Language Continuity

Dictada Occitana

2012-02-04T16:58:00.009+01:00

Last Saturday I participated in the Trobada Occitana at Burjassot (a town in the Valencia Metropolitan Area). As you can see in the bilingual programme (picture on the right), the event included a series of activities around the Occitan language: a speech, live music in Occitan, and obviously, the Dictada itself, i.e. a dictation where the participants have to show their level of proficiency in Occitan. This type of events are held once a year in many places around the Catalan/Occitan world, and they work as a way of showing support for the Occitan language.

So there we were, ready for the dictation. The singer of the band (Primaël) read out the lyrics of one of his songs (Companh), which were used as the text for the dication. I had hardly ever written any Occitan before, like most of the people there, but the words of the lyrics were easy to understand. Below you can see a photo of the three winners, and the funny thing is that the second from the right is actually ... me!

How is it possible for some Catalan/Valencian speakers like ourselves to be able to understand and write in Occitan at a more or less decent level, without having learnt or practiced any Occitan before? The answer is easy: both languages are closely related. Some authors have gone beyond that idea, proposing that Catalan and Occitan are, grossly speaking, two varieties of the same language. The truth is that centuries of separation, and a series of historical events, particularly the expansion of Spanish and French in the corresponding territories, have created a linguistic scenario that differs strongly from Medieval times. In fact, the number of people who speak Occitan in France is low, and declining, and the language has no official status. However, the idea of an Occitan/Catalan unity is at least a beautiful dream, a mirage, one that would include a vast area with cities like Bordeaux, Marseille, Clermont-Ferrand, Toulouse, Barcelona or Valencia.

In any case, going to that Occitan dictation was such a cool thing to do! And I even got a prize.

explorer

2012-01-10T11:05:00.000+01:00

Can we walk on four legs? We might try to do it, using our legs and arms, but even in that case, are we truly walking on four legs like horses or cats do? In fact, we are not. Our species has evolved towards bipedalism, and our whole body is designed for the upright position. When we try to walk on four legs we are merely imitating what other animals do. That's what it is: an imitation.

In some posts I've talked about the our speech faculty and the origins of human language. As I said then, the fundamental change took place in the brain. Our capacity for symbolic thought gave us the grounds to develop our peculiar way of communicating, which makes us different from other known species. I used some examples from the animal world, especially the language used by bees. Now, can we communicate like bees? Can we go back to a stage where communication is not produced the way it is usually produced between humans? Can we communicate in a non-human way, i.e. expressing content without symbolic notions like 'imperative' or 'narrative'? Can we forget about ourselves and try to reach some kind of primeval or animalistic type of communication? The answer, in my opinion, is no. We can of course try to imitate 'animal' communication, as we can also imitate the way a tiger moves, but that's just an imitation. There's no way our brain can be told to work differently in terms of communication or logical thought. We are trapped inside our brains. It is indeed a beautiful cage, but that's what it is. We can only be human. But what does that exactly mean? Let's see.

If you take a look at the Task Manager in your computer, you'll probably notice that there is a program called explorer.exe. At the beginning I thought it was the Internet Explorer application, taking up a lot of my RAM memory, but then I discovered that it is actually an important component of Windows, responsible for controlling how the whole system works. I like this concept of permanent exploration, and I think it applies to the human mind too.

We are all born with a full set of physical features, including our brain, and an inborn impulse to explore the possibilities offered by these features. This exploration starts at birth, and continues to operate throughout our lives, like the explorer.exe file in our computers. There's no way we can exist without having some kind of curiosity about the possibilities that lie within ourselves. It is obvious that the exploratory instinct is more active during childhood, for obvious reasons. However, this exploration is always guided by the other people: our parents, our brothers or sisters, our teachers, and it is modelled to suit the social and communicative networks that we are born into, including language. There's no way to know how a child would develop its inner world without this human environment; in fact, a newborn baby would die in a matter of minutes without the help of other people, as happens to other mammals and other species. Our personal exploration is limited, guided, directed towards a socially efficient network that we necessarily have to belong to. There's no other way. There's no other possible model for us. With the end of childhood, our exploratory instinct falls into a secondary role that is progressively reduced as we get older. But it never really disappears. There's always something inside us that tries to keep on exploring. Some people are particularly keen on developing this inborn utility. They want to create beauty, they want to transcend our ordinary world in unexpected ways, they create art, they make things that are apparently useless, like poems, or a statue, and the incredible thing is that all of us tend to appreciate these exercises of creativity, we like it when an unexpetced connection is found between two words, or two ideas, or a given combination of colours. The concept of beauty itself, or art, shows that there's some part of us that goes beyond the usual codes by which our society is built. We are not just passive agents in a world of solid structures: we are active explorers in a world that must somehow transcend us, that's why we appreciate art, that's why we're so fond of beauty, that's why we cannot be human unless we continue the search or at least admire those whose exploratory efforts fill our own needs.

Human language is just a convenient social construct that uses a tiny percentage of the possibilities offered by our bodies and minds, a useful tool composed of a finite set of phonemes and lexical items, plus a logical set of syntactic relationships based on human logic. But there's much more in ourselves, as can be seen in music, in art, in literature, in many aspects of our everyday life. A typical question in books about prehistory is: 'When did art begin?' The answer is usually connected with the appearance of 'artistic' objects in the archaeological record. I see it differently: human art started as soon as a hominid was born with the chance of exploring a complex brain. Art is exploration. Art is the need for exploration.

Illustrations:
Top: Triumph of Venus, Roman mosaic at Bulla Regia, Tunisia.
Bottom: detail from Ara Pacis, in Rome.

Meet the Iberians

2011-11-03T10:28:00.112+01:00

The Iberian lynx is a rare sight nowadays. It is actually the most endangered feline species in the world, and the few remaining individuals can only be found in some areas of western Andalusia (south of Spain). They are called Iberian for obvious geographic reasons. The Iberian Peninsula (Spain + Portugal) is named after the term Iberia, used by the Greeks and the Romans to refer to the peoples that they met on the Mediterranean coast. In fact, it was originally the name of a river (Iberos, nowadays Ebro). Through time, Iberia acquired its modern meaning, grossly equivalent to ancient Hispania. But the ethnonym Iberian is also an archaeological term, referring to a given pre-Roman material culture, associated with a language (still undeciphered) that can be read in a series of inscriptions. The meaning of ethnonyms and ancient languages is usually quite inaccurate and often misleading, and the term Iberian is no exception. However, we can be quite certain that around the east and south of Sapin there was a cultural continuum, including inscriptions and characteristic place-names, apart from a given set of settlement structures, that is generally labelled Iberian. In contrast to this, the rest of pre-Roman Spain is thought to be Celtic. Now, let's go back to the rare Iberian lynx: how Iberian is it actually? The territory where it is presently found is not at all the heart of the Iberian world. The Iberian lynx is probably more Tartessian than Iberian. The Tartessians are also quite a mysterious people themselves. For some authors (see e.g. here), they would be connected to the Celts, though this theory is far from being generally accepted.

So where do you have to go if you want to meet the real Iberians? A good place to go is Medierranean Spain, the area where I live. One of my hobbies is to visit the archaeological sites in the Valencia area; I've seen many of them, and I'm planning more tours in the future. The other day, I even had the chance to meet some ancient Iberians! I went to a site in Caudete de las Fuentes, supposed to be the ancient Kelin, a name that has been preserved in coins. Let's see some pictures from that day:

There I was with an Iberian lady who welcomed us in the museum (picture on the left) and listening to some merchants (right), in this beautiful reenactment organized by the University of Valencia. This type of events really helps you get closer to the ancient world. They are not just a show for families or some kind of touristy entertainment. Archaeology is more than just stones or abstractions, archaeology is something that can (or must) be felt, looked at, measured. Let's see another picture:

This is me at Puntal dels Llops (the Hill of Wolves), an Iberian site in Olocau, near Valencia. I went up there last year, and the most impressive thing about it is that, when you look around, you can locate other ancient sites and some relevant geographic features, and this gives you the right perspective. It makes sense. It looks real.

A couple of years ago I started my PhD dissertation, focused on the ancient languages of Britain. Some lines of my research are outlined in my blog, and they obviously include a good deal of arcchaeology. Now, there's a problem here. I haven't been to Britain in many years, and I don't have any direct experience of British archaeology: I haven't visited any of the main sites, which means I don't have a personal perspective of places, distances, the real size and look of ancient artifacts. To put it simple: I haven't touched British past. It is impossible to do research from simple abstractions, or from books. If you do something in life, try to make it real. That's why I think I won't finish my dissertation.

The speech faculty

2011-09-08T00:25:00.007+02:00

There's one obvious thing about human language: we speak the way we do because we have the physical capacity to do it. It's hard to imagine a dog or a chimpanzee pronouncing human words with some degree of intelligibility. This fact has led some people to see a correlation between the evolution of our vocal tract and the emergence of language. Their hypothesis would run as follows: "We started to 'speak' when we had the right anatomy to do it". The argument looks convincing at first sight, but I think it's quite weak. Let's see why. First, a video:

This is the Italian soprano Luciana Serra singing an aria from Mozart's The Magic Flute. Wonderful, isn't it? Now, the question is: did we evolve to produce this kind of performance?

In another video (sorry, embedding disabled), we can see an example of throat singing from a region in Central Asia called Tuva. This man is able to produce different types of voices using the overtones created in his throat. It looks incredible, but it's possible. In other words: at least in some of us, if not in the vast majority of us, there is a potential for this kind of thing. If you talk to people who do yoga or meditation, or other sorts of physical or mental exercise, they will often tell you that they have discovered something inside them that they didn't know existed. Humans are full of all kinds of potential, including the vocal ones, but our languages only use a very small portion of these possibilities, disregarding the rest as irrelevant. The principle of economy works here: in fact, learning to pronounce the phonetic repertoire of a language requires great effort, and some people are never completely able to master the whole set. The problem gets much worse when we get older and try to learn a second language. By then, we have lost most of the mental flexibility or predisposition that we had as children and find it really hard to produce or imitate the new sounds. The story is well known, and we can find examples everywhere everyday. I know poeple who have learnt Spanish at extraordinary levels of proficiency but who still have problems pronouncing words like piscina or decisión, or find it hard to distinguish between caro and carro.

Children are not born speaking a language. They are born with the mental ability to see the logic of human communication, and during the learning process they have to explore the vocal possibilities offered by their own bodies. But it is only some of these vocal possibilities, in fact a finite set of vowel and consonant sounds (plus suprasegmental elements), that are selected and promoted in each case.

Let's imagine another hominid species with a poorer repertoire of possible vocalizations. Even if their imagianry IPA chart were ten times smaller than ours, they would still have at their disposal a considerable amount of elements to choose from. It's not just what you have but how you exploit the potential that you have. It comes as an obvious conclusion that other hominid species could very well have developed verbal language even if their vocal tract was quite different from ours. The only requisite is that they had the kind of logical thought that leads to human communication.

Some people say language is what makes us human. I think language is just a secondary factor in a much wider scenario: the one created by our minds. Maybe that's why there are so many people doing yoga, or experimenting with sounds or trying to break communicative barriers. They want to break away from the boundaries of finite sets. They want to get a sample of a more global type of human interaction.

Or just to have fun:

Grammar as an app

2011-09-04T11:30:00.014+02:00

With or without the use of words, human communication has a syntax of its own, i.e. we can use all kinds of communicative tools (face gestures, calls, whistles, clicks, facial gestures, etc.) to create meaning: to tell a story, to refer to the present or past, to talk about possession, to point to an agent in the story, to urge the others to do something, to present information as a finished event, to describe an action that is happening simultaneously, to negate, to exclamate, to express admiration, doubt, prohibition, permission, lack of obligation, possibility, certainty, uncertainty. We have a brain endowed with the ability to generate these contrastive meanings and we use communicative elements accordingly.

Many different scenarios have proposed for the emergence of human language. In one of them, it is thought that at the beginning there were a series of words that were used without a particular syntax. I think this idea is wrong. Words were born in a context that was already meaningful in terms of communication, or syntax. From the very start, their meaning was connected to their function.

I am aware that the term syntax is traditionally used as one of the main parts of grammar, alongside morphology and semantics. This traditional meaning should not be confused with the one I have described above.

On the other hand, I define grammar as the application of our logical thought to a specific subset of communicative elements: the verbal ones.

The gramamrs of the various human languages bear strong similarities with each other, and this peculiarity has led some people to think that there is some kind of universal grammar from which subsequent ones would have generated. I think this idea is completely absurd. The similarities arise from two main factors:

1) all human languages and their grammars are based on the logical structure and symbolic possiblities of the human brain, which are to be understood as universal.

2) grammars do not emerge in complete isolation: there is a high degree of convergence between them.

Another aspect to consider is the role of our speech capacity, i.e. our capacity to produce sounds. I'll be talking about this in a forthcoming post.

More on Paleolithic proto-Indo-European

2011-09-01T00:20:00.006+02:00

They don't usually do it, but sometimes they do, especially when they have to face apparently inexplicable phenomena like the emergence of some language groups (Indo-European, Afro-Asian, etc.) and their mysterious, even transcontinental dispersals at prehistoric times. It is then that some archaeologists feel the need to tackle the issue of ancient languages and devise their own theories. In the field of Indo-European studies, for example, the list is already quite long: Gordon Childe, Marjia Gimbutas (Kurgan theory), James Mallory, Colin Renfrew (Anatolian Hypothesis), Marcel Otte (Paleolithic Continuity), David Anthony, and many others. The debate is still alive, and it involves a number of archaeologists. Let's see an interesting example that I recently found:

Gamble et al (2005: 209; the highlighting is mine): "the most fruitful avenue for advocates of the cognitive origins synthesis to pursue might be the arrival of a proto-Indo-European dialect in southwestern Europe with the Badegoulian ATU2, in the refugium phase, and its subsequent codispersal with the Magdalenian ATU2 into western and northern Europe. It seems unlikely, however, that historical linguists who were not prepared to journey with Renfrew back to the early Neolithic would welcome the concept of a Late Glacial dispersal of Indo-European languages in western Europe."

Sounds like the Paleolithic Continuity hypothesis, doesn't it?

As we can see in the abstract, the authors of the article, among them two notorious British archaeologists (Clive Gamble and Paul Pettitt), criticise the role of historical linguistics and genetics in the debate and also the validity of what they call 'agriculturalist thinking', which was born in the work of Gordon Childe and continued by Colin Renfrew and other archaeologists. Let's see an excerpt from the abstract:

"This article presents the initial results from the S2AGES database of calibrated radiocarbon estimates from western Europe in the period 25,000-10,000 years ago. Our aim is to present a population history of this sub-continental region by providing a chronologically-secure framework for the interpretation of data from genetics and archaeology. (...) We conclude that only archaeology can currently provide the framework for population history and the evaluation of genetic data. Finally, if progress is to be made in the new interdisciplinary field of population history then both disciplines need to refrain from inappropriate agricultural thinking that fosters distorting models of European prehistory, and they should also pay less, if any, attention to historical linguistics."

I'm afraid I agree with them.

References:
- Gamble, Clive, W. Davies, P. Pettitt, L. Hazelwood & M. Richards (2005). "The archaeological and genetic foundations of the European population during the Late Glacial: Implications for 'Agricultural Thinking'. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 15:2, 193-223.

Picture:
- Magdalenian art. Lascaux (France).

From vocalizations to grammar

2011-08-23T08:40:00.031+02:00

In previous posts I have expressed some of my thoughts about the origins of 'language' and 'grammar', especially in connection with the wider concept of 'human communication'. Now it's time to put these ideas in order. As I see it, the story of 'human language' can be described as a three-stage process.

At Stage I, our ancestors used a variety of signals, e.g. vocalizations, screams, hand or facial gestures, tongue clicks, whistling, etc. to refer to situations that were relevant to them, e.g. the possibility of danger or the discovery of food sources. This is the kind of communication that we can see in many animal species, with a varying degree of sophistication.

