From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Ted Holden on Linguistics and Evolution
Organization: LLNL
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1992 05:26:48 GMT

	Ted Holed-in has spouted yet another of his absurd claims,
this time on race and language. I sometimes think that TH deserves a
FAQ of his own, given his taste for coming up with absurdities.

	About Indo-European and Semitic being unrelated while speakers
of both come from the same race, I think that (1) it is not quite
true, and (2) it does not prove that the two language families are
completely separate and of recent origin. About (1), more of that
later on, although it is a good approximation :-), but about (2), the
seeming unrelatedness could be a side effect of several thousand years
of language change.

	But _are_ Indo-European and Semitic related? Strictly
speaking, Semitic is part of a larger grouping called Afro-Asiatic or
Hamito-Semitic, which includes Ancient Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, and
Cushitic.

	What language families are related to Indo-European is a murky
issue, though Uralic is probably one of the closest of the non-IE
families. Probably the strongest hypothesis of such a relationship is
the Nostratic hypothesis, first put forth in detail by the Soviet
linguists Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky in the early 1960's. It is a
macro-family that encompasses Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic,
Kartvelian, Dravidian, and Afro-Asiatic. Since then, some linguists
have proposed Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut as additional
members, and others have suggested that Afro-Asiatic is a grouping
comparable to the rest of Nostratic.

	Another such macro-family is Sino-Caucasian or Dene-Caucasian,
which includes North Caucasian (Northeast Caucasian and
Abkhazo-Adyghian), Sino-Tibetan, Basque, Yeniseian, Burushaski,
Na-Dene, probably Hurrian-Urartian and Etruscan, and possibly
Sumerian. I've been trying to investigate the hypothesis that Minoan
is a member, without much success.

	Amerind is another suggested macro-family, but its principal
advocate, Joseph Greenberg, uses relatively imprecise and subjective
methods, compared with the efforts to find sound correspondences that
the Nostraticists have made.

	The ultimate is the ultimate ancestor of all human languages,
if there ever was a single such language; it has been given the name
"Proto-World". However, the question of humanity's first language has
been so contaminated with crackpottery that even some Nostraticists
would prefer to avoid bringing the subject up.

	The ages of these families? About 10,000-15,000 years or so,
estimated from linguistic-divergence rates. This would put their
origin at about the end of the last Ice Age, when agriculture was
invented in the Middle East in three spots -- southern Anatolia,
Syria-Palestine, and the Zagros Mountains of Iran. Of these, the
Natufians of Syria-Palestine at that time have been suggested as the
original speakers of Afro-Asiatic.

	Another proposed identification is Colin Renfrew's hypothesis
of the origin and spread of Indo-European, that it started out from
Anatolia, and spread of Europe as agriculturalists went searching for
more land for themselves. Although there is genetic evidence for this
type of spreading, derived from how much mixing there has been with
the local populations, there are serious difficulties with that IE
hypothesis. In particular, the branching order inferred from the IE
dialects is all wrong for this theory, and there are serious cultural
discrepancies, which Renfrew waves away. The cultural inferences are
derived from what the Proto-IE speakers had words for: horses, wheeled
vehicles, various weapons, and so forth, including a deity named
"Father Sky". Perhaps the first people to ride horses were the Kurgan
people of South Russia, about 4500-2500 BCE (they fade off into the
Scythians, Sarmatians, and others of historical times); they also had
wheeled vehicles; both are unknown before their presence. There is
evidence of several waves of invasions by the Kurgans into Eastern
Europe, which resulted in the destruction of the agricultural
societies already there. Burial customs differ considerably; Neolithic
and Copper Age European burials are often collective, with few
individuals receiving great honors; both sexes had the same amount of
wealth in their graves. On the other hand, the burial mounds the
Kurgans were named afterward, were all for their chieftains, who were
all male; there is one skeleton in the center, and several on the
outside, probably sacrificed so that they may be buried with their
monarch. There is also a significant difference in the tastes in
symbolism between the Kurgans and the people they overrun.  Many of
the deities of the Neolithic Europeans were female and chthonic,
judging from their art, compararable to later deities such as Demeter,
Artemis, Athena, Dionysus, Brigit, and so forth. The Kurgans appeared
to have preferred weapon-wielding male deities of the Sun and the sky,
judging from their burial stelae. Marija Gimbutas has written in
detail on this subject.

	I know this seems rather long-winded, but it is worth noting
that prehistory is not necessarily a "simple" subject.

	I have a whole list of references on Nostratic and related
subjects that I am willing to post or e-mail.

	And TH's comments about "yuppie scientists" might best be
described as first-class boorishness, although it is a bit funny. I'm
not sure if he would like to be treated in any similar fashion, say,
by having numerous horrid puns worked on his name.

/Loren