linguistics

"Ethnicity and language are not so easily wedded to an archaeological signature. Material residues as well as the units of analysis in archaeology are too frequently incongruent with what we wish to investigate. The Arab, Turk, and Iranian may share a laundry list of general attributes but they are neither linguistically nor culturally similar entities."

"Examples could be multiplied to show that language, long held to be the main, if not the sole, differentiating mark of ethnicity, is often irrelevant or divisive for the sense of ethnic community.... Yet scholars persist in regarding language as the distinguishing mark of ethnicity, a standpoint that leads to gross simplification and misunderstanding of both ancient and modem periods of ethnic community. ... Besides language is one of most malleable and dependent of cultural categories ... particular linguistic formations are largely the product of the interplay of religion and political organization in a given area. Hence any delineation of the “cultural” aspect of ethnie must include all manifestations of culture and look beneath the immediate and salient sign of communication which a shared language expresses, to the underlying lifestyles and values of a community."

"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?"

"It has yet to be demonstrated that language expansions can be traced through similarities in material culture or that a widely distributed culture, existing for a millennium and consisting of substantial variation, means that a population shares a common or related ethnicity."

"In the context of a renewed fashion of relating archaeology, culture, and language it is well to remember that neither sherds nor genes are destined to speak specific languages, nor does a given language require a specific ceramic type or genetic structure."

"Linguists cannot associate an archaeological culture with words, syntax, and grammar, and archaeologists cannot make their sherds utter words."

"Denis Sinor (1999:396), a distinguished linguist and historian of Central Asia, takes a position that more might consider: “I find it impossible to attribute with any degree of certainty any given language to any given prehistoric civilization.”"

"Linguists too often assign languages to archaeological cultures, while archaeologists are often too quick to assign their sherds a language."

"Contemporary methodologies, linguistic or archaeological, for determining the spoken language of a remote archaeological culture are virtually nonexistent. Simplified notions of the congruence between an archaeological culture, an ethnic group, and a linguistic affiliation millennia before the existence of texts is mere speculation, often with a political agenda. Archaeology has a long way to go before its methodology allows one to establish which cultural markers, pottery, architecture, burials, etc., are the most reliable for designating ethnic identity."

"This thesis will receive—and has already received—cheers from dilettantes. Dilettantes desperately need one thing: the proof that the population of the Armenian Plateau spoke Armenian ever since the Palaeolithic period, if possible."

"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."

"Comparative grammar is in reality radically incapable of discriminating between divergent kinship… and convergent kinship."

"Hermann goes even further: complete forms cannot be reconstructed at all, only single sounds, and even these are meant as approximations only, not as phonetically completely correct reconstructions."

"No reputable linguist pretends that Proto-Indo-European reconstructions represent a reality, and the unpronounceability of the asterisked formulae is not a legitimate argument against reconstruction."

"We must not make the mistake of confusing our methods, and the results flowing from them, with the facts; we must not delude ourselves into believing that our retrogressive method of reconstruction matches, step by step, the real progression of linguistic history."

"[I]t can be very difficult to determine whether a word truly is inherited from the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary or has been borrowed later from an Indo-European sib­ling language. If this question cannot be resolved, it is impossible to determine whether the object or phenomenon that the word denoted existed in the Proto-Indo-European homeland or is something that people became acquainted with later."

"In a certain sense lexicography may be considered a superior discipline to lexicology, for results are more important than intentions and the value of theoretical principles must be estimated according to results."

"Editing a dictionary isn’t like editing any other book or magazine," the professor pointed out. "It’s a peculiar world. You need extreme patience, a capacity for endless minutiae, a love of words bordering on obsession, and a broad enough outlook to stay sane. What makes you think there are any young people like that nowadays?"

"I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven."

"Almost all literature on language spreads assumes, at least implicitly, either demographic expansion or migration as basic mechanism, but in fact language shift is the most conservative assumption and should be the default assumption. There is no reason to believe that the mechanism of spread has any impact on the linguistic geography of the spread … simple phylogenetic descent [i.e., the tree model] is insufficient for tracing the origin and dispersal of the world’s languages and peoples."

"‘The Tree Model presupposes a flawed understanding of language diversification processes. In a nutshell, cladistic (tree-based) representations are entirely based on the fiction that the main reason why new languages emerge is the abrupt division of a language community into separate social groups. Trees fail to capture the very common situation in which linguistic diversification results from the fragmenta- tion of a language into a network of dialects which remained in contact with each other for an extended period of time’ (François 2014, p. 162)."