At Stage II, hominids started to use these communicative strategies in a more complex way. An utterance, a gesture, is no longer a simple reference to a given event, but also the expression of how we are presenting the information. Are we describing things? Are we narrating an action? Are we telling the others to do something? In a previous post I offered a complete explanation of these new contrasting elements and their relevance for human communication, using as an example what I would like to call the bee paradox.

At Stage III, some of the communicative elements described above, particularly those involving vocal utterances, undergo a further process of reinterpretation that we may call grammaticalization. They are no longer, or not only, used as a symbol of the real world (objects, actions) but rather as functional units that help construct the message, expressing abstract notions of the kind grammarians are familiar with: tense, aspect, number, case, etc. In fact, this process is the one that eventually gave birth to what we usually call a 'grammar'. It must be said that developments that took place at Stage III do not cancel those of Stage II: human communication is a complex phenomenon that involves both the 'grammars' of spoken language and the endless possibilities of gestures and exo-grammatical utterances (that's a nice word I've just invented...).

The transition from Stage I to Stage II is crucial, because it involves the emergence of symbolic thought, and it must necessarily be connected with other examples of complex reasoning, like our ability to make tools. Obviously, we are talking about things that happened millions of years ago, and that have eventually detached hominid species from any other animal species on earth. The fundamental change took place in the brain. The 'revolution' is in the way you encode the information. Maybe those ancient hominids did not have the anatomical ability to produce something resembling speech, but they did have the mental ability to use communication in this new way (Stage II). Let's remember: what we are dealing with here is communication, not 'language' or 'grammar'.

In both transitions, from I to II and from II to III, we are also concerned with a more specific problem: how a particular communicative element, i.e. vocal output, attained increasing prominence through time, eventually becoming the central element in our communication system. Let's go back to the beginning (Stage I). A group of hominids uses a repertoire of signals, including simple vocalizations in the form of syllables. Let's imagine one of these vocalizations, `wak`, with the following meaning: "danger, a bear". The utterance of 'wak' was probably accompanied by a series of gestures indicating the proximity of the danger or urging others to hide from it. But we can also imagine the the syllable itself was susceptible of being produced in a variety of ways, using intonation. This is something that is still an essential part of our communication system: there are dozens of meanings or shades of meanings that can be conveyed by modifying the way we produce a given utterance, without changing the words. We can say 'table', 'table!' or 'table?' depending on the occasion, and we can express doubt, surprise, fear alarm or happiness by just changing the intonation. We can also give information about the size of an object or animal. All these expressive tools were already available to those hominids, not only 'available' as an option but maybe inseparably attached to the vocalizations. Being born as a simple alarm call, the segment 'wak' was already provided with an intonation component that could be modified afterwards. Those utterances were not the neutral words that we find in dictionaries, or the boring sequences spoken by robots or the monotonous talk of some formal situations. They were full of colour. They were alive.

Another little resource that those hominids could use with 'wak' was repetition. Saying 'wakwak', for example, could imply a series of additional meanings, especially because the possibilities for intonation were now bigger, including the use of stress. What we have here, in any case, is not just a single segment ('wak') with a single meaning, but a multiple way of using this element with a variety of situational meanings. How some of these variable vocalizations became grammatical elements at a later stage is difficult to determine, but we can try to imagine possible examples, like this one: the segment 'wak' with rising intonation could be associated with an action like 'go away because there's a bear'. Maybe at one point it started to be used with the meaning 'go somewhere else' even if there wasn't a bear in sight, and later on it was added to other segments as an indication of movement.

The story I have described here is by no means a unique event. It is based on the process that led to language as is known to the only hominid species that has survived: our own, but it may have had other developments in other hominid species. The important thing, as I have said before, is the emergence of logical thought and the ability to establish contrasts. The rest of the story may have taken all kinds of forms. Humans, for example, have built communicative systems which focus extensively on the spoken medium, exploiting some of the possibilities of their own vocal tract in order to produce contrasting sounds; in some cases, as in tonal languages, intonation is also used as a contrastive element. Other hominid species may have focused on different communicative aspects, or they may have developed vocal languages similar to our own. It's true that, at present, we are the only hominid species on the planet, but we should try to avoid the mistake of thinking that all that went before us was a process that was necessarily going in one direction.

Making sense of archaeology

2011-08-09T16:30:00.006+02:00

In the last couple of centuries archaeologists have accumulated a massive amount of knowledge about ancient humanity. All over the world, thousands of sites have been dug out and their remains carefully analysed, classified and dated. The techniques used in this endeavour are in constant development, which means all concepts and ideas that are proposed about the archaeological finds are challenged by new, more elaborate proposals. Archaeology has become a highly specialized field, with every single site requiring the processing of an enormous amount of data. The task of comparing all this information and drawing pertinent conclusions about the prehistory of a given area is just daunting. Now, how do archaeologists make sense of this vast amount of knowledge? I can think of at least two practical ways.

One of them is the use of a series of metaphors or theoretical concepts, such as 'Neolithic', 'Iron Age' or 'Mesolithic', around which the information is organized in more or less coherent ways. Needless to say, these concepts are rather inaccurate, even misleading in some cases, but in general they're practical tools that allow scientific debate in archaeology. On the other hand, they're really useful in order to construct a discourse that can be understood outside the sphere of specialized archaeology.

Another essential, and obvious, method is the creation of hypotheses. By organizing the available archaeological evidence around a given explanatory framework, archaeologists can find relevant connections between different sets of materials and draw the corresponding conclusions. In this blog we have already seen some examples of archaeological hypotheses at work, e.g. the one proposed by Marija Gimbutas, and later developed by other archaeologists like Mallory or Anthony, about the origins of the supposed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) people. These authors have devoted a great deal of scientific expertise and effort in order to develop their ideas about PIE homeland and chronology, which incidentally I find quite erroneous. There have been other attempts at trying to make sense of the Indo-European group of languages from an archaeological perspective, like Renfrew's Anatolian Hypothesis and Alinei's Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm (PCP). The problem with all these attempts is that they have to deal with a remarkably extensive amount of data, covering geographical areas that encompass various continents, which makes it really difficult to avoid all kinds of possible flaws. However, these wide-ranging hypotheses can help inspire some more local research based on a more limited set of data. A recent example of this is the proposal of a distinctive archaeological zone in the Atlantic façade of western Europe, with a deep redefinition of concepts such as 'Celt'. One century ago, the term 'Celt' was used as an archaeological metaphor by people who were honestly trying to make sense of some material cultures of Central Europe. Now we are witnessing a gradual change in which the word 'Celt' is used in a different context and with different implications. Celticity is no longer the result of some unlikely migration from Central Europe to the West but more likely the consequence of local developments that started at a much earlier date.

We could ask ourselves if there are other geographical areas in Europe susceptible of being understood as an archaeological continuum with linguistic implications, like the Atlantic Façade. In my opinion, a good candidate could be the Germanic-speaking area of Northern Europe. Mario Alinei was the first to propose this archaeological-linguistic continuum (see here), whose formation would have started as early as the Mesolithic, when the ice-cap started to recede. The Maglemose culture, identified primarily from a series of sites in Denmark, would be one of the earliest examples of a material culture shared in this northern European territory, at a time when the British Isles and the continent were still united by great expanses of land that are now under water (see map on the right; source: Wikipedia). Following this line of thought, Xaverio Ballester proposed an interesting hypothesis about the origins of English (see reference to article below). The idea is quite coherent and deserves serious attention. In fact, what is required is the kind of scientific effort that has guided the work of many archaeologists until the present. Without a deep analysis of the archaeological data carried out by specialists, not to mention the contribution of population genetics and other additional sciences, it will be impossible to make any further step in the direction of proving the validity of the theory. Will any archaeologist volunteer? I hope so.

References:
- Alinei, Mario (2000). Origini delle Lingue d'Europa II. Continuità dal Mesolitico al''Età del Ferro nelle Principali Aree Etnolinguistiche. Bologna: Il Mulino.
- Ballester, Xaverio (2005). "The first Germanic origin of the English language". In Quaderni di Semantica, XXVI, 29-41.
- Oppenheimer, Stephen (2006). Origins of the British. London: Constable and Robinson.

Languages on horseback

2011-06-26T20:41:00.017+02:00

I have just finished reading David Anthony's book The Horse, the Wheel and Language (2007), a book that I mentioned briefly in a post some time ago.

First of all, I'd like to say that David Anthony is an eminent archaeologist with vast knowledge about the prehistory of the Eurasian steppes, and more concretely about the archaeology of human societies in connection with horse domestication, an area which is vital in our understanding of Eneolithic and Bronze-age societies. He has written extensively about this issue and has also developed an innovative technique to date the use of domesticated horses by analysing bit wear in their bones. I'm sure his ideas about the subject are valuable and must be taken into account in any serious research in that field. Now, what's the problem? The problem arises when Anthony tries to fit all these data into a comprehensive explanation of the genesis and transcontinental expansion of Indo-European (IE) languages. This is when his scientific writing becomes fantasy.

Anthony bases his archaeological voyage on a series of linguistic facts which he accepts as irrefutable. We have talked about these things profusely in this blog (the traditional concept of proto-language, the use of linguistic paleontology, etc.) and we have seen how these ideas can easily be challenged. Anthony, however, takes them for granted. In his view, there is a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) people to be found somewhere, with its own language and even institutions. (p. 89): "that language [PIE] is a guide to the thoughts, concerns and material culture of real people who lived in a definite region between about 4500 and 2500 BC". In this respect, he follows Gimbutas' and Mallory's ideas, which we have extensively talked about (and criticised) in the blog. The novelty is that Anthony uses horse domestication and later developments as the use of chariots, as the main factors in the expansion of Proto-Indo-Europeans and their languages.

In his book, Anthony analyses one by one all the prehistoric cultures of the Pontic-Caspian region. He presents them in the framework of his own preconceptions, at times establishing simple correlations between culture, people and language. Pastoralist societies become PIE societies endowed with a remarkable capacity of expanding and subduing other human groups. (p. 343): "Wealth, military power, and a more productive herding system probably brought prestige and power to the identities associated with Proto-IndoEuropean dialects after 3300 BCE. The guest-host institution extended the protections of oath-bound obligations to new social groups. An Indo-European-speaking patron could accept and integrate outsiders as clients without shaming them or assigning them permanently to submissive roles, as long as they conducted the sacrifices properly. Praise poetry at public feasts encouraged patrons to be generous, and validated the language of the songs as a vehicle for communicating with the gods who regulated everything. All these factors taken together suggest that the spread of Proto-Indo-European probably was more like a franchising operation than an invasion. Although the initial penetration of a new region (or "market" in the franchising metaphor) often involved an actual migration from the steppes and military confrontations, once it began to reproduce new patron-client agreements (franchises) its connection to the original steppe immigrants became genetically remote, whereas the myths, rituals, and institutions that maintained the system were reproduced down the generations."

Franchises, military power, migratory movements... It is obvious that all of Anthony's metaphors and hypotheses can be doubted or found completely wrong. He talks about (literally) hundreds of prehistoric societies, and maks all kinds of assumptions about their language, social customs or expansive moods. One theory leads to another, in a process that can only be described as accumulative conjecture, or plain fantasy. First it is horse domestication, then the use of chariots, with the addition of a myriad of complementary elements. Aided by these extraordinary tools, PIE people started their incredible story of success. First, with the detachment of Anatolyans, then, with the emergence of proto-Slavic, proto-Germanic and proto-Italic in central-eastern Europe as off-shoots of the Pontic steppe developments, finally the expansion of proto-Indo-Aryan in the BMAC area. Let's see an example (p. 367): "The many thousands of Yamnaya kurgans in eastern Hungary suggest a more continuous occupation of the landscape by a larger population of immigrants, one that could have acquired power and prestige partly just through its numerical weight. This regional group could have spawned both pre-Italic and pre-Celtic. Bell Beaker sites of the Csepel type around Budapest, west of the Yamnaya settlement region, are dated about 2800-2600 BCE. They could have been a bridge between Yamnaya on their east and Austria/Southern Germany to their west, through which Yamnaya dialects spread from Hungary into Austria and Bavaria, where they later developed into Proto-Celtic".

The author finishes his analysis at this point, sometime at the Bronze age, with all the IE proto-languages ready for action. Their incredible run of good luck lasts centuries, millennia. In the vast poker game of prehistory Indo-Europeans seem to have the winning hand at all times!

Obviously, Anthony is not the only researcher who has felt the temptation to offer a comprehensive explanation of IE origins and expansion. Like Mallory and Gimbutas, he does so from an archaeological perspecitve, and as I said before many of the things they said might be useful and coherent, at least at a minor, less ambitious level. A similar type of analysis, enriched with population genetics data, is to be found in other authors, such as Mario Alinei. Reading his volumes about the linguistic prehistory of Europe I often felt a bit lost in the never-ending tales of prehistoric societies that follow one another. His theories are possibly quite imperfect and need a lot of refining, and in some cases must probably be rejected, but there is an important difference between Alinei and the more traditional authors such as Anthony or Mallory: his approach offers a more logical framework to understand language events through time.

Note on illustrations: on the left, The Large Blue Horses, a painting by Franz Marc.

The Atlantic zone of Western Europe

2011-05-24T11:27:00.003+02:00

I won't be there and it's a pity, because I'd love to. From the 9th to the 11th of June the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (University of Brest) organizes a conference about the possible connections across the Atlantic fringe of western Europe. There are contributions from a variety of sciences: archaeology, linguistics, population genetics, and some of the participants are scientists that I have already talked about in this blog, in some cases extensively: Mario Alinei, Stephen Oppenheimer, Marcel Otte, Xaverio Ballester, John Koch, Francesco Benozzo, and some others whose research I would be very interested to know about. It is clear that some of the participants share views that are connected with the Continuity paradigm, something that can be seen very clearly just taking a look at the programme of the conference, with titles like Les Indo-Européens sont venus avec Cro-Magnon (Marcel Otte) or The Atlantic Celts: cumulative evidence from Paleolithic (Alinei- Benozzo).

As I said, I'd really would love to be there, but I can't. Unfortunately, there is no post as 'official blogger of the event' that I could apply for! It's not just the conference, it's also the chance of going to Brittany. In any case, however, I'm planning a trip there in August, so I'll get a chance to visit places like Carnac (see picture) or the Armorican coast.

On the edges of the earth: Atlantis, Celts, Ovid

2011-05-01T15:31:00.015+02:00

Some years ago I made an unforgettable trip to Rome and its region, Lazio. One day I visited the Alban Hills, in an area nowadays called Castelli Romani. My journey there, first by underground and then by bus, was like a journey into the most archaic history of the Latins. My first stop was Albano Laziale, near lake Albano; the legendary city of Alba Longa stood by the shores of this lake, possibly near the location of today's Castel Gandolfo. The beautiful scenery is dominated by Mount Albano (nowadays called Monte Cavo in Italian), a place that was sacred for the old Latins (picture on the right); it was there that the Feriae Latinae, an annual celebration of the Latin league, took place. The next stop in my journey was the beautiful town of Genzano di Roma, famous for the Infiorata, when the main street of the town is covered with flowers (see picture below). That street leads you to the upper part of Genzano, with beautiful views of Lake Nemi, a small, round lake in the centre of what used to be a volcanic crater. Anyone who has read James Frazer's The Golden Bough will be familiar with the antiquities of the area, including the famous Temple of Diana, now disappeared, and the vicissitudes of the Rex Nemorensis.

Definitely, travelling around the Castelli Romani is like going back to the remote past of Rome and the Latins. I didn't have time to visit all the interesting places in the area, including the remains of Tusculum, the walk to Mount Albano along an old Roman path or a visit to places like Grottaferrata, Velletri or Aricia. In Aricia, for example, there's a curious Roman building. It used to be a guesthouse in classical times, and it continued to be so in later centuries. I read about it somewhere, but now I can't find the information about it, even using the whole apparatus of Internet. According to tradition, the Roman poet Ovid (43BC-17AD) stayed in this guesthouse some days on his way to exile. Maybe this story is just an invention to attract visitors, as Ovid is one of the most famous Roman poets and the story of his exile to the remote lands of Tomis, at the shores of the Black Sea, which he dramatically narrated in his books Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, soon became literary classics. In these books, Ovid complained bitterly about the conditions he had to live in and the back luck he had had to end his days in such a remote and apparently uncivilised corner of the world. Now, was it really so bad? Was he really sent so far away?

