithic. He then says that the Thracians were 'militarised'by their Altaic contacts, and at a later stage, established some transient hegemony over neighbouring Slavic peasantries, hence Slavs were mistaken by the classical historians for Thracians, where in fact they were under the rule of the latter.

Frankly, I find this idea that from the Bronze Age onwards different social classes occupying the same territory spoke different languages is far more sophisticated than the analysis of his critics.

While we're on the subject of the Balkans, I will say that I'm much less convinced by his theory of proto-Romance in the Balkans which could have given rise to Romanian. If this were true, then I think you'd see far more divergence between Romanian and classical Latin than between the latter and say Portuguese, and this is not the case. Indeed, I think that he underestimates just how effectively Trajan and his legions ethnically cleansed Dacia, although this is a very special situation.(Jonathan Morris2 13:18, 26 February 2007 (UTC))

PS His classification of Thracian with Balto-Slavic is not based on the fact that they all just happen to be satem languages, but on archaeological evidence and the similarities between Baltic and Thracian toponyms noted by Trubacev. Furthermore, I see nothing in the above which conflicts with Duridanov's view that "it turned out that the Thracian language is in close genetic links with the Baltic languages". This discussion would be far more productive if people posted on the basis of what Alinei actually said and not what they hope he might have said so that they can disagree with him. (Jonathan Morris2 13:59, 26 February 2007 (UTC))

I am not speaking generally of PCT. I understand Alinei is proposing a model, I'm fine with that, yet when I'm trying to apply his model to historical realities I am more familiar with, I can't see it validated by them as it should be. Hence my characterization: "artificial construct". If his model could explain the linguistic maps of Balkans as they evolved from the ancient times until today, I wouldn't have used this characterization. I haven't read his entire work, just some materials available online. So I'll just stick to what I've read and the view I can get from that. From "Interdisciplinary and linguistic evidence for Palaeolithic continuity of Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic populations in Eurasia, with an excursus on Slavic ethnogenesis" I've focused in my earlier reply on section 7.5.5, particularily on the page 37 where Alinei draws together Thracian and Slavic languages and argues for it.

He indeed calles Thracian a "Southern Slavic geo-variational group" but he also advances much more than that: "we could advance the hypothesis that the Thracians were a Slavic group [...] we could then advance the hypothesis that Thracians was the name that Herodotus gave to the Slavs, owing to the fact the Thracians were one of the most powerful and representative elites of Slavic speaking Eastern Europe". He mentions a "Thracians = Slavs" equation, he mentions a Slavic speaking Eastern Europe. This is a radical change in views ignoring the otherwise complex ethno-linguistical maps suggested by other scholars.

Therefore for the time being I must plead innocent for my guilt. I'll address the arguments on Thracians vs Balts vs Slavs and scholarship a bit later. Daizus 14:36, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, I hadn't checked the English translation (Alinei's) since I work off the original Italian, but now I can see where the confusion lies - "Southern Slavic group" looks to me as if it means "a group of people who are Slav". The original "un gruppo periferico della Slavia meridionale" isn't the same thing at all. It means a peripheral group inhabiting the Southern Slav area - i.e. it is a geographical location. It is very clear from the original that Alinei doesn't think that the Thracians are just Slavs, since he writes "pendant dei gruppi baltici della periferia settentrionale. A differenza dei gruppi baltici..." - i.e. they are counterparts to the Balts, who are also not Slavs, although he thinks that all three groups, Slavs, Balts and Thracians share common origin (Jonathan Morris2 11:25, 2 March 2007 (UTC))

All I have read of Alinei can be found here - both in English and Italian, but only in English I've found a detailed presentation of his theories on Thracian language and Thracians. You're mentioning an Italian original quite different from the material I've consulted, I'm not saying it's not possible, I just want you to note that text is subtitled as "Expanded version of a paper read at the Conference Ancient Settlers in Europe, Kobarid {my note: in Slovenia}, 29-30 May 2003." and is authored "by Mario Alinei". No mention of translation, no mention of a translator (other papers from the same site have the mention "translated from Italian", so here would be an accidental and dubious omission), a paper for a conference held outside Italia - with all that you're saying there was an Italian original to it? Without further access on the paper read at that conference, or if other persons were involved in the creation of this text, I must assume Alinei fully responsible for the text and that the text reflects his views, regardless if the text was initially conceived in Italian or in English.