"Changes [of language] are quicker in unsettled communities than in more settled ones."

"As regards the kinship of the languages, it is quite impossible to state definite chronological limits within which languages change. Some languages change very rapidly , others remain more or less unaltered for a long period. It is true that hieratic languages, like those of the Vedic hymns and the Avesta, can remain unaltered much longer than spoken languages."

"Languages change at different speeds, and English has certainly changed more quickly than, say, Lithuanian or Icelandic."

"We know that two neighbouring languages can evolve at different rates: Danish. for instance, developed much more rapidly than German, or even Swedish."

"Too many comparative historical linguists want to dig up Troy, linguistically speaking. They consider it more important that comparative historical linguists shed light on prehistoric migrations than to shed light on the nature of language change [...] I do not consider comparative historical linguistics a branch of prehistory, and I sincerely believe that if we cared less about dates, maps and trees and more about language change, there’d be more real progress in that field."

"The only way to establish absolute linguistic chronologies is to correlate linguistic facts with dates fixed by other means."

"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?"

"One overall judgement emerges from this survey of how historical linguists have traditionally sought to set language (pre)histories into real-world contexts: all our traditional techniques and models are less reliable than the discipline has long liked to believe.... The same technique can be open to opposing interpretations, and different techniques often contradict each other on the same language family. Convincing ‘proof’ is hard to come by indeed.... Linguistics alone cannot come to the most plausible overall scenario for the prehistory of the populations involved. That can be assessed only in the light of the archaeological and genetic records, and the cause-and-effect relationship that links them all.... Those other disciplines continue to make spectacular leaps forward, and in historical linguistics itself, dropping the mask of many ‘old certainties’ only throws open the potential for great advances towards a sounder, truly cross- disciplinary understanding of prehistory.... Even for the world’s largest language families, that synthesis still has far to run. For language convergence areas and diversity hotspots, we have barely even begun to unlock the cross-disciplinary potential, so as to round out the rich tale that our languages can tell us of our past."

"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 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."

"It now strikes me that the attempt to reconstruct a prototypical (“Proto- Indo-European") form from which all attested variants can ultimately be derived may actually obscure much of what is most fascinating and important in myth. For while this stance acknowledges that the contents of a given myth will vary as it is recounted by different persons over time and across space, such variation is treated as a problem—or better, as the problem—to be undone by scholarly research: research that takes as its task the restoration of some hypothetical “original." Such research aims, in effect, to reverse historic processes and recapture a primordial (and ahistoric) moment of unity, harmony, and univocal perfection. In its very presuppositions, such research—it now seems to me—is itself a species of myth and ritual, based upon a romantic "nostalgia for paradise," to cite Mircea Eliades famous formulation."

"We must not make the mistake of confusing our methods, and the results flowing from them, with the facts; we must not delude ourselves into believing that our retrogressive method of reconstruction matches, step by step, the real progression of linguistic history."

"We now find ourselves in possession of two entirely different items, both of which we call Proto-Indo-European: one, a set of reconstructed formulae not representative of any reality; the other, an undiscovered (possibly undiscoverable) language of whose reality we may be certain."

"Arguing about 'Proto-Indo-European' can be meaningful and fruitful . . . if we always explain whether we are talking about the one or the other— which, as we well know, we do not do."

"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 Urvolk 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 vocabulary 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."

"No reputable linguist pretends that Proto-Indo-European reconstructions represent a reality, and the unpronounceability of the asterisked formulae is not a legitimate argument against reconstruction."

"A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses." The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool." Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain."

"It must be stressed, and cannot be said often enough, that whatever date is given for 'PIE,' it is necessarily no more than pure speculation."

"Every attempt, then, to give absolute dates for 'Proto-Indo-European' (or dates for alleged different stages of'PIE') is either based on the speculative identification of an archaeological culture with the speakers of the 'language of the PIE's' or on what may be called 'intelligent guesses,' deliberations of probability and feelings of appropriateness. ... The first type of proposal is usually contested by fellow archaeologists and doubted by linguists, the second, being purely subjective because objective arguments simply do not exist, is bound to remain noncommittal. As is easily to be seen, many dates of both types have found their way to an often far too skeptical public."

"It is therefore historically irresponsible for the linguist to speak of 'Proto-Indo-European' in the 4th millennium, and linguistically meaningless for the archaeologist to argue about 'Proto-Indo-Europeans' living somewhere before ca 2500 B.C."

"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."