In a recent book published in Spanish (Gálatas, Getas y Atlantes, 2010), Xaverio Ballester analyses Ovid's texts in full detail and reaches the conclusion that they're full of inconsistencies. It seems that for the geographic and cultural aspects the Roman poet relied on the general erudition of the time, rather than on first hand experience. According to Ballester, the location of Ovid's exile was a lot closer to Rome. Ovid wrote about Tomis basically because he was supposed to be there!

Ballester's book is a compilation of three essays, including the one about Ovid (El geta de Ovidio). The book is really pleasurable to read, an excellent mixture of scientific rigour and the finest sense of humour.

In the third essay (La Atlántida... si creemos a Platón), Ballester tackles one of the most intriguing topics in Greco-Roman antiquity: the possible location of Atlantis, the legendary territory whose dramatic fall was narrated by the Greek philosopher Plato in two of his dialogues. Is Atlantis just a myth, or is there any truth in this story? If so, what was the location of the 'lost continent'? For centuries, all types of people, including scholars, have asked themselves these questions and come up with the most varied proposals. One of the main points to bear in mind is that Plato offered a precise location for his Atlantis: off the Columns of Hercules, i.e. the Strait of Gibraltar. According to Ballester, however, this location must not be taken at its face value. In many cases old myths are adapted and re-elaborated to the new circumstances. The original material originated at a very early time, in the context of the eastern Mediterranean. The lands further west were basically unknown, or unheard of. Later on, with the expansion into new, and therefore exotic lands, the myths were embellished with new locations further west, as happened, for example, to the Herculean cycle. Ballester puts forward an interesting hypothesis about the Atlantis myth, linking it with the Dardaneles and the Black Sea. The myth would be linked with a geological process that took place at about 5,600 BC: the rise of the sea level and the flooding of the Black Sea area (until then just a small lake) with water from the Mediterranean.

In the first essay (Más allá de gálatas o celtas), Ballester deals with the Celts, particularly with their ethnonym. The study of ethnonyms is traditionally full of absurd proposals, as Ballester funnily shows at the beginning of the chapter. They are explained in linguistic terms, with little or no connection to reality or common sense. We find an example of this in the various explanations for the word 'Celtae', 'Galli' or 'Gallaeci' that have been traditionally proposed. Ballester offers a completely new reading of the terms, which he connects to the geographic notion of 'people who live on the fringe', or 'at a remote area in the west', with the association of 'the west' with the notions of 'death' or 'the end of the world'. It is difficult to prove the validity of this proposal but at least it is coherent with the geographic and (pre)historic contexts.

Out of southern Africa: the ancestral click

2011-03-14T10:46:00.011+01:00

In a previous post I talked about the Out of Africa (OOA) theory, which is the most generally accepted explanation about the origin and dispersal of our species. There are also some alternative views, the so called multirregional theories, and in recent times the original OOA proposal has become more complex, with the addition of possible hybridization between H. Sapiens and other hominid groups, e.g. the Neanderthals, and the possibility of various migration routes from Africa, also with varying chronologies. The debate is still open, but the core of the theory remains the same: our species emerged in Africa some time between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Now, whereabouts in Africa exactly?

In a very recent article (Henn et al, 2011, available here) it has been suggested that South Africa is the most likely location of the emergence of Homo Sapiens. The authors used a very large sample of genetic material from various sub-Saharan populations, especially hunter-gatherers. They concluded that the highest level of genetic variability in Africa, and therefore in the world, can be found in some areas of southern Africa. The models of geographic dispersal clearly suggest the same conclusion: (p. 3) "A point of origin in southwestern Africa was approximately 300-1,000 times more likely than in eastern Africa". On the right you can see a map, taken from the article, with a representation of geographic distance deduced from genetic material.

The authors also mention the fact that the suggested original area coincides roughly with the aera where the so-called Khoisan languages are spoken. We would have a very deep chronology based on the genetic diversity of those human populations and the presence of a very peculiar group of languages. The authors don't make any further comments or proposals about the population-language correlation, but the idea is tempting, and it has of course been proposed by other researchers, as we will see later. Now, what is it that makes the Khoisan languages so peculiar? No doubt, the presence of click phonemes, which are not found anywhere else in the world, with only some rare isolated cases in eastern Africa. What does a click sound like? Let's take a first lesson:

The correlation between population divergence and linguistic distribution has led some researchers to think that the Khoisan languages may date to a very early period in our history as a species. In their 2003 article (available here), Knight et al studied the genetic divergence between some of the Khoisan-speaking groups, especially between the San and the Hadzabe. This divergence is so deep that it can only be understood as a very old phenomenon, maybe more than 40,000 yeras old. The authors suggest that the linguistic divergence between those populations could correlate with the genetic variation, and be equally old. According to them , the possibility of an independent 'invention' of a click sound repertoire must be ruled out; therefore, these clicks must have been already present in some kind of proto-Khoisan language that was spoken prior to the San-Hadzabe separation. (p. 471): "The deep genetic divergence between the click-speaking groups is consistent with the hypothesis that clicks are an ancient element of human language", an element which only survived in those original areas and disappeared elsewhere. This hypothesis is in fact a radical proposal of language continuity as it suggests a linguistic survival from beyond the Upper Palaeolithic, but it is nearly impossible to test its validity. Trying to compare hunter-gatherer societies through time, including their languages, is no easy task, and there are other ways of explaining the presence of clicks in those languages (vid. Traunmüller 2003, available here). But it must be admitted that the correlation between the various data (archaeological, genetic and linguistic) is firmly established, which is a good basis for further research and developments.

Reference:
- Henn et al (2011). "Hunter-gatherer genomic diversity suggests a southern African origin for modern humans". PNAS, 108 (10).
- Knight et al (2003). "African Y chromosome and mtDNA divergence provides insight into the history of click languages". Current Biology, 13, 464-473.
- Traunmüller (2003). "Clicks and the idea of a human protolanguage". PHONUM, 9, 1-4.

The puzzle of Romance languages (I): Sardinian

2011-01-12T15:51:00.002+01:00

The origin of the so-called 'Romance languages' (French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, etc.) can be summarized in a short sentence that seems obvious and quite simple to understand:

..............................Romance languages are those that derive from Latin.

The truth is, however, that underneath this simple statement lies one of the most elusive enigmas in historical linguistics. The problem is the word 'Latin'. What is the exact meaning of this word? Are we talking about the written standard used by Cicero, Vergil and other classical authors, which was kept as a lingua franca in the western world for centuries? Or was there some kind of popular form of 'Latin' spoken by the majority of the population, often referred to as 'Vulgar Latin', from which the Romance languages evolved? If so, was this 'Vulgar Latin' a more or less unified language, or were there different regional versions spoken all over the Empire? How different were these variants? We must also add to this the role of other languages in this process, as substrata, adstrata or superstrata. On the whole, the nature and characteristics of' 'Vulgar Latin' is far from clear, and the more I read about the subject of Romance languages, including for example József Herman's Le Latin Vulgaire (1975), the less clear it is.

I think a good place to test theories about Romance languages is the island of Sardinia, with a vast repertoire of archaeological remains and some linguistic peculiarities that make it specially interesting.

Sardinia is located in a strategic geographic position, and the archaeological record shows the influence of the various Mediterranean material cultures from the Paleolithic onwards. In some cases, there are local developments where the external elements were reinterpreted, as can be seen in the famous Bronze-Age megalithic monuments known as Nuraghe, which are a distinctive Sardinian feature. There are thousands of nuraghe all over the island, like the one you can see on the right (Nuraghe Ponte, near Dualchi). Needless to say, these unique archeological monuments have triggered the imagination of scholars for ages. Concepts like 'Nuraghic civilization' or 'the language of the Nuraghians' have been, and still are, the focus of lively debate.

The languages traditionally spoken in Sardinia can be divided into two main areas. In the north there are some dialects (Sassarese and Gallurese) associated with Corsican. In the rest of the island, the various dialects belong to what is generally referred to as 'Sardinian'. There are also some other linguistic areas, confined to very small territories, and often associated with historical developments, for example the Catalan spoken in the area of Alghero.

The Sardinian language is generally divided into two areas: the Logudorese-Nuorese dialects, occupying the central part of the island, and Campidanese, in the southern half. These dialects are often described as 'archaic', in comparison with other Romance languages. A classical example of this 'archaic' nature is found in Nuorese, where the classical pronunciation of 'c' as [k] is retained, as can be seen in the word chento, connected with Latin centum. In all the other Romance languages, this Latin [k] is rendered with other phonetic realizations, e.g. French cent, Spanish cien and Italian cento. It must be understood, however, that terms like 'archaic' are relative in themselves, and derive from the point of view of the observer rather than from the actual data, and in fact the 'archaic' nature of Nuorese and other Sardinian dialects has been questioned by some authors. In any case, we can still use the term 'archaic' for practical reasons, with the sense of 'similar to classical Latin'.

According to the traditional view, the language from which Sardinian derived was brought there by the Romans when they conquered the island in the 3rd c. BC. The question, also traditional, remains open: What languages were spoken in Sardinia before the Romans? As can be imagined, a wide variety of possible answers have been proposed, suggesting connections with Ligurian, Iberian, Phoenician or even Etruscan. The problem is that the evidence is scarce, and must be inferred from elusive elements such as place names, which are usually (or always) open to all kinds of interpretations. It is obvious that, whatever the languages spoken in the area in pre-Roman times, the influence of the various Mediterranean elites must have played an influential role, which can be traced in the remaining evidence, but the question is still unanswered: what language(s) did the ancient Sardinians actually speak? In a recent book (2010), prof. Blasco Ferrer has reelaborated the Basco-Iberian theory for Sardinian, already proposed many decades ago, with new analyses of the toponymic material. Blasco Ferrer's ideas, and even methodology, have been strongly criticised by other authors, for example Massimo Pittau (see here). It is obvious, however, that any other theory, including Pittau's Etrusco-Lydian connection, can also be criticised. They all have a common problem: their conclusions are based on very little evidence, and this evidence is open to all kinds of interpretations.

And then we have the Continuity Theory. In the second volume of his Origini delle Lingue d'Europa (2000), Mario Alinei proposes the idea that the populations of pre-Roman Sardinia spoke languages that belonged to the Italid group, like Latin. This proposal is obviously part and parcel of the major Continuity Paradigm, a theory that the readers of this blog are already familiar with. In order to prove the theory for Sardinia, Mario Alinei offers a series of examples from the vocabulary. One of the most complete studies is the one about the word for 'plough' and its related vocabulary, an example of what he calls 'Latin words before the Romans'. Some of his conclusions about this vocabulary are worth being taken into account. In other cases, his proposals do not seem so realistic, e.g. in his analysis ofg the word 'Nuraghe' itself, which he connects with the vocabulary of kinship. According to him, the word nuraghe derives from a word similar to 'nuora', with a meaning of 'daughter-in-law' in Italid languages. Alinei uses other arguments apart from the lexicon, for example the use of the 'ipse' article in Sardinia and in the Balearic islands or some phonetic peculiarities of the Sardinian dialects compared to other Italian dialects of today. Is Alinei's theory right? It's too early to say, but I personally like his proposals. The funny thing is that, apparently, he's not the first person to propose a continuity hypothesis for Sardinian. In a post written by Gigi Sanna, I have read about an eminent Sardinian scholar, called Vittorio Angius, who made similar proposals as early as the mid 19th c. Continuity Theory avant-la-lettre? Probably. In Sanna's post it is possible to read some excerpts from Angius's original writings, in Italian.

So definitely, an island full of archeological and linguistic mysteries, and also full of beauty. No doubt about it: one of my plans for the new year 2011 is to visit Sardinia. By the way, I wish a happy new year to all my readers!

Proto-English theory

2010-12-05T12:05:00.006+01:00

Win Scutt is an archaeologist and amateur linguist who has proposed some alternative theories about the languages of pre-Roman Britain. According to him, there is evidence in place names to suggest that there were Germanic elements already present in the area in Roman, or even pre-Roman, times. The idea is interesting, and I firmly believe that it should be taken seriously by toponymists, but I'm not so sure if Scutt's analysis of placenames is rigorous enough, or even scientific. His article about Romano-British placenames, for example, is merely a collection of conjectures based on poor evidence.

In 2007, Win Scutt appeared on a BBC programme talking about some of his theories, and giving examples of English placenames that could date back to pre-Anglo-Saxon times. The video also features Stephen Oppenheimer, who has proposed similar theories based on genetic evidence. Is there any truth in this? Can Scutt's or Oppenheimer's theories be taken seriously?

This is the video:

Influential articles

2010-11-01T08:23:00.008+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I read some blog posts (e.g. here and here) that celebrated the 20th anniversary of Pinker and Bloom's 1990 article Natural language and natural selection, generally considered the starting point for the revival in the studies of language origins. Sometimes the discussions in this area derive into theoretical controversies that seem to lead nowhere, as could be expected in a relatively new scientific discipline. The debates are usually conducted by American scholars who are imbued in Chomskyan linguistics, with its collection of useless notions such as UG (Universal Grammar) and its tendency towards 18th century-style categorizations. However, in the milieu of this renewed field of study, there are also people making interesting proposals. One of them is, precisely, Steven Pinker (see photo on the left). I have read some of his books, e.g. The Language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought, in which he has put together notions of psychology and linguistics in a most intelligent and coherent way. Even though I may not agree with some of the things he has said, I think his proposals are a step forward in the direction of getting a clearer view of language.

What makes an article influential? I suppose the main factor is time. A couple of decades is enough time to assess the degree of importance of a given writing, which can even be measured in numbers of citations, etc. Normally it is books, not journal papers, that become a landmark in the humanities, so we could say the Pinker and Bloom's article is rather exceptional in this respect. But there are other examples of articles that have been influential in linguistics, or that may have a potential for it. Let's see one of them.

In 1999, Jonathan Adams and Marcel Otte published a paper whose title poses an interesting question: Did Indo-European languages spread before farming? , a question that is not often asked in the field of Indo-European linguistics. According to the authors (p. 77): "No one seems to have given the idea more than a passing thought". That was at least until Mario Alinei and his proposals for a Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm (PCP). In fact, Marcel Otte (picture on the right) is nowadays a member of the multidisciplinary PCP workgroup. One of the things that the authors of the article say is that there is no clear indication in the archaeological record of Europe of any massive process of language substitution of the kind that would have caused the supposed spread of IE in the Neolithic of Bronze ages. For them, the key to understanding the distribution of people and languages in prehistoric Europe lies in the climatic conditions of the post-Ice-Age period. Later developments during the Neolithic and Bronze/Iron Ages, some of them quite relevant, produced the final outlines. In the article, the authors offer a series of hypotheses for future research, opening a completely new line of thought. Let's remember, on the other hand, that Marcel Otte is actually one of the most prestigious prehistorians in contemporary times, comparable to other figures like Renfrew or Zvelebil, and I think what he has written about the prehistory of European languages should be taken into account.

In short, a couple of influential articles on linguistics, or at least with a potential to be influential, written by authors who are not linguists themselves. What is this, a sign of the times?

Blogs and science

2010-10-03T01:49:00.005+02:00

The other day I read an interesting post in A Replicated Typo about the role of blogs in scientific research. We could be debating this issue for hours, even days, without really reaching any kind of conclusion, but at least one thing seems true: the interaction between popular science and formal scientific discourse is now at a different level, and that's interesting. This reminds me of a quote by archaeologist Catherine Hills (2007: 18): "Popular presentations, because simplified for clarity, often show more immediately the outlines and implications of an argument which may be nuanced, modified, even fudged, in scholarly writing". And she's quite right.