Now, considering also those execerpts from his texts in Italian, Slavic is (also) a linguistical group. A group (even peripherical) from "Slavia", if it's not stressed to be speaking another language, it is speaking Slavic (of course, a version of it - being a separate language or dialect from other members of the same group). I must emphasize again, in the text I invoked, he asserts a "Slavic-speaking Eastern Europe" at the time when Herodotus lived.

Let's consider another point of view. He clearly states there was no Slavic invasions (section 7.5 from "Interdisciplinary ...", starting at p. 32), he speaks of post-glacial Slavic area covering also the territories assigned tradionally to Thracians (p. 33), he speaks of Balts to be the northern neighbours of the Slavs (while Thracians are not the southern neighbours as one would have expect in the symmetry you're suggesting) (p.33), he assigns all the ancient archaeological cultures from Balkans (except Illyrian and Greek) to a Southern Slavic area (pp. 33-34), he justifies the Balkanic Sprachbound and the relative homogenity of Southern slavic languages through the presence of Slavs in Balkans from Antiquity exactly in the same territory where otherwise we know Thracian tribes to have lived (pp. 34-35). If the Balkans are from his point of view Slavic, while the Baltic territories apparently not, it's obvious we can't justify his view on Thracians with what he is saying about Balts.

Now I'll pick again on the arguments on Thracians from section 7.5.5:

• Alinei mentions an archaic Turkic influence on Thracian arguing the sica is a typical centr-Asian metallurgy?? - no reference
• Alinei conjugates Hoddinott's identification of Ottopeni-Wittenberg (Carpathian basin) culture as an early Thracian culture with the latest research (?) which argues this culture is a continuation of Baden and Vučedol cultures (identified by Alinei as 'Slavophone'), the latter being connected with Steppe cultures (he quotes Lichardus & Lichardus affirming a connection with kurgan cultures); from these he concludes (?) the Thracians must have been a southern Slavic group who underwent strong Turkic influences and that's why they extinguished (?).

This is all about archaeology. Now linguistics:

• Alinei stresses Thracian is an IE satem language, like Baltic and Slavic (and I have replied: he ignores completely the Indo-Iranian group which offers interesting parallels with Thracian)
• Alinei invokes Trubačev for a similarity between Thracian and Baltic toponyms. However Trubačev similarities are not so numerous and contested (Sorin Olteanu, for instance, suggests the closeness between Thracian and Baltic was exaggerated) and as Alinei he ignores parallels with other IE languages. As you have remarked Ivan Duridanov also supports a similarity between Thracian and Baltic toponyms. Yet what we should point out that none of these linguists support directly Alinei's hypothesis. a) there's no strong parallelism drawn between Slavic toponyms and Thracian b) some claims though similar with Alinei are in fact incompatible. For instance, Duridanov claims there are some similarities between Thracian, Dacian, Slavic, Baltic (he also claims Thracian and Dacian to be distinct languages) but they have broke up as distinct languages in 3rd millenium BC, ~3000 years before Alinei's analysis of the Slavic invasion. Duridanov also notes the Thracian had more distant relations with Greek, Italic and Celtic (as we were speaking of Celts in Eastern Europe).
• Alinei compares Thr. -dizos/-diza ("fortress") with the OSl. ziždo, zydati ("to build"), zydŭ, zidŭ ("wall"), claiming they are closer than the Baltic ones. Yet Alinei seems to ignore completely the Avestan daeza ("wall") or the Persian didā ("fortress") - see Pokorny (but also Duridanov. He also compares the Thracian Strymōn/Strymē (the former is a hydronym) with the Polish strumień ("river"). The Polish term could be related to the Germanic stroum/Strom ("river", "stream"). Duridanov discusses this term, too.

Here the linguistic arguments end.

Alinei's conclusion is "The most plausible hypothesis would be then that Thracian was a conservative type of Slavic, still preserving Baltic features and spoken by a peripheral group of Southern Slavs, somehow parallel to the Northern peripheral Balts (following the geolinguistic well-known rule, according to which the center innovates, and the periphery preserves).". I disgaree with him, as the aforementioned arguments barely have shown there could(!) be some similarities. The omission of larger perspectives within the IE group are fatal when jumping to conclusions. This is my personal opinion, so you can disregard it. I however demand stronger arguments to claim Thracian (or any other tradionally non-Slavic group) was a type of Slavic. Daizus 13:51, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi Daizus, with all due respect, I don't think that you are adapting your thinking to a PCT framework. For Alinei, the Slavs have been around since the Mesolithic/Neolithic (see Vol2, Ch 5), as have the Balts, hence his long chapter about how there are cultural parallels to the Uralic/Baltic linguistic frontier dating back to the Mesolithic (this is a key point, since if everything up there was undifferentiated pre-IE, you wouldn't expect to find this cultural boundary at such an early stage) - hence when he says that Thracian is related to Slavic, the point at which let's say proto-Thracian and proto-Slavic start to diverge is probably back in the Neolithic. Your comments seem to suggest that you believe that he is saying that Thracian only differentiates from Slavic at a much later stage and this really isn't what he's saying at all. Please note, I am merely trying with all my comments to clarify what Alinei is actually saying, not whether or not he's right.

