Paleolinguistics

"The extent to which one can accept or deny the premises of ‘archaeo-linguistics’ depends on the extent of one’s faith in the premises built up by orthodox ‘compara- tive philologists’ of the nineteenth century. That ‘New Archaeology’ of the 1960s and 1970s, which began by swearing in the name of ‘science’, should reduce itself to linguistic mumbo jumbo of the nineteenth century is possibly an object lesson in how archaeology need not be confused with hard science."

"All prehistoric reconstruction is of course purely hypothetical, that is, based on conjectural assumptions. Strictly speaking any conjectural assumption is a guess. . . . A prehistorian depends on ... his imagination . . . trained by experience."

"The apparent existence of a common term in the language, which is attained through reconstruction on the basis of the attestations in the daughter languages, does not prove that the item it denotes actually existed in the relevant original society."

"The linguist J. Fraser (1926),for example, presented a well-known (but faulty) caricature of the whole enterprise by re-constructing a proto-Romance scenario from the paleolinguistic evidence of the historic Romance languages: "By th[is] same method of investigation we shall discover that the Romans had emperors, and a republic; that they had priests, called by a name represented by die French pretre, and bishops; that they drank beer, probably, but certainly coffee, and that they smoked tobacco" (269)."

"Now the more sophisticated among us could easily object here that it would take a great deal of naivete on the part of linguistic palaeontologists to propound such views, . . . yet such naivete seems to enjoy the status of high acumen, as anyone can see who reads some of the numerous volumes that deal with the "Indo-Eutopeans," their lives and their mo- res. But if the authorship of such works is not astonishing enough, the uncritical and admiring credulity bestowed upon them by a vast number of scholars certainly is."

"The English language has laid under contribution almost every language on the face of the earth. We speak freely of the fauna and flora of other countries, not merely [of] England. . . . Names like 'lion', 'tiger', 'wine', 'cotton' . . . and hundreds of other things which are not indigenous in England but are perfectly familiar to every speaker of the English language all over the world. . . . 1 do not see how scholars placed in the same relation to English as we are to Indo-Germanic could tell that the Englishman knew cotton, wine, and the like only through literature or as articles of commerce, and not because he lived in a region which produced them all. That the palaeontologist of the future . . . should describe the Englishman as tending his vines in the neighborhood of tiger-infested jungles, would not, perhaps, be very astonishing. (272)"

"The determination of the Indo-European civilization is precisely the point which affords least hope of any satisfactory result. It rests on linguistic evidence pure and simple, and it is open to the gravest doubt whether such evidence is capable of giving the results which are claimed for it by those who seek to determine the Indo-European home. . . . It should suffice to remember that on the basis usually adopted we would have to conclude that the Indo-Europeans knew snow and feet, but were ignorant of rain and hands. The difficulty, of course, is in theory recognized by all who deal with the issue; the trouble is that in practice they tend more or less completely to ignore it, and to create for us a picture of the Indo-Europeans which is probably a mere delusive shadow of the actual civilization of the people. Yet it should be a warning when we find that linguistically we may assert that the Indo-Europeans knew butter but were unacquainted with milk. (189-190)"

"It is an elementary mistake to equate common Indo-European words with Proto-Indo-European words and to base thereon conclusions concerning the Proto-European Unolk or Urheimat. Yet this is precisely what has often been done. . . . impassioned linguistic palaeontologists have gone even further. From the existence of certain items of vocabu- lary in all or a majority of the extant Indo-European languages, and blandly ignoring all the pitfalls just noted, they even fabricated conclusions concerning the social organization, the religion, the mores, the race of the Proto-Indo-European."

"The arbitrary and unrigorous methods that have characterized much of this linguistic paleontology certainly deserve Renfrew's scepticism. . . . Most of the lexemes that can be confidently assigned on the basis of widespread attestation . . . do not tell us much."

"The clues afforded by linguistic paleontology were either so general that they accommodated both centres without much difficulty, or they were so hypothetical that they could be easily ignored if unsuitable."

"Most recently, Krell (1998) argued that "the old, pliable crutch of linguistic paleontology should certainly be abandoned, at least until the theoretical uses and limitations of the Proto-Indo-European lexicon have been more precisely defined" (280).... "It is imperative, in working with the problem of Indo-European origins, that the contents of the PIE lexicon not be treated too literally. Historical linguistics has shown numerous examples of how dramatically the meaning of a given word can shift in the course of a few centuries, let alone several millennia" (279). She concludes that "the use of so-called 'linguistic paleontology' . . . has always been a popular method in the construction of Proto-Indo-European urheimat theories. It rests entirely on the supposition that the meaning of a proto-form can be reconstructed beyond a reasonable doubt, a supposition which I argue is false" (279)."

"It is disappointing to have to say that at present there seems to be no hope of estimating objectively and with a useful degree of precision how long an originally homogeneous Indo-European language would have taken to develop into derivative groups or languages which diverged as much as Greek, Sanskrit and Hittite did when the earliest texts in them were composed. Some linguists seem to think that they can make intuitive judgements about the minimum time which a particular phonetic or other change in a language would have taken. But the results of intuition when applied to estimating the minimum time in which a group of cognate languages or dialects would have differentiated to an observed extent vary so much that no useful deductions can be made from them. . . . I sympathize with archaeologists and other prehistorians who are not primarily linguists over this. Linguists are unable to provide the information which would be most useful."

"The question of identifying archaeological remains of Indo-European populations in Central Asia has been one of the main questions that has occupied a number of linguists and historians for many years [...] when written records are not available, a reconstructed time-space framework is generally used to substantiate the reconstruction with some relevant illustrative material. The linguistic attributes are mapped onto archaeological correlates: artifacts are selected, like the chariot, as well as ecofacts, like agriculture, or whole archaeological cultures (material assemblages). The archaeological correlates become some sort of labels or tags that one may employ in order to trace the supposed Indo-European populations. But, in fact, very little of the illustrative archaeological material actually exhibits specific Indo-European or Indo-Iranian traits; a question therefore arises: what is the relevance of archaeological material if any sort of assemblage present at the expected or supposed time/space spot can function as the tag of a linguistic group?"