Who knows? Maybe blogs are already playing an important role in redefining scientific practices and discourse. I have been publishing posts in this blog for more than two years and now I am also working on my own dissertation about historical linguistics, so I am in an intermediate position between those two spheres. In my case, there is no doubt that the blogging experience has influenced the way I approach the task of researching. The problem, now, is time. I have a full-time job as a teacher and a full dissertation to write, which means I will probably have to stop blogging, or at least I will not be able to publish long elaborate posts for some time. We'll see.

References:
- Hills, Catherine (2007). "Anglo-Saxon attitudes", in N. Higham, ed., Britons in Anglo-Saxon England. Rochester: The Boydell Press.

Celtic from the West

2010-09-02T13:55:00.016+02:00

How old are the Celtic languages once spoken in the Iberian Peninsula? Where did the 'Celts' come from? Were they from central-eastern Europe, as tradittionally assumed, or did they originate in the west? The debate about these issues is quite lively, with new proposals being made as the research in this field continues its development. The identification of some ancient languages of western Iberia as 'Celtic' is one of the most relevant developments.

A series of specialists, e.g. José Antonio Correa and Jürgen Untermann, have argued for the possible celticity of some words in Tartessian, a language of southwest Iberia. The Tartessian inscriptions are remarkably old (in some cases as early as the 7th c. BC), which makes them particularly relevant for celtologists. A similar case is Lepontic, in northern Italy, a Celtic language attested in very early inscriptions. Prof. John T. Koch has provided some further evidence to prove that Tartessian was a Celtic language, or at least that there was a significant percentage of Celtic elements in it (Koch's article is available here). If we add to this other proposals about the celticity of Gallaecian and Lusitanian (vid. Ballester 2004, "Hablas indoeuropeas y anindoeuropeas en la Hispania prerromana". Elea 6, 107-138), one has the impression that the chronological horizons of Celtic elements in Iberia must be much earlier than previously, or traditionally, assumed. This, of course, has far-reaching implications for our global understanding of the Celtic language group, or about the origins of the 'Celts' themselves. And there are of course some scholars already following these new lines of research.

In 2008 the University of Wales launched a research project called Ancient Britain and the Atlantic Zone, also known as ABrAZo. The project is coordinated by Prof. Koch, and its aims are explained in this web-page. Obviously, the abbreviation used for the project (ABrAZo) is also the Spanish word for 'hug' or 'embrace', exactly the same as in Galician (abrazo) and very similar to the Portuguese one (abraço). The name is actually quite appropriate, as the project aims to find common elements in the archaeology, languages and genetic components of these Atlantic areas (western Iberia, Armorica, Ireland, western Britain) as a single archaeological entity. I guess the inspiration for the project comes from the work of archaeologist Barry Cunliffe and his theories about the peoples of the Atlantic Façade, which he outlined in his book The Ancient Celts (1997) and developed in his influential Facing the Ocean. The Atlantic and its Peoples (2001). In fact, Cunliffe is co-editor (with John Koch) of the first volume emanated from the ABrAZo project: Celtic from the West: Alternative Perspectives from Archaeology, Genetics, Language and Literature (2010), Oxbow Books, and has also contributed with an article. Another author in this volume is Stephen Oppenheimer, whose theories have already been discussed in this blog (see here).

There are many more things to say about this issue (Celtic, Lusitanian, Tartessians), and I'll be publishing more posts about it in the future. Un abrazo!

Toponymic notes (1): Valentia

2010-08-12T22:40:00.004+02:00

It's summer time and the temperatures are getting high around Valencia. I can enjoy the sandy Mediterranean beaches near my home, which is quite good, but sometimes I wish I were in a place with milder weather, somewhere in the mountains or further north, for example on this beautiful island off the southwest coast of Ireland (picture taken from here).

Beautiful, isn't it? And refreshing. The funny thing is that this place is actually called... Valencia, like my home town. The complete name is Valencia (or Valentia) Island, also Dairbhre (= "place of oaks"), in Irish. The question is: Why is there a Valencia in this corner of County Kerry? It's difficult to imagine the reason, but there must be one. I'll go into the details later. First, a little digression.

The best known 'Valencia' is the one I live in, in eastern Spain, but there are others in this country and also in France, Portugal and Italy, with variations like 'Valença' or 'Valence'. The original form derives from Latin Valentia, used by the Romans to name some new settlements (the Spanish one was founded in the 2nd c. BC), but in some cases, e.g. Valence d'Albigeois (Tarn, France) or in Valencia de Don Juan (León, Spain), the place-name was coined at a later age as a calque on the original model, for reasons of beauty or prestige. Later on, it was also exported into the Americas (for some curious US examples take a look at this post from Vent d Cabylia, a blog I usually read).

What about the British Isles? The other day, reading a book about Romano-British place-names, I made an interesting discovery: by the end of the 4th c. AD, the Roman Emperor Theodosius decided to reorganize the province of Britannia adding a new sub-division in northern England that he called Valentia, probably as a tribute to Emperor Valens. It seems that the capital was Carlisle (Rivet - Smith, 1979: 46). The name of this territory can be found in some classical texts but it disappeared from common use.

In England there are nowadays a couple of place-names with a 'Valence' element in them. One of them is Sutton Valence (Kent). Its name derives from a French noble family that settled in England in the 13th c. They were called de Valence, after a small French village in France with the same name, in Poitou-Charantes. (On the right you can see a picture of Saint Mary's Curch, in Sutton Valence, taken from this web page).There is also a small village in Hampshire called Newton Valence. I haven't found information about its etymology, but I guess it must also have a medieval origin from a noble family.

Now, let's go back to our green Irish island. Its name is certainly not from Roman times (Ireland, or Hibernia, was never a Roman province), and there are no links with any noble familiy from medieval France. So where does this 'Valencia' come from? According to Mills' Dictionary of British Place Names, it derives from the Irish words Béal Inse, with the meaning "estuary of the island". The present form of the name is probably influenced by the Latin ones, but, as we have seen, its origin is completely different. And quite unexpected! As usually happens in the world of toponymy, a place-name is definitely not what it seems.

References:
- Mills, A.D: ( 2003). Dictionary of British Place Names. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Rivet, A.L.F., and C. Smith (1979). The Place-Names of Roman Britain. London: Book Club Associates.

Vaccei, Celtiberians and the Iniesta of Iberian epigraphy

2010-07-20T18:19:00.024+02:00

I liked the experience last year, so I decided to participate, again, in the Seminario de lenguas y epigrafías antiguas, which took place in Gandia (Valencia) last week. The lectures covered the topic of pre-Roman languages of Iberia from a variety of perspectives. There were two contributions by archaeologists: Alberto Lorrio (Universidad de Alicante) talked about some aspects of the Celtiberian area; Francisco Blanco García (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) offered an interesting account of the Vaccei, one of the Celtic-speaking peoples of Central Spain. One of the interesting things about both lectures was that the authors tried to delimit very carefully the boundaries of those ancient territories, one of the most difficult aspects in their task. All too often, for example, the term Celtiberian is used in a generalized sense of 'Celtic-speaking peoples of Iberia', which is erroneous. The Celtiberians inhabited a specific area in east central Spain which can be identified with the help of archaeology and ancient sources. As for the Vaccei, it is also possible to find a series of defining traits that characterize them as a socio-cultural unit.

On the linguistic side of the lectures, we had the opportunity of listening to some of the leading experts in the field, among them Javier Velaza, Eduardo Orduña, Eugenio Luján and Joan Ferrer i Jané, who offered some interesting insights into the world of Iberian epigraphy and languages.

One of the lectures was given by the Hispano-Italian linguist Eduardo Blasco Ferrer (Università di Cagliari), an expert in the field of Sardinian languages. He expounded his theory about the languages spoken in pre-Roman Sardinia, which he calls Paleosardinian. According to him, Paleosardinian was a non-Indo-European language connected, at different time periods, with both proto-Basque and Iberian. He offered a lot of examples to illustrate his theory, which will be expounded in fuller form in a forthcoming book (Paleosardo. Le radici linguistiche della Sardegna neolitica), to be published by De Gruyter in November 2010. The readers of this blog know that I am not particularly fond of proto-languages, and in some cases, e.g. the supposed 'proto-Basque', I find them quite dubious. I wonder how an ancient proto-language, one designed to explain events occuring in the Neolithic, can be deduced exclusively from modern material (the oldest texts in Basque are only a few centuries old). Similar doubts arise in the case of Iberian. In any case, I think Blasco's theory is worthy of attention and I'll try to read some of his articles, and also the book, when it's published. In fact, the linguistic story of Sardinia, an island that occupies the centre of the western Mediterranean, is quite interesting in itself, and I will certainly write a post about it in the near future.

Now, the real highlight of the seminar was Joan Ferrer i Jané's lecture on the dual script of Iberian. Some years ago, he published an influential article (available here) in which he developed the theory of the dual system for the differentiation of stops in the Iberian script, a theory which had been first proposed in the 1960's but which had not received much attention. Ferrer proved the existence of this dual system for northeastern Iberian, and now he has extended it to the southeastern script. Roughly speaking, the idea behind the dual system is as follows: some Iberian letters show a series of variants, with dots or little marks, which were generally considered irrelevant; however, as Ferrer has proved, these variants are systematic, generally (but not only) expressing a voiced/voiceless contrast. Needless to say, this is a real step forward in the study of Iberian epigraphy, as it will allow a more accurate transliteration of the texts. When he finished his lecture, there was an open debate. The first one to speak was professor Javier Velaza (Universitat de Barcelona), who said something like this (I'm quoting from memory): "Last week, as I was watching the World Cup final between Spain and Holland, I was convinced I was in front of a historical moment. And the person who was making history with his goal was Andrés Iniesta, a football star who looks like a very normal person, away from stardom. And today, here in Gandia, we are in front of one such moment, when something historical is happening in our field of study".

The task of deciphering the Iberian texts is quite hard, and these developments are definitely in the right direction. For the moment, however, there isn't a single word in Iberian whose meaning can safely be established, apart from some numerals. Researchers like Velaza or Ferrer, who know many of the inscriptions by heart, do a very elaborate and meticulous job analysing possible segments and linguistic units and trying to understand the epigraphic material more accurately. Nothing to do with the fantasies of other scholars who have offered translations of Iberian based on dubious connections with Basque.

We were so excited with Ferrer's discoveries that we really thought we had something to celebrate. One week before, the streets of Gandia and other Spanish cities were crowded with people celebrating Spain's World Cup victory. Whenever there's a great achievement, there's someone ready to celebrate!

- Note on the pictures (from top to bottom): 1.Iberian inscription from Yátova; 2. A potsherd with Iberian inscription, from Llíria.

How old is English?

2010-06-15T08:27:00.011+02:00

That's a good question. And it's also the title of an interesting website that I have recently discovered. Its authors ("Michael Goormachtigh with the help of Dr Anthony Durham") propose an alternative view on the origins of English. According to them, English was spoken in England long before the 'arrival' of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons in the 5th c. AD. And there are important reasons to think so, as they show in the various sections of the website. Sound familiar? Definitely. They're not the only ones who have proposed these hypotheses, as we have seen in this blog with reference to the Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm (PCP) and the works of Mario Alinei and Xaverio Ballester. Apparently, however, Goormachtigh and Durham are not aware of the existence of the Continuity Theory, and it's quite interesting that they have reached similar conclusions independently.

One of the arguments they use to back their thesis is population genetics. The authors draw extensively from Stephen Oppenheimer's (2007) The Origins of the British, a book that I reviewed in a previous post. Maybe they should try to read other sources too. Oppenheimer's book offers an apparently simple and comprehensive analysis of the population history of Europe and the British Isles, and the results of his research seem really spectacular, offering the perfect answer for the whole process. I really enjoyed the book when I read it, but now I'm more sceptical about Oppenheimer's methodology (for further criticism, see here). Very probably things are not as simple as Oppenheimer portrays them.

One of the most interesting aspects of Goormachtigh and Durham's website is their study of place-names. They take some ancient toponyms, already recorded in Roman times, e.g. Thames, Lincoln or London, and interpret them as originally Germanic. Needless to say, this analysis would be completely verbotten in the traditional view, where Germanic languages were not expected to be there at such an early time. As a consequence, the whole tradition of British toponymy has treated ancient place-names as non-Germanic, not even allowing the slightest shade of doubt about it. But now we have some authors trying to offer an alternative view for some of those place-names. And not only on their website: Goormachtigh and Durham have also published an article with their toponymic proposals in a journal (see reference below). These authors are probably not at the cutting edge of place-name studies, and they cannot be qualified as 'expert' toponymysts, but in any case their proposals are interesting enough to be taken seriously, and they actually open a completely new line of research in British toponymy. As far as I know, there are no major research projects exploring these possibilities, and for the moment what we have is Goormachtigh and Durham's suggestive proposals and little more. Now, let's see one example of their proposals. And a big one: London.

According to the authors, the toponym London derives from the Germanic word 'land'. In origin, it would be the plural form of this word, meaning something like "the lands by the river Thames', which the Romans rendered simply as Londinium. Now, why 'Londinium' with an "o", and not *'Landinium'? The answer is quite simple: before a nasal + consonant, West Germanic */a/ was written "o" in the Anglian dialect of English, probably reflecting the local pronunciation at the time. This "o" spelling was later replaced by standard "a", as in 'land', but was kept in some place-names, which tend to be more conservative in general.

I think this proposal about the interpretation of 'Londinium' looks quite promising. But, obvioulsy, if you want to accept it, first you have to accept the fact that Germanic languages were present in the British Isles in Roman times, which is currently an academic anathema. Now, what have the experts said so far about the origins of this toponym? I have recently read an article about it (Coates, 1998), with a thorough analysis of the literature and a new proposal, connected with Hans Krahe's Old European stratum. Richard Coates' article is a good piece of scholarly work, one done by an expert, with richness of detail and depth of linguistic analysis. However, I find his proposal a bit artificial, or a bit forced, requiring a complicated set of events to make sense of the evolution of London as a place-name. I think it would be great if some eminent scholars such as Coates decided to explore other possible ways of analysing the ancient place-name material of England.

Reference:
- Coates (1998). "A new explanation of the name of London", in Transactions of the Philological Society, 96 (2): 203-229.
- Goormachtigh, M., and A. Durham (2009). "Kentish place-names: were they ever Celtic?", in Archaeologia Cantiana, 129, 279-293.

Picture: a plaque with the Latin name of London (source).

The Franco-Iberian refuge

2010-05-08T11:25:00.016+02:00

During the last glaciation, vast areas of northern Europe, including the British Isles, were uninhabited. This glaciation reached its peak at about 20,000 BC (Late Glacial Maximum, LGM), and it wasn't until the beginning of the Holocene (about 12,000 BP) with milder climatic conditions, that these territories started to be repopulated from southern refugia. Population genetics studies show that the Franco-Iberian LGM Refugium played a major role in this repopulation, with a series of relevant gene clusters that can be traced back to that original area. Some authors, e.g. Oppenheimer, have also suggested that this Mesolithic expansion from the various rrfugia is the most important component in today's European populations; other authors suggest that the role of later oppulation movements, e.g. during the Neolithic, has left a more significant mark. This is of course a matter of current debate, and one that has important implications for the study of European prehistoric languages. Now, what was this Franco-Iberian refuge exactly?