As for the 2 etymologies - frankly they're common IE words. -dizos could well be an Iranian loan, but who is claiming that there isn't any borrowing from Iranian into Slavic. If anything, the presence of Iranian speakers in S Russia would lead you to expect extensive borrowing.

I'm not sure you can draw many conclusions about strymon, except that it's very unlikely to be a borrowing from Iranian/Gk, since , there is a basic re-/ra- root which seems to mean 'flow', which is present in these 2 groups, but the st- prefix is Slavo-Germanic. (Jonathan Morris2 13:06, 17 March 2007 (UTC))

I have linked the paper I've read, I have browsed it and commented it in my earlier reply. If my understanding is wrong, please follow the same material as I did and show me where I was wrong.

The 2 etymologies are given as arguments by Alinei. I'm expecting for the one using them in such a way to show a) that Thracians indeed borrowed them from Slavs (and not from someone else) b) that these two examples are indeed meaningful for the relation between Thracian and Slavic languages (e.g. English has a lot of borrowed words from French). Daizus 14:03, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

I think this source provides a plausible scenario for the process of the continuality theory.*The Paleolithic Indo-Europeans --J intela 06:50, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

he justifies the Balkanic Sprachbound and the relative homogenity of Southern slavic languages through the presence of Slavs in Balkans from Antiquity exactly in the same territory where otherwise we know Thracian tribes to have lived (pp. 34-35)

Yeah. Even this sole thing is pretty absurd. Old Church Slavonic, exactly in the same territory, doesn't have any Balkan Sprachbund features. These appear much later, and any proper linguist should know that. Neolithic origin?! --91.148.159.4 14:43, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

There is no contraddiction. We have to discern between written language, which is the expression of an élite, and the commonly spoken one. And Old Church Slavonic is clearly a theoretical, reconstructed language, a slavic koiné. Pcassitti 19:32, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

The original OCS was based on the colloquial form, because there was no other form at the time - there was no elite, written form of Slavic before that. It is not theoretical, it is not reconstructed, and it is most certainly not a koine. It's a Balkan Slavic language. See the relevant article. --91.148.159.4 (talk) 23:34, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Scope, Format, References and NPOV

Over at the Fringe Noticeboard I recently offered to help out with this article. I consider myself entirely neutral on its subject matter, and have no vested interest in anything other than seeing it improve in an atmosphere of cooperation. I hope the other editors will work with me in improving it. With that said, here is my first suggestion:

As it says on the Article Development page, the first thing any editor should do when composing (or in this case: performing a major edit on) an article is consider the scope, format, references and how to present the information from a NPOV. I invite other editors (particularly Rokus01) to detail their thoughts regarding these four points in relation to the article at hand. Of course, other editors will and should comment on these, and make suggestions along the way. The goal is to find an acceptable framework from which future edits can be made.

Also, as there doesn't seem to be any active discussion on this talkpage (at least nothing which would seem to require its remaining active), I suggest that it be archived and that Rokus01 or someone else begin the new talkpage with their response to the points I raised above. Thanks. Aryaman (☼) 20:46, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

I think maybe one of the archive bots would be a better choice, as most of the discussion on this page is either from Oct 07 or very new. I think that would be better as there is a lot of discussion in the history also that appears to be deleted? unless there is an archive somewhere I'm not seeing. --Rocksanddirt 22:02, 15 November 2007 (UTC) I set up the Misza bot to archive the page for threads older than 30 days. --Rocksanddirt 22:09, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Good deal, considering that half of it goes back 1-2 years... =) Aryaman (☼) 22:14, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

and a fair bit of arguementation around the topic as well. --Rocksanddirt 22:15, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

I subscribe to the proposal of Varoon Arya to find an acceptable framework. Actually, I was just busy on this and already submitted a proposal in the next section. I dropped in here only recently and most discussions don't reflect a balanced view on PCT anyway. I'm not sure if someone is still brooding on saying something on Chomsky, so I agree on all before this to be archived. Rokus01 22:54, 15 November 2007 (UTC)