Sometimes, it is referred to simply as the Iberian refuge, but I prefer the other name (Franco-Iberian, or Franco-Cantabrian) because I think it's a more accurate term. In his book (Origins of the British), Stephen Oppenheimer defines it as follows: (p. 118): "The refuge for south-west Europe was spread either side of the Pyrenees in southern and eastern France, the Basque Country, and other northern coastal parts of Spain such as Galicia and Catalonia." I'm not so sure of that. If we take a look at a physical map of the Iberian Peninsula, we realize that it is in general composed of high lands and mountainous terrain. In fact, Spain is the second highest country in Europe, after Switzerland, and the area of Castilla-León, sorrounded by mountains, is the highest plateau in Europe (with cities like Burgos, at an altitude of 929 m.). In present-day climatic conditions, these natural features would impose some limitations to population or linguistic exchange. In the hard conditions of the LGM, and also in later cold spells, e.g. the Younger Dryass, they probably meant complete isolation. The Mediterranean areas of Iberia, including Catalonia, were probably cut off from the Cantabrian coast, so they probably did not participate in the repopulation of north-west Europe. As I see it, there is an axis dividing the Iberian Peninsula into two distinct prehistoric areas: on the one hand, the Atlantic Façade, comprising Portugal and some regions of northern and central Spain; on the other, a Mediterranean Façade, connected with southern France and Italy. This division, caused by climatic and geographic features, is also reflected in the distribution of languages in prehistory: Celtic in the west and Iberian on the Mediterranean, as can be seen in the map of the left (source: Arkeotavira). How old are these linguistic borders? What were the languages spoken by those people who repopulated the British Isles and other northern regions from the Franco-Iberian refuge? These are difficult questions to answer. Geographic features are an important factor in population movements, as they define the possible routes of communication and the chances for interaction. This can clearly be seen during the LGM, the most hostile environment that can be imagined for human populations in Europe, but also in other periods, with milder climatic conditions.

In some previous posts (e.g. here) I have suggested some possible scenarios for the languages of the Iberian Peninsula in pre-Roman times. One of the hypotheses, as stated by Xaverio Ballester and other authors, is that the speakers of Iberian languages arrived at a later period, settling over a territory where IE (possibly Italid) languages were spoken. But where did these Iberian-speakers come from? A possible candidate is Aquitaine, in south-west France, as some parallels can de drawn between the ancient languages of the Aquitani and Iberian. It has also been argued that Iberian is connected with Basque, and this idea was actually quite popular in the 20th century, leading to some simplistic equations of Basque and Iberian which were more enthusiastic than scientifically sound. In any case, it is reasonable to see some possible links between the languages of the Basques, the Aquitani and the Iberians. Now, what is the possible geographic connection between these territories? If we look at the first map again, we find that there is actually a natural corridor uniting those areas: the Garonne River Valley, situated between the Pyrenees and the French Massif Central; at its centre, the city of Toulouse, a strategic point in this route. Was this natural corridor shut off during LGM? It would be interesting to know.

Whenever one attempts to make sense of the languages of western Europe, one is forced to face a familiar mystery: the presence of an unexpected non-IE linguistic isolate: Basque. And to make matters worse, the Basque-speaking area is actually at the heart of the Franco-Iberian LGM refugium. According to the German linguist Theo Vennemann, the people in the Franco-Iberian refugium spoke languages related to Basque, and they spread them through vast areas of western and northern Europe. These languages were later superseded by Indo-European (except of course in the Basque Country) and their traces, as Vasconic Substratum, can be found in the vocabulary of some European languages, including toponymical terms. Vennemann's theory has not been accepted in general, and I personally think it's not tenable (I'll discuss it in a future post). However, it presents a coherent explanation in terms of prehistoric events. Now, is there an alternative explanation? Let's try.

The question is: why would a language, in this case Basque, be excluded from the opportunity of expanding to a new territory, in this case post-Ice-Age northern Europe, when the opportunity arose? First, it must be said that, in theory, there's no reason to believe that Basque was spoken in that area at such an early age (the Mesolithic), but in any case, for the purposes of this investigation, let's assume that this was the case. The Basque country of today occupies the coastal corner of land that connects Spain and France. At first sight, this would have been the natural route for any population transfer from the LGM refugium to the north. However, let's remember that at that precise moment the coastal line was different from the one we have today; the sea level was much lower, and the lowlands extended well into the Antlantic. At least in theory, it is possible that some populations along the Cantabrian coast, speakers of a non-Basque language, moved to the north, bypassing the highland areas where Basque-related languages were spoken and actually impeding any possible expansion of this language group into the new horizon created by the receding ice. And it can also be argued that these 'opportunists' from the Cantabrian refuge were speakers of some form of Indo-European, but that's of course a different discussion. In any case, is it reasonable to suppose that the Basque-speaking population just missed the chance for expansion? The situation is not impossible in itself. To illustrate the point, I will provide an example which bears some distant resemblance: the conquest and colonization of America.

The discovery of America opened a new horizon for European populations and languages, but who took the chance? Obviously, there is a geographic factor in this: it was the areas around the Atlantic that were involved in the whole process. First the Spanish and the Portuguese, then the English, the French and the Dutch. Let's take a look at the Spanish expansion: who took part in it? Basically, it involved people from the west side of the axis (see above), mainly from areas such as Extremadura or Andalusia. There was little or no involvement of people from the Mediteranean coast in the whole event. Consequently their language (Catalan) played no role in the story. This can be explained in geographic terms but also, more importantly, in socio-economic terms: the eastern regions of Spain are in a different context, one that connects them to other Mediterranean territories. In addition, the discovery of America coincided with a time of decadence for the Catalan language, with Spanish as the language of the new emerging power.

Witold Manczak: criticism of PIE laryngeals

2010-04-07T11:05:00.015+02:00

It is true that the Laryngeal Theory of Proto-Indo-European is widely accepted nowadays, but with different degrees of 'faith'. Many IE linguists have expressed their doubts about some aspects of the theory and in many cases (notably Oswald Szemerényi) only accepted a weak version, with just one laryngeal sound. But of course, there are other linguists who seem to be more enthusiastic about their h1's, h2's and h3's, as we saw in this post, with nice examples like the reconstructed word for 'two PIE widows' (nom. dual). In a book by Mallory and Adams (2006), I have found a really beautiful set of laryngeals. There are nine of them (see picture below), and it's not just the normal h's with numbers, but also with little letters (x and a) and even some mysterious combinations of numbers:

Does it make sense to invent a whole set of imaginary phonemes just for the sake of reconstruction? Is it justified? There are some linguists who have noticed some of the important inconsistencies in PIE Laryngeal Theory, and in some cases are completely against it. It's not easy to find their articles, as they are generally ignored by the IE linguistics establishment. And don't try to find much about them in Wikipedia or other Internet sources, they are just neglected. One of these authors is the eminent Polish linguist Witold Manczak, who has written a series of articles with strong criticism, actually a refutation, of the Laryngeal Theory. I have recently read one of these articles (Manczak, 2006), which has a significant title: Invraisemblance de la théorie des laryngales (=The Unlikelihood of the Laryngeal Theory). As we can see in the initial remarks, the author is quite aware of the difficulties of trying to raise a critical voice in IE studies (p. 25): "Nos articles ayant passés sous silence, il nous est venu à l'esprit de présenter nos arguments dans une revue beaucoup plus connu".

And indeed, he has some arguments. First, he starts by reviewing the process that led to the invention of the theory. Let's remember it briefly: by the end of the 19th c. the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure proposed the idea that PIE had only one vowel (/e/) and a series of 'coefficients sonantiques' that could influence this vowel. Later on, the Danish linguist Hermann Möller introduced the concept of IE laryngeals, which he saw as arising from the supposed kinship between IE and Afro-Asiatic. The final impulse for the Laryngeal Theory came with the discovery oh Hittite, an IE language which showed a 'laryngeal' sound. In 1927, the Polish linguist Jerzy Kurylowicz combined Saussure's 'coefficients sonantiques' with the evidence from Hittite to produce the first version of the Laryngeal Theory.

According to Mańczak, the first problem is that Saussure's proposal is untenable, for various important reasons, among them the absurdity of proposing a language with just one vowel (/e/), when in fact the most common pattern in the world's languages is, at least /i a u/. (p. 26): "l'explication de ces alternances à l'aide des coefficients sonantiques est fausse. (...) les coefficients sonantiques n'ont existé que dans l'imagination de Saussure". This would be enough to invalidate the whole edifice of PIE laryngeals, which was based on Saussure's assumptions. But then Manczak goes on to analyse some further details of the theory, for example the fact that there are so many different versions of the set of laryngeals: (p. 29) "les laryngales n'existent que dans l'imagination de certains linguistes, la théorie des laryngales est un domaine où tout est permis, où rien ne freine la fantasie des chercheurs, où la notion de rigueur scientifique est inconnue". He quotes several authors who have expressed similar opinions, e.g . Hiersche (1964: 11): "die Laryngale sind in der Lage, bainahe jede Lautveränderung hervorzurufen oder selbst zu erfahren, was in der allgemeine Phonetik nicht seinesgleichen hat". The laryngeals were, and still are, the perfect solution to solve any possible PIE reconstruction mystery that could not be solved by other means, even if it's necessary to propose quite abnormal things, like consonants turning into vowels and other unlikely events.

In the final part of the article, Manczak asks himself why it is that the Laryngeal Theory has been so successful among linguists. According to him, there is a general lack of validity criteria in historical linguistics. (p. 31): "le terme "critères de verité" n'est jamais employé par les linguistes, bien que les linguistes soient unanimes pour dire que la linguistique est une science". The important thing is the 'authority' behind the theory, not the validity of the theory itself. (p. 32): "Comme les linguistes croient en l'infaillibilité des autorités, ils détestent ceux qui osent critiquer les autorités et adorent ceux qui approuvent ou développent les idées des autorités".

I find Manczak's proposals quite interesting, and I think anyone doing research in the field of IE studies should take them into account, instead of assuming the Laryngeal Theory as indisputable truth.

References:
- Hiersche, R. (1964). Untersuchungen zur Frage der Tenues aspiratea im Indogermanishen. Wiesbaden.
- Mallory, J. P. and D.Q. Adams (2006). The Oxford Introduction to PIE and the PIE World. Oxford University Press.
- Manczak, Witold (2006). «Invraisemblance de la théorie des laryngales». In Historische Sprachforschung, 119: 25-34.

Hunter-gatherers, farmers and... something in between

2010-03-07T13:41:00.007+01:00

When it comes to thinking about the origins and expansion of agriculture, one is influenced by the powerful appeal of the word revolution. We were all taught at school that there was an Agricultural, also called Neolithic, Revolution that started somewhere in the Middle East and then propagated to the adjacent areas. This hearth of farming and pastoralism would eventually become the so-called 'cradle of civilization'. There were other places in the world where agriculture and animal domestication developed independently (South Asia, China, the Americas) but not at such an early date and with such far-reaching consequences. From the perspective of today, it is logical to see the events associated with agriculture as a revolution that involved profound changes in every possible sphere of human economy and society. But in what ways was it a revolution for the human populations who were involved in the process? I have recently read an enlightening book that analyses this issue in detail: Barker, Graeme (2006). The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory. Why did Foragers become Farmers? Oxford: OUP. It's the kind of book that anyone interested in prehistoric languages should read.

It would be difficult to summarize the book in a few lines. It is a comprehensive study of the whole process of foraging-farming transition in all the world's regions. One of the main conclusions of this study is that there is not a general pattern for this transition but a variety of possible scenarios. According to the traditional view, the one established since Gordon Childe's coining of the term Neolithic Revolution, agriculture and farming were transmitted from its core area by a process of demic diffusion of wave of advance, whereby groups of farmers, pushed by demographic or climatic pressure, spread into new territories either displacing the local population or causing a process of quick acculturation. This model was proposed for all domestication areas in the world, especially for the one that involved the Fertile Crescent and its contiguous areas of propagation, especially Europe and Africa. It seems, however, that the archaeological evidence does not support this kind of model on a general basis.

First, it seems that most of the research in this area in the last century has been biased by a series of preconceived ideas about the topic. Most archaeological research has focused on South-East Asia (the Levant and Fertile Crescent region), whereas other areas have not been researched so thoroughly. On the other hand, the archeological evidence was traditionally interpreted on the lines of a simple contrast between foraging and farming populations. However, the use of more modern techniques, for example the study of the DNA of animals and plants or the analysis of sediments or pollen deposits, and the better understanding of the hunter-gatherer communities of modern times provided by anthropological studies, offer a much more complex picture of the process. In any case, it was not a single event, or the result of a single expansion process: (p. 378) "The traditional model of Neolithic agricultural colonists from South-West Asia spreading inexorably across Europe is extremely difficult to reconcile with the complexity of the evidence now available for the beginnings of agro-pastoral farming here". Something similar can be said about East and South-East Asia: (p. 229): "The central and eastern Pacific was a 'melting pot' of local domestications and cultigen acquisition from both west and east, not a one-way movement of agricultural colonists", and about South Asia. What we have in general is a variety of subsistence strategies that were adopted at different times and places. In some cases there was a quick transition to a farming-pastoralist economy, in others there was a long coexistence of foraging economy with some forms of basic farming. At the beginning of the Holocene, most human populations were acquainted with more or less elaborate techniques of plant collection and processing that paved the way, especially at the psychological level, for the later introduction of farming. The patterns of nomadism or sedentism also varied considerably. Some of the early farming populations show significant patterns of mobility, whereas some foraging populations were more sedentary than previously acknowledged. A few decades ago, the animal and plant remains found in archaeological sites were confidently understood as domesticated or wild species, which allowed a very simple explanation of the facts. A closer analysis, with more accurate technologies and a more multidisciplinary approach, tells us a different story. Our understanding of prehistoric societies is changing. The contrast between farmers and hunter-gatherers is not as clear-cut as once thought, and it seems that there were (and in some places of the world there still are) many possibilities in between: (p. 413) "a major problem with the demic diffusion model (...) of agriculture has been its focus on the transition to farming as some kind of unique sequence of movements in an otherwise static world".

In a previous post I commented on the importance of agricultural expansion in connection with language. The demic diffusion model, involving the expansion of farming-pastoralist populations into vast territories, has been applied in different linguistic areas of the world, e.g. the Indo-European area (Renfrew's Anatolian Hypothesis), and especially the Afro-Asiatic group, where it has found a more general acceptance (I'll write a post about this group of languages in the near future). The question is: can the expansion of agriculture be the main reason behind the expansion of these language groups? Some linguistic arguments have been used in order to support this view, especially the ones provided by linguistic paleontology: it has been suggested, for example that the IE and Afro-Asiatic 'proto-languages' have some common vocabulary for farming, which would imply that the speakers of this proto-language were already farmers. I have had the chance to look at some of these lists of 'farming vocabulary', e.g. the ones proposed for IE, and it seems to me that they are anything but conclusive. In many cases, they are words that could perfectly fit a foraging type of subsistence, especially if we understand foraging in more complex ways, as Barker has suggested in his book; in other cases, they can be explained as examples of language diffusion.The Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan groups of languages seem especially interesting as a testing ground for the various proposals (p. 322) "the theory that the earliest speakers [of Afro-Asiatic languages] were farmers depends on the assumption that terms identified in proto-Afro-Asiatic such as grains, grasses, and grinders must automatically refer to domesticates and their processing, rather than to wild plant collecting, whereas in the formative stages of the language group a correlation with wild grass collectors is just as likely (...) In both language groups, terminologies with indisputable agricultural connotations can only be identified in the more developed stages of the member families".

As I said, I will discuss some aspects of the Afro-Asian and Nilo-Saharan groups in some future posts.

Note: the second picture shows a hunting scene from the Cova dels Cavalls, in the Valltorta Valley near Castellón (Spain), a beautiful example of the Levantine prehistoric art. I really enjoyed visiting this place, and the nearby museum, a few years ago; the third picture, taken by me the other day, is from the Abrigo del Ciervo, near Dos Aguas (Valencia).

My PhD studies

2010-03-01T22:36:00.012+01:00

Now it's official: I am a PhD student at the University of Valencia (Doctorate Programme: Llengües i Literatures, Facultat de Filologia), with a research project in the field of historical linguistics. One of the good things about being (again) a member of the university community is that now I have full access to a wide range of bibliographic sources, including online journals and other reference material. And I also have a new email address, provided by the university: jesanca@alumni.uv.es

The real problem about carrying out this research is time. I'm not a full-time student, and I have to combine investigation with other activities, for example work as a teacher. This will probably have a negative effect on the blog, as I won't have much time left for it, but I don't want it to disappear. Maybe it could be a good idea to keep the PhD and the blog as two separate things. In my PhD I'll focus on a very specific topic: the languages of the British Isles and their origins, whereas in the blog I can write about more general topics in the field of linguistics, as I have done so far: Indo-European, origins of human language, general linguistics, population genetics, etc. Recently, for example, I've been reading some interesting texts about the Afro-asiatic group of languages, and also about the origins of agriculture, and I'm already preparing a series of posts about these topics. Now, the question is: Will I be able to cope with everything? I'm not sure, but I'll try.

Universals of human communication

2010-01-23T11:53:00.027+01:00

For many years, linguists (especially in the US) have discussed concepts such as Language Universals and Universal Grammar (UG), in an attempt to find features or patterns shared by all languages in the world. The idea seems interesting but... is there anything really 'universal' in language? In a recent article, Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson have reviewed the concept of language universals, offering a great deal of examples that contradict even the most basic of the universals proposed by Greenberg and other linguists. According to the authors of the article, the only thing that can be established is a series of statistical tendencies (following Greenberg's nomenclature) that may be inferred from typological analysis. As for Chomsky's UG, I personally think it is one of the most irrelevant concepts ever devised in linguistics.

So it seems that there might be nothing really 'universal' about human language, but what about human communication? In two recent posts (here and here), I put forward some ideas about the origin of language and grammar. In my opinion, the main difference between human and non-human 'language' is the fact that we can use the narrative/descriptive vs imperative contrast in our utterances; in fact, there's no way we can produce an utterance ouside these parameters. If I say a word or a sentence, I'm either narrating/describing something or telling someone to do something, or maybe a combination of both, whereas in non-human communication, it is not clear that this contrast is used meaningfully, or consciously. At first, I thought of it in terms of 'language' or 'grammar', but then I realized that it is present in both verbal and non-verbal types of human communication. Whenever we communicate, with words or with gestures, we are actually creating narrative, descriptive or imperative contexts, and our listeners have an ability to decode this variety of meanings. The grammatical components associated with this contrast, e.g. the various moods (imperative, optative, indicative, etc.) were probably preceded by a non-verbal 'grammar' that set the foundations for human oral language as we know it. Without this previous development, which may have originated at a very early stage in our development as a species, our verbal communication would be limited to a simple set of calls.

Now, what about universals? Is it possible to find them at the level of human communication? I can see at least two possible candidates:

1. All human groups use verbal language, unless its members are physically impaired to develop this ability, e.g. deaf and dumb people.

2. In all types of human communication, both verbal and non-verbal, a significant contrast is established between narrative/descriptive and imperative contents.

Sources of the pictures, (added on Jan31, 2010): 1st and 3rd, from Inimagine; 2nd picture, from this interesting article in PNAS.

The birth of grammar

2009-12-29T17:51:00.015+01:00

Some time ago I wrote a post with some of my thoughts about the origin of language, which was complemented with a series of comments (there is also a good summary written in Spanish by José Ángel García Landa in his blog). I'm not planning to write a complete theory about the origins of human language, but I like the idea of expressing some thoughts that may trigger debate. It's in the comments, in the exchange of ideas, that a 'theory' can best be shaped.

Now, what I said about language then is merely a set of generalizations, and generalizing is an easy task. Today, however, I want to add some more detail.

It was in the papers recently (as you can see here or here): according to some researchers, there is a species of monkeys, known as Campbell's monkeys, who have developed a complex system of alert calls which, in some of its features (e.g. meaningful combination of distinctive units), would resemble some form of syntax. Of course, this discovery has caused some stir among the linguistic community, and now there's an ongoing debate about this question: "Are these monkeys, actually, using syntax?", a question which, probably, cannot be answered.

Campbell's monkeys use their language as alert calls, whenever there is a potential danger in sight, e.g. an approaching predator or a falling tree. They use a variety of calls (at least six: Boom, Krak, Hok, Hok-oo, Krak-oo, Wak-oo) and combine them in different ways to convey meaning. Let's imagine one of these alert situations: a group of monkeys are eating fruit from a tree, and then one of them sees a leopard a few metres away. As an immediate response he shouts an alert: Hok-oo Krak Boom! (I've invented the combination just to use it as an example). On hearing this, the other monkeys react and run for safety. The situation is clear: there is a message and a reaction to the message. Now, what does the message involve?

This series (Hok-oo Krak Boom!) can be understood at least in two different ways:

1. as an imperative: run from the approaching leopard!
2. as a narrative/description: a leopard is approaching!

Maybe the monkeys do not go as far as interpreting the utterance one way or the other. But, for us, linguistic utterances do have a form. In interpretations 1 and 2 above we have the same situation, and roughly the same meaning, but different language. An imperative is not the same as a narrative. Let's imagine our human ancestors milions of years ago. Maybe at some point they started to develop an ability to distinguish between imperative and narrative/description. Let's see another example from the animal world: bees.

It is well known that bees use body language to explain location of food sources to other bees in the hive. They perform what is sometimes referred to as a 'dance': a series of vibrations of their bodies in various positions that the other bees can interpret as a maningful message. The question is: is this language? How could we translate this waggle dance into human language. Let's see an example:

1. I have found some nice pollen in the southwest.
2. Go to the sothwest to get some nice pollen!

Number 1 is a narrative, number 2 an imperative. Again, bees are not likely to care much about these details, but for us humans, they make a difference. A linguistic difference.

In my post about the birth of language I talked about grammar as the application of logical thought and our capacity for abstraction to a particular problem: the growing amount of linguisitc units facilitated by our rich verbal ability, inherent to humans. I thought of individual units meaning 'red rock' or 'go to the river!', and then a later development where abstractions such as 'nouns', 'adjectives' or verbs' would be used as a more economical and efficient way of storing linguistic units. One of the first examples that came to my mind was the use of imperatives, as the most basic verb form. However, the examples from the animal world (see above) have shown me that the implemenation of narrative/descriptive mechanisms could perfectly be at the same level of abstraction. Of course, in our languages of today we are used to a complex array of verb features (mood, voice, tense, aspect) which offer an endless range of possiblities, but when I think of the first steps of human language, it seems to me that the difference between these two basic moods, which I call 'imperative' and 'narrative/descriptive', could have been quite relevant. What was the first 'mood' that gave birth to the original forms of verbal expression? Was it the need to tell the others what they should do? Or was it the need to narrate things? Was our first alert call understood as 'climb the tree (because there's a lion approaching)!' or simply 'there's a lion approaching!'? Difficult to know.

Note: The images in this post are all paintings by the French artist Henri Rousseau, aka 'Le Douanier' Rousseau.

The PCP website and other news

2009-12-23T02:00:00.005+01:00

- The Continuity Theory workgroup has opened a new website (www.continuitas.org), replacing the old one (that means I had some extra work updating the links in my posts!). There is also a new 'official' name for the theory: it's no longer the PCT (Paleolithic Continuity Theory), but the PCP (Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm). In the new web-site you can find information about the members of the workgroup (Mario Alinei, Xaverio Ballester, Francesco Benozzo, Marcel Otte, Henry Harpending, et al.), and the main bibliographic references, including some downloadable articles. The introduction (The Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm for the origins of Indo-European Languages. An introduction in progress), has been updated.

- The second issue of Liburna has been published (November 2009), with some interesting articles and a couple of contributions of my own: brief reviews of F. Benozzo's La Tradizzione Smarrita and G. Costa's La Sirena di Archimede.

On the left, a picture of a Roman liburna. Museum für Antike Shiffahrt, Mainz (Germany).

- Probably, there'll be news about my doctorate studies soon.

I don't know if I'll write another post before the end of the year, so just in case: Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

The spread of agriculture and languages

2009-12-05T16:50:00.014+01:00

Being a vegetarian, I have mixed feelings about the concept of agriculture. On the one hand, I feel fine with this way of life: it has helped me have a more balanced diet and a more natural approach to life in general. On the other hand, however, vegetarianism is ultimately a product of the agricultural revolution, a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of mankind. Our species was shaped in the context of hunter-gatherer societies where technological innovations took a very long time to be developed or perfected. The long-lasting balance between humans and their environment came to an end with the advent of agriculture and pastoralism: human populations became more sedentary and the surplus in production led to a complete change in the way humans related to one another. The rest of the story is well known: exploitation of resources, overcrowding, famine, war, slavery and many other elements (including some positive effects) that have shaped the world ever since (you can read this article by Jared Diamond for a complete view on this topic). The Neolithic revolution, starting in the Fertile Crescent at about 9,500 BC, is the real turning point for humanity, even for the fate of Homo Sapiens. It would be impossible to go back to pre-Neolithic times and advocate for a hunter-gatherer existence, like some people have proposed, e.g. John Zerzan and the followers of anarcho-primitivism. We are just too imbued with agriculture, we can only try to do things better for once.

It's obvious that the emergence of agriculture must have made a considerable impact on the languages of prehistoric people. First, as a source of new vocabulary and linguistic structures for the new social reality; second, as a new scenario for the spread of languages and the appearance of stratified variants. Unfortunately, it is impossible for us to know the languages that the first farmers spoke, as there is no direct evidence of them. However, the analysis of indirect sources (linguistic, archaeological, genetic, etc.) has allowed linguists to come up with some interesting results. Associating the spread of a given group of languages with the spread of agriculture is a strong argument, and it has been used in the various areas where agriculture was independently developed: the Near East, the Indus Valley, China, Mesoamerica, etc. As far as I know, there isn't a generally agreed pattern of how agriculture and language may have expanded in parallel. Authors such as Colin Renfrew, in the context of the processual approach, have made interesting proposals about the combined process of agriculture-language spread, but it seems there's still much to be done in this field of study.

What about the Indo-Europeans? The expansion of IE languages has traditionally been seen as occurring some millennia after the expansion of agriculture. In this blog I have variously criticized this traditional view, which is based on a series of assumption which are quite dubious. I have presented some alternative views, including Renfrew's Anatolian Hypothesis (see here), which links the spread of IE with the spread of agriculture from the Anatolian Peninsula. Needless to say, Renfrew's theory has been strongly criticised by mainstream Indo-Europeanists, who stick to their intra-linguistic approach. I find the Anatolian Hypothesis quite interesting, and I'm sure that the spread of agriculture and pastoralism must have made a crucial impact on the languages of the IE area, as anywhere else in the world, but there are some problems associated with this theory that are not easy to solve. It is true that Renfrew's hypothesis offers a plausible scenario for the spread of IE languages in Europe, but for the events in the other areas (Iran, India, Central Asia) a different, possibly more complex explanation is required. Was agriculture a local development in the Indus Valley or was it imported from another place? The former option looks more likely. And one more, and essential, question: what kind of language did the first Indus Valley farmers speak?

We tend to think that new languages, e.g. the ones brought by the first farmers or by any other migratory or expansionist group, is basically different from the language of the original population, and that the new situation triggers a process of language substitution whereby the old language simply disappears. But it doesn't have to be this way. Maybe the languages associated with the Neolithic expansion were not so different from the ones spoken by European Mesolithic populations. And something similar could be said about the Indus Valley. What we would have here is a common IE background and a double process of language expansion (or re-expansion) associated with agriculture. This is just a hypothesis, of course, but I think it makes at least some sense.

Note: the map (see above) has been taken from this page.

Migrations in prehistory

2009-11-08T13:13:00.011+01:00

The concept of continuity/discontinuity is essential in any science attempting to study human past. Archaeologists, for example, try to determine whether a given material culture had a local origin or was brought from somewhere else, producing a break in the the continuum of cultural elements. For historical linguists it is essential to establish the length of time that a given language or group of languages was or has been spoken in a given territory, and whether they're the result of continuity or 'substitution'. On the other hand, population geneticists try to produce maps where genes and human populations are distributed along a timeline of thousands of years, trying to reveal the actual story of human origins and migration. In principle, the results obtained in these scientific disciplines are independent of each other; establishing the continuity of a prehistorical material culture does not necessarily imply the continuity of a language; population discontinuity caused by migration does not necessarily involve language discontinuity, and so on. However, it is sometimes possible to put the various types of data together in search of common patterns. This, in fact, is possibly one of the main challenges for the human sciences at present and in the future.

In this blog I have often written about continuity/discontinuity in language, and have also drawn some paralellisms with population studies and archaeology. Today I want to focus on population genetics in particular. Or more exactly, on the patterns of genetic continuity/discontinuity in Europe.

Are modern Europeans the descendants of the people who lived in their area in the Paleolithic, or is their genetic heritage the result of later migrations? This basic question has kept a couple of generations of population geneticists quite busy, and it seems that a general agreement is far from being reached. Some authors, e.g. Bryan Sykes and Steven Oppenheimer, have proposed that most of the genetic material of modern Europeans can be traced back to local Paleolithic populations. Others think that the percentage of genetic input from later migration is higher. One of the most important factors affecting this issue is the type of technology or methodology used in the analysis. The pioneering studies of Cavalli-Sforza in the 1960s, which seemed to support the Neolithic demic diffusion model, may now be considered obsolete, especially because of the dated technology used then. These technologies are improved and multiplied constantly, including for example the possibility of analysing 'old bones', i.e. the genetic material found in ancient human remains; as a consequence, the debate on the origins of European populations has become more complex, and indeed quite interesting. A new theory is proposed one day and the next there is new contradictory evidence found by means of a more accurate technique. Needless to say, it is difficult for a non-geneticist to follow these developments, but ayone studying language prehistory must be aware of this debate.

As I said earlier, Steven Oppenheimer can be seen as one of the proponents of the indigenist theory of European populations. I have recently read a couple of blog posts (this one and this one) whose auhtor, Dienekes Pontikos, provides evidence against the indigenous theory and the validity of Oppenheimer's methodology. He goes as far as to say that the indigenous theory has definitely been 'demolished', and that the genetic components of modern European populations derive mostly from post-Paleolithic migratory events. He offers links to some recent articles written by geneticists who would support this migrationist view. What do I make of all this? I am sure that there must be some faults in Oppenheimer's methodology, and that some of his conclusions can be revised or even refuted, as usually happens in the scientific domain, but I am not so sure that the counter-arguments used by Dienekes are as conclusive as he claims them to be. These two posts have generated a massive amount of comments (222 in one case), sometimes from people who are currently researching on population genetics, and it seems that the indigenous/migrationist debate is still open. And it will be so in the future, with the development of newer techniques. Now we are in November 2009. What can we say about European population genetics? Can we give numbers, percentages of 'indigenous genes' versus 'migration genes'? Let's take the Basque Country, Switzerland, Lazio, Greece or any other European area. Is it possible to determine whether the current populations of these areas are to a greater or lesser extent the descendants of the people who lived there in the Paleolithic? Or is the role of migration greater than some cholars thought a few years ago? I think the answer to these questions is not clear yet.

Lenga d'Òc

2009-10-24T15:33:00.012+02:00

Today, at this time, as I sit in front of my computer writing this post, the streets of Carcassonne, a city in the south of France, must be filled with people demonstrating in favour of the Occitan language. It's impossible for me to be there (I live 650 km. further south), but I'm sure there are a lot of people from Catalonia or Valencia in that demonstration, sympathising with our northern neighbours. On the right you can see the poster of the Carcassonne event, written in Occitan.

The similarities between Valencian/Catalan and Occitan are striking, as can be seen in the poster itself: at first sight, it could be taken for a Catalan text. However, there are important differences in the official and social status of these 'regional' languages. Valencian/Catalan is considered an official language in the corresponding regions and it is used in all spheres: education, media, politics, etc. The speakers of Valencian/Catalan are counted by the million and the future of the language, despite the pessimistic views of some people, does not seem particularly sombre. The situation of Occitan is quite different. It is not considered an official language and the number of its speakers has decreased constantly since the 14th century, when la langue d'oïl, i.e. French, started to take over. A word like Provençal is forever associated with the flourishing world of the Medieval Troubadour, a time when this language was considered the lingua franca of literature in south-western Europe, and poets from Catalonia and northern Italy used it to write their poems. I'm sure that there are many people today who must think that Provençal and the other varities of the Langue d'Oc (see map on the left) are no longer spoken, but the truth is that they are still alive. In poor condition, but alive!

In two recent trips to that land of Oc (last December I visited Carcassonne and in the summer I spent a week in Provence) I tried to find out about the presence of Occitan in the areas. As I imagined, the result was a bit disappointing. But I did find some things. For example, a school in Carcassonne where children were taught in Languedocian (these schools are called 'Calandretas' and there are some more in the region). In some cities I could see street names written both in French and in Provençal (see photo on the right, which I took in Aix-en-Provence).

This reminds us that Occitan is not just a memory of the past. Below the surface of big nations with their official languages and their official borders (French, Spanish, Italian), there lies a world of less 'official' languages which are still preserved and which offer us a richer story: the one about people who could understand each other in a language continuum that lasted centuries.

Note: the map has been taken from this web-page.

Two proto-Indo-European widows

2009-10-12T10:25:00.051+02:00

Reconstructed proto-Indo-European (PIE) forms, especially the ones produced in the context of the laryngealist tradition, have something in common: they all look quite bizarre, with many consonants followed by little superindexed w's or h's and plenty of m's and n's with vocalic value, not to mention the most bizarre of all, a set of three (sometimes more) phonemes called laryngeals (h1, h2, h3) that no-one really knows how to pronounce. I remember reading an article by Xaverio Ballester in which he talked about IE horses. In his opinion, the reconstructed word for 'horse' was so difficult to pronounce that it would have been easier for a PIE speaker to imitate a horse's whinny! I have recently come across a book with a nice selection of PIE reconstructions. It is a book by the eminent American linguist Don Ringe, a firm believer in laryngeals (Ringe 2006). Let's see some examples from his book:

This word is supposed to mean 'name' in PIE. Here, we find a couple of laryngeals and a final n with a vocalic component, written as a little circle below the consonant (sorry, my word editor does not include this symbol). According to Ringe (2006: 9): "There seems to have been very few constraints on the distribution of (...) the laryngeals (...) *h2 was perhaps the second most common [obstruent] in a lexical count". Constraints on laryngeals? What for? They can appear everywhere and they can be nearly anything, from vowels to consonants and also semi-vowels and semi-consonants. They are like jokers in a card-game.

This string of letters is supposed to be the word for 'widow' in dual nom., voc. and acc. The meaning, therefore, would be 'two widows'. Let's imagine a speaker of PIE, in prehistory, pointing at two elderly ladies and calling them that... It's hard to imagine. One peculiarity of this word is that it has two laryngeals in a row! What are they? Two vowels? One vowel and a consonant? One consonant and a vowel? What about the combination 'dhw'? Does anybody really know how this was pronounced? Was there ever anyone who used this word?

Finally, the reconstructed word for 'tongue':

... A real tongue-twister!

In the past few months I have written a series of posts about PIE laryngeals, showing some more examples of how bizarre traditional PIE reconstructions can be. I have also expressed these ideas in some Internet forums and blogs, e.g. Language Log. PIE laryngeals are only one of the many aspects of traditional comparative linguistics that I criticise. Using Angela Marcantonio's terminology, laryngeals might just be 'artefacts of the linguistic method of analysis', i.e. produced by a type of methodology based on language trees, linguistic paleontology and other unacceptable or at least dubious ideas.

Angela Marcantonio is an expert in Uralic languages. In a series of interesting articles and books (e.g. Marcantonio 2002) she has reviewed some of the traditionally held views on the Uralic family, reaching the conclusion that a Uralic proto-language cannot be reconstructed scientifically. She has also carried out research on other language groups. In a recent article, "Evidence that most Indo-European lexical reconstructions are artefacts of the linguistic method of analysis" (in Marcantonio ed. 2009), she analyses some traditionally held assumptions about PIE, with striking results.

First, she focuses on some of the laws that have been proposed for PIE, and finds that in many cases they might be examples of circular reasoning. To test her hypothesis, she applies a quantitative test to a set of reconstrucetd PIE words (the verbal roots in Rix's dictionary, 1998). The results are as follows: 66% of the recontructed verbs are based on words found in only one or two of the IE branches; only 34 % are attested in three or more branches. On the other hand, it is supposed that the laws governing phonetic change in IE, e.g. Grimm's Law, should be a useful tool to determine these reconstructions. However, these laws are usually modified with a series of secondary laws or refinements, so that there is always some kind of intricately designed new parameter to explain any apparent deviation from the norm. Marcantonio has clearly shown that, when you have a PIE verbal root with forms attested in many IE branches, a high number of laws is needed to account for the whole set. In some cases, the number of rules equals the number of laws. This is how the corpus of PIE reconstructions has grown in the last 150 years: by a cumulative amount of laws, many of them designed 'ad hoc'. What is the use of a law, e.g. Grimm's Law, if it is immediately followed by new laws, e.g. Verner's, to make it tenable? Marcantonio sees the adjustable parameters of PIE laws as an indication of circularity.

She also analyses some particular aspects of traditional PIE reconstruction, e.g. the present-perfect alternation. Again, she considers them an example of fabrication of the method of analysis.

Finally, she focuses on the laryngeal set. In her quantitaive analysis, she notices that a high percentage of PIE verb roots and morphemes have been reconstructed with the aid of laryngeals. In her opinion, the use of laryngeals adds some extra flexibility to the system: they are phonetically unspecified and can appear virtually anywhere in a word; they are the perfect solution for any reconstruction, a real magical wand that makes any prediction possible. Marcantonio does not reject the laryngeal theory (she says that this issue is beyond the reach of her present research) but I have the feeling that she is quite convinced that the set of laryngeals is, basically, one more artefact in the hands of those who believe in proto-languages.

So, what is left of PIE if we subtract the poorly attested roots (those found in less than three IE branches) and if we eliminate artificial artefacts like vowel gradation and laryngeals, based on circular reasoning? Maybe PIE is reduced to just a relatively small set of cognate words and an even smaller set of grammatical elements, if any. Maybe it's about time IE scholars started to abandon the idea of perfect proto-languages with their complete sets of phonemes, declensions and conjugations and equipped with immaculate laws that would predict every step from one proto-language to another. Maybe it's time the whole idea of a proto-form with an asterisk were replaced with a different type of notation, one that reflected the complex nature of language rather than an aspiration to immaculate, circularly-proven forms.

Bibliography:
- MARCANTONIO, A. (2002). The Uralic Language Family: Facts, Myths and Statistics. Transcations of the Philological Society. Oxford/Boston, Blackwell.
- MARCANTONIO, A., ed. (2009). The Indo-European Language Family: Questions about its Status. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Series, No 55. New York, Institute for the Study of Man.
- RINGE, D. (2006). From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. Oxford, OUP.

Imagining the birth of language

2009-10-02T17:54:00.015+02:00

One of the blogs I ususally follow is Babel's Dawn, published by Edmund Blair Bolles. Babel's Dawn focuses on a linguistic topic that has received considerable attention in the last couple of decades, and that I find quite interesting: the origins of human speech. In his blog, Mr Bolles discusses the main trends in this field of research and makes his own proposals. He is not a 'professional' linguist or a university professor specialised in the subject. However, his posts are on the cutting edge. Quite interestingly, he attends international conferences on language origins, as a 'freelance' linguist. I like this kind of things; I am convinced that something as complex and profound as the study of language origins involves something more than linguistic academia, and ousider views are probably quite ncecessary too. He was at the 2008 Evolang Conference in Barcelona and has recently attended the Ways to Protolanguage Conference in Torun (Poland), publishing a series of interesting posts about the most remarkable proposals made in both events. In the last post about the Torun Conference he focused on the concept of proto-language, which was one of the most debated issues in that conference. I have just posted a comment in that post. In fact, what I wrote in that comment is an idea that I was planning to develop as a post in my blog. But finally, as you can see, it is written in the form of a post comment, i.e. in a more dialectical form. You can read it here.

And here's an excerpt from my comment:

I think language must have started with a few nouns and a few imperatives, and little more. The increase in vocabulary, in both the nominal and verbal sides of language, and the development of more varied ways of expressing notions such as time and space, must have put human language in a critical position: how can you possibly handle an ever increasing number of nomina and verba and of linguistic variabiblity? Can you just memorise the whole set, or is it not just easier if you do what humans have always done: use logic? I think 'grammar' is just a logical response to the increase in size of human language. There's nothing special about recursion or parameters; they are examples of a human response to a given problem. Grammar as we imagine it (or the 'true language' that some linguists talk about) is an additional tool, a necessary solution that makes language (a communicative tool in itself) apt for social use: rather than having an unlimited number of nouns, verbs and functions, humans have implemented a series of patterns using analogy and logic.

Linguistic paleontology and catastrophism

2009-09-07T11:18:00.025+02:00

In the previous post (31st Aug 09) I reviewed the first part of an article by Andrew Garrett: «Convergence in the Formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology», 2006), in which he reaches a series of interesting conclusions about the philogeny of Indo-European (IE) by analysing some evidence from ancient Greek dialects. Today, I'll review the rest of the article.

In the second part, Garrett focuses on the origins and dispersal of IE. Using linguistic paleontology as the main argument, he concludes that the date of IE dispersal cannot be earlier than 4,000 BC., aligning therefore with the traditional, also called Kurganic theory. According to him, the existence of common Proto-Indo-European (PIE) words for plough, wheel, wool, yoke and other technological innovations invalidates Renfrew's theory of a Neolithic, and therefore earlier, dispersal of IE. At first sight, the argument of linguistic paleontology seems quite strong. It is one of the pillars of traditional PIE methodology, and has often been used as a way of reconstructing PIE society, economy, religion, etc. A remarkable example is Émile Benveniste’s (1969) Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (in this post you can find some comments on this book). Linguistic Paleontology aims to reconstruct the vocabulary of a proto-language by analysing and comparing the linguistic material of the descendant languages. It relies on the reconstructed linguistic forms and the inherent assumptions that lead to those reconstructions. In this blog I have shown various examples of how misleading this type of traditional reconstruction, based on branches, subgroups, laws and other theoretical entelechies can be. Linguistic paleontology can easily be proved wrong as a way of dating or reconstructing the homelands, the dispersals or the societies of the speakers of a given proto-language. For example, how can we know exactly what a given reconstructed word actually meant 6,000 years ago? This is only one of many questions that could be asked to the advocates of this method. In Chapter 4 of his book The Puzzle of the Indo-Europeans (1987), Colin Renfrew offers some curious examples of how the use of linguistic paleontology can lead to seemingly ridiculous results. In a previous post I mentioned the example of the word television. If we analysed the various words for 'television' in Romance languages from the perspective of language palaeontolgy, we could reach the conclusion that ancient Romans actually had TVs in their villas! For a complete evaluation (and I would say complete demolition) of linguistic paleontology I suggest reading an article by the British linguist Paul Heggarty (2006): Interdisciplinary indiscipline?: Can phylogenetic methods meaningfully be applied to language data - and to dating language? - Funnily enough, both articles, Garrett's and Heggarty's, are published in the same book: Forster, P., and C. Renfrew, eds. (2006) Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research (further details here; a list of Heggarty's publications, here).

In the third part of his article, Garrett tackles the difficult question of IE dispersal, one of the leitmotivs of my blog. As we saw earlier, he champions the traditional chronology of IE, which means he is obliged to produce a convincing explanation for the dispersal of IE after 4,000 BC. Obviously, as we are in the 21st century and the traditional tales of horse-riding invaders from the steppes are no longer in fashion, he proposes a different type of explanation for the phenomenon of IE dispersal. In fact, he uses three different patterns: (p. 146): "One is steppe spread that led to the dispersal of Tocharian and Indo-Iranian. A second pattern is characteristic of the IE spread into Europe (...): dispersal was associated with systems collapse (...) and the social reorganizations of the secondary products complex (...) The third pattern is not widely noted but seems quite robust: a north-south spread into the interactional spheres of the urbanized zone that runs from the Aegean through Anatolia and the Near East to Bactria-Margiana". What we find here is a remnant of the traditional steppe migration plus a couple of relatively new ideas. The second pattern is peculiar: the idea of systems collapse reminds me of other catastrophic explanations for IE: there must be something catastrophic in order to explain the intercontinental expansion of this language group in just a couple of millennia (otherwise, how can you explain it?). 19th century scholars imagined a world of invasions and massive migrations. New developments, like Garrett's, put forward a more realistic scenario, but the problem still remains: in the systems collapse theory, there is a group of people, the speakers of PIE, who seem to have the secret of success. They wait in silence for centuries until the opportunity arises, and then, they are so irresistible that they impose their language causing the disappearance of any other previous language, an event which is repeated everywhere they go: Italy, Greece, Central Europe... IE opportunists I would call them. Maybe some elements in Garrett's proposals are acceptable and reasonable; very possibly they could explain some aspects of language spread or hybridization in the context of IE-speaking areas, but they can hardly be acceptable as a general explanation of the spread of PIE. As I have variously suggested in this blog, a much earlier date for IE dispersal is required.

Bibliography:
- GARRETT, Andrew (2006). «Convergence in the Formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology», in Forster and Renfrew, eds. Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 139-151.
- HEGGARTY, Paul (2006). «Interdisciplinary indiscipline?: Can phylogenetic methods meaningfully be applied to language data - and to dating language?», in P. Forster, and C. Renfrew, eds. Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 183-194.
- RENFREW, Colin (1987). Archaeology and Language. The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. London: Pimlico.

Comparative philology and proto-languages

2009-08-31T19:07:00.021+02:00

In principle, there is nothing wrong about comparing languages; it seems a very natural way of approaching historical linguistics, and in fact it is difficult to imagine any type of linguistic research without some kind of inter-language comparison. The problem arises when the task of comparing grammatical or phonetic features derives into the establishment of supposed laws and the reconstruction of supposed proto-languages. It was in the field of Indo-European (IE) studies that the comparative method was first applied in a systematic way, and where it was carried to its apparently logical conclusions: a perfectly organized world of rules and genealogical trees based mainly on the analysis of the extant texts of ancient languages. Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the most famous of these proto-languages, and somehow the jewel of the crown of the comparative method, was described as a structurally complete language, with inflections, declensions and its own phonetic system, which was eventually 'improved' with of a series of mysterious phonemes, called laryngeals (see this post and this one for more on laryngeals), which are as absurd as they are essential for the 'perfection' of the reconstructed proto-language. That reminds me of a famous etching by the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya (1746-1828): El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (="The sleep of reason produces monsters"; see picture on the left).

Personally, I think it is impossible to reconstruct a theoretical proto-language from a series of supposed 'descendant' languages. First, because very probably this proto-language never existed as such, and those 'descendants' are rather the result of a complex net of interactions; second, because even if there was something resembling a proto-language common to a series of subsequent languages, the possibilities of actually reconstructing the 'structure' of this proto-language are quite remote, especially because the interpretation of written texts is not a good indicator of something as complex as the history of a language. It is true that the data obtained in the last couple of centuries via the comparative method can still be useful and illustrative; they are indeed the product of thorough study and erudition. However, the idea of a perfect tree-like diagram of languages and proto-languages must be abandoned. There are still many linguists today who believe in these immaculate ideas but, fortunately, some other scholars have criticised them in a variety of ways.

In this blog I have already pointed out some of the weak points of traditional (comparative) linguistics. Right now I'm in the process of reading, as part of my research, a series of articles which deal with this topic, for example by authors such as Gessman or Caflish. One of the things that Gessman has shown is that the famous Grimm's Law, designed to explain some important features of Germanic languages, is rather implausible. But Jakob Grimm and his followers, e.g. Karl Brugmann, lived in the 19th c., and therefore they did not have the tools and the perspectives that we have today in order to analyse linguistic diachrony.

Recently, I have read an interesting article by the American linguist Andrew Garrett: Convergence in the formation of Indo-European: Philogeny and Chronology (2006). After analysing some phonological and morphologiccal features of ancient Greek dialects, he comes to the conclusion that the idea of a Greek proto-language derived from a common IE proto-language is not tenable. The linguistic materials from ancient Greek dialects point in a completely different direction, and this could be also applied to other IE branches. (p. 139): "the familiar branches arose not by the differentiation of earlier higher-order subgroups - from 'Italo-Celtic' to Italic and Celtic, and so on - but by convergence among neighbouring dialects in a continuum"; (p. 141): "detailed analysis reduces the dossier of demonstrable and uniquely Proto-Greek innovations in phonology and inflectional morphology to nearly zero"; (p. 139): "I will suggest that conventional models of IE philogeny are wrong". I think Garrett's innovative ideas about the formation of Greek and IE are highly interesting, and they may open interesting new lines of research in historical linguistics. I agree with him completely when he says: (p. 139) "Convergence together with loss of intermediate dialects in the prehistoric continuum, has created the historical mirage of a branchy IE family with its many distinctive subgroups". - The mirage of order, structure, rules, laws.

In his article, Garrett also deals with other topics, mainly the philogeny and chronology of IE. Even though in the first part of the article he expounds the groundbreaking ideas referred to above, in the rest of the article, quite surprisingly, he sticks to the traditional paradigm, using a series of arguments such as linguistic palaeontology and his own version of catastrophism, which he calls 'systems collapse'. I found this quite contradictory, even paradoxical. In any case, these things deserve further scrutiny (and criticism), so I'll be talking about them in a future post (this one is already quite long).

References:
- GARRETT, Andrew (2006). «Convergence in the Formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology», in P. Forster, and C. Renfrew, eds. Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 139-151.
- GESSMAN, Albert (1990). «Grimm's Law - Fact or myth?», in Language Quarterly 28: 3-4. (first published in 1974).

Scripta manent

2009-08-11T12:27:00.022+02:00

I am a booklover, even a bookworm. I have always felt the need to fill up the shelves of the places where I've lived with as many books as possible; maybe it's because I was born in a house where there were few books, or just because I love them. I guess some of the readers of this blog are also booklovers. Sometimes you buy a book and you read it immediately, but more often you just put it on the shelf and leave it there for a long time, even years, or decades, before opening its first page. The big problem about this is space. One day you realize that there's not enough room for so much literature and you are forced to make difficult decisions about what to do with your beloved books. You want to keep them all, but you know very well that some of these books must go, especially that big volume you bought fifteen years ago for reasons that you can't recall any more. You know you might never read it but throwing it to the recycling container is indeed a painful experience. Recently, I have experienced this kind of feelings, as I am in the process of moving house, which means I have to face the reality of my book collection in its actual dimensions, compared to the ever-shrinking size of contemporary homes. One of the 'big' books I came across the other day is called Scripta Manent. La memoria escrita de los romanos. It is actually the catalogue of an exhibition that I visited in Barcelona in 2002. The exhibition was really interesting, and I decided to buy the beautifully designed catalogue, which included several articles about Roman and pre-Roman epigraphy in Iberia. The book lay on the shelf all these years, and sometimes I thought "Why did I buy this thick volume after all?"- I was not particularly interested in ancient epigraphy at the time and I thought buying that book was not a brilliant idea. But books are patient artifacts, they wait in silence for years and years until their 'moment' arrives. There are also cases where the postponement of the act of reading is a more deliberate choice: the reader knows that the book is there but decides that it is better to start reading it sometime in the future. When I read Richard Ford's novel Independence Day a few years ago I thought it was one of the best books I'd ever read, and I still think so. Independence Day is the second part of a trilogy which describes three different stages in the life of its main character, Frank Bascombe. I bought the first book of the trilogy, The Sportswriter, and read it the following summer. Then, somebody gave me the third book (The Lay of the Land) as a birthday present last year, but I still haven't read it. Maybe I need to allow myself some time to match the timing of Bascombe's development as a character. He was in his forties in the previous novels, and he is presumably older in The Lay of the Land, so I'm not in a hurry to read the book. I'm just taking my time. Why not? - Now, let's go back to the Ibero-Romans.
The phrase Scripta Manent is actually the second part of a well-known Latin proverb: Verba Volant, Scripta Manent (= "spoken words fly, the written ones remain"), a well-chosen name for the exhibition. I have been browsing the catalogue, where I have found a couple of interesting articles, especially one by Javier Velaza: "La epigrafía romana como modelo de las epigrafías paleohispánicas" (pp. 52-65). Velaza is one of the most important experts in the field of pre-Roman scripts and epigraphy in the Iberian Peninsula: in his article, he offers a brief and comprehensive account of the subject which can easily be read by the non-specialist. He also analyses some of the inscriptions in detail, for example one that was found in Empuries, an ancient site on the Catalan coast. This inscription (see picture above) was made in Iberian in the 1st c. BC, using the Levantine script, but the format of the signs clearly show the influence of Roman epigraphy. It is thought that it was made in a workshop that was also producing Latin inscriptions. The co-existence of epigraphic texts in Latin and pre-Roman languages (Iberian or Celtiberian) lasted until the beginning of our era, when Latin became the only language used in writing.

Inscriptions made on stone, bronze, lead or pottery are the only documents that have reached us written in the pre-Roman languages of Iberia. This is in fact an important limitation in the study of these languages, as the texts found in epigraphy are usually confined to a few contexts, mainly commercial or funerary. We do not have any written texts reflecting the oral epic or the legends of the Iberians or the Celtiberians; we don't even know if they were ever written down, but in any case the transmission of this literature is lost forever, as the languages themselves. Something similar happens with Etruscan, and many other pre-Roman peoples in Europe. We have for example more than 8,000 Etruscan inscriptions, but they mostly consist of a few words, maybe just a person's name in a tomb. This all makes it very difficult for the investigators to understand the languages of the Iberians, the Lusitanians, the Celtiberians or the Etruscans. They must rely on the epigraphic material and the indirect information from other sources: classical authors, toponymy, etc.

A seminar on ancient languages and epigraphy. Gandia 2009.

2009-07-26T10:45:00.026+02:00

Last week I attended the XXV Seminari de Llengües i d'Epigrafia Antigues, organized by the Acadèmia de Cultura Valenciana and directed by José Aparicio. It took place in Gandia, a city on the Mediterranean coast near Valencia, famous for its wide sandy beaches. However, the programme of the seminar was so full, with lectures and other activities, that we didn't have much time to enjoy the sunshine or the beaches, but I must say it really was worth the effort. One of the most interesting activities was a trip to an archaeological site, the Iberian settlement of El Molón, in Camporrobles (see picture on the left), about 100 kms west of Valencia. We had an excellent guide for this tour: the archaeologist Alberto Lorrio (University of Alicante), who has directed the excavations at El Molón in recent years. He gave us an informative and detailed description of the site, highlighting the fact that it shows a mixture of Celtiberian (i.e. Celtic) and Iberian elements, as it was located on borderline territory in ancient times. Professor Lorrio spoke both as an expert in Iberian and Celtiberian archaeology (you can see a list of publications here) and as someone who really loves his job and who has fought hard for the preservation of El Molón and other sites. The tour was most enjoyable, the only little problem being the scorching heat in the July afternoon!

The participants in the Seminar were among the leading scholars in the field of pre-Roman languages and epigraphy of the Iberian Peninsula: Javier Velaza (Univesitat de Barcelona), Xaverio Ballester (Universitat de Valencia), Eugenio Luján (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Joan Ferrer (Universitat de Barcelona), Jaime Siles (Universitat de Valencia) and others. There were also some students, both under- and post-graduate, from various classical departments. The lectures covered a wide variety of topics: archaeology, toponymy, Iberian language, ancient scripts, etc., and the ensuing debates, in which both professors and students participated, provided an interesting opportunity for the exchange of ideas. In one of the lectures, for example, we were shown a recently discovered Iberian sculpture, representing the head of an animal. There was a short inscription in Iberian alphabet on the stone, and we discussed the possible reading of the text. The most amusing activity, however, was to try to guess the animal species that was depicted in the sculpture. There were all kinds of suggestions: a horse, an Iberian lynx, even a monk seal, and it seems, using parallel evidence from other classical sources, that the latter was the likeliest option, which came as a surprise (at least to me). If I have the chance, I'll publish a picture of this Iberian monk seal in a future post.

During the seminar, a new issue of Elea was presented. Elea is a journal in which some of the papers from previous seminars are collected. In this issue (nº 9, see picture), there are some interesting articles from the 2006, 2007 and 2008 seminars. Furthermore, the editors have included a selection of classical papers on pre-Roman languages and scripts, by authors such as Jürgen Untermann and W. Meyer-Lübke, which is quite useful for the researcher.

Attending this seminar has been an enriching experience for me, especially because it has shown me a different, more personal approach to the world of academia. I must also thank the organizers for their brilliant job.

Origins of the Etruscans

2009-07-09T09:27:00.016+02:00

In 2004, a group of Italian researchers published an article with an innovative type of research about the origins of the Etruscans (see Vernesi et al, 2004). They analyzed the genetic components of bones found in Etruscan tombs and compared them with the genes of modern populations of the same areas. They found out that there were significant differences between these two populations, with a clear pattern of discontinuity which is by no means easy to explain. Suggesting a process of massive migration or population shift does not seem in accordance with archaeological evidence. The authors suggest a more plausible explanation (p. 702): “Those tombs belong [to] the social elite (...) and so the individuals we studied may represent a specific social group, the upper class. We do not know whether that group differed genetically from the rest of the population, which might be the case when a foreign elite imposes its rule, and often its language, over a region”. According to the authors, the genetic components of ancient Etruscans show similarities with those found in Near East populations, which makes them think of a possible gene flow from that area, but the results are not conclusive. In any case, the publication of this article triggered a series of research projects that have shed new light into the matter (for a complete view of the main developments you can take a look at Dieneke’s Anthropology Blog; e.g. this post). In a very recent research work (Guimaraes et al, 2009; see abstract here), the authors compared the genetic materials of ancient Etruscans, Medieval and present-day Tuscans. They found out that there is continuity between Medieval and modern populations, as expected, but not with ancient Etruscans.

I suppose in the next few years there will be more research in this area, especially with the development of newer, more accurate ways of analysing old genetic material. Although it is very difficult to interpret these data and establish possible affiliations between the various populations, it seems that the DNA analyses suggest, at least, a clear pattern of discontinuity in Etruria/Tuscany. Traditionally, the Etruscans (speakers of a non-IE language) have been seen as an autochthonous population of the Italian Peninsula, older than the Italic populations (speakers of IE languages). This view, based on a Roman-centred perspective, has rarely been challenged or tested, and has been held as undisputed truth for centuries. Now, with the development of new tools for research, it seems that the picture is exactly the opposite: it was the Etruscans, as an intrusive elite, that arrived later.

Now, the logical question is: where did they come from? Some connections with Turkish or eastern Mediterranean populations have been suggested from ther genetic data, but they don’t seem to be conclusive. I suppose there will be some more research on this, and not only in the field of genetics: it is necessary to compare the genetic data with the evidence found by archaeologists and linguists. Let’s take Mario Alinei for example. His idea that the Etruscans descended from ancient Hungarians is based on archaeological and linguistic evidence. Maybe he's right, or maybe not, but in any case his proposals are coherent (see this post for more details). One of his assumptions, namely the late arrival of the Etruscans, seems to be corroborated by independent research, as we have seen; his proposals about the chronology of Hungarian prehistory and the linguistic parallelisms between Etruscan and Hungarian are much more speculative and still need to be tested. A curious coincidence is that, according to Alinei, there are numerous Turkic elements in both the Hungarian and Etruscan languages, which he interprets in the context of Ugric-Altaic contacts in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC. I remembered this when I read about the ‘Turkish’ and eastern Mediterranean component in the Etruscan genetic material. It is obvious that the terms ‘Turkic’ and ‘Turkish’ refer to completely different concepts: a language family in Asia (Turkic) and a modern country where a Turkic language is spoken (Turkey). Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but who knows? I’m sure geneticists will come up with new, sometimes surprising results.

References
- Guimaraes et al (2009). Genealogical discontinuities among Etruscan, Medieval and contemporary Tuscans. MBE, Advanced Access published on-line. (Abstract).
- Vernesi et al (2004). The Etruscans: a population-genetic study. AJHG 74: 694-704.

Images (from top to bottom): 1. Sarcophagus of the Bride and Bridegrrom, 6th c. BC. Museo Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome; 2. Map of the Etruscan territories in ancient times; 3. Etruscan Musicians. From a tomb in Tarquinia, 5th c. BC.

Last Edit: 20 July 2009

From parents to children

2009-07-02T00:37:00.030+02:00

In fond memory of my parents, Ismael and Asunción.

We all have a mother tongue. In my case, it's Valencian, a Romance language usually classified as a dialect of Catalan (see map below). This is the language I learnt from my parents and the one I use today in everyday life, together with Spanish. It is obvious that languages are generally transmitted from parents to children, but there are circumstances that make this transmission a bit complicated, especially in cases where the mother tongue is not associated with power or prestige. To illustrate this point, let’s take a look at the history of Valencian/Catalan (I’ll try to be brief): The Late Middle Ages and Early Rennaissance were a period of splendour for this language, but by the late 15th century, under the pressure of the neighbouring powers (mainly Spain and France), there were signs of decay, which continued in the next centuries. It was still kept as the most common language for everyday communication but was not so relevant in some domains, for example in literature. This delicate balance came to an end in 1714, when the War of Succession brought about the first Bourbon King, Philip V, and with him a centralized, absolutist regime similar to the one they had in France. After the publication of the Decretos de Nueva Planta, Valencian/Catalan disappeared as an official language, substituted by Spanish, and its use was basically relegated to colloquial conversation. It was not until the second half of the 19th century that a series of Catalan/Valencian-speaking intellectuals started to think of their local language as something more than a just picturesque note. The early 20th century saw some developments in the use of Valencian/Catalan as a prestigious language, but the Civil War (1936-1939) and the Franco Regime (1939-1975) was a step backwards. After the restoration of democracy in 1975, the status of regional languages in Spain has grown considerably, and nowadays there is a lot of legislation aimed at protecting and promoting them.

When I was born, in 1968, there was only one official language in my region, and it was Spanish. Valencian was not taught at schools and most of its speakers could not even write it. But in spite of this long-lasting precarious situation, it had been kept alive by generations of people in my community. They were not the heroes or martyrs that nationalists, in Valencia or elsewhere, tend to imagine. They were just common people, people like us speaking their language and bequeathing it to their children. Maybe Valencian/Catalan was simply a lucky language, rescued from extinction at the very last minute. The forces behind modern states and their standard languages are really powerful, and the process of language substitution has been a reality in many places in recent centuries. But it seems that, beyond the great facts of history, the battles and invasions, the lists of kings and their deeds, and also beyond the works of the grammarians and antiquarians dreaming of the ideal land of the ancestors, the story of language is basically about common people. There is something particularly strong about the linguistic links between parents and their children. Otherwise, it’s hard to imagine why in 1968, after more than 250 years of decay, Valencian was still alive. And 250 years is actually a quarter of a millennium, which is quite relevant in historical terms. In this blog I have written extensively about the concept of language continuity, and today I have described a nice example, one that I know at first hand. And it’s quite recent. Let’s imagine other types of context, e.g. in prehistory, where languages were not under the pressure of highly complex entities such as modern states and modern societies. Mainstream historical linguistics seems to forget these details all too often, and the history of any language is usually described as the consequence of historical or imaginary facts including invasions, conquests and a continuous process of language substitution. Is it really so? Was it really like this?

Language continuity in Europe (III): Ireland

2009-06-13T11:57:00.012+02:00

Who brought Celtic languages to Ireland? And when? - It seems that there is no easy answer to these questions.

In general, islands are a good place to study population and language evolution, because they offer a more limited range of variation and better chances for establishing the chronology of events than in continental land. The British Isles are not an exception. In fact, there’s a detail that makes this area even more interesting for the researcher: due to their location in the northern Atlantic, the British Isles have been greatly affected by major climatic changes, especially glaciations. It is supposed, for example, that by the time of the Late Glacial Maximum (LGM), i.e. the coldest period of the last ice age (about 22,000 to 17,000 years BP), the British Island became a frozen desert, with no possibilities for human life. The re-population of the British Isles started from zero when the ice started to recede.

In the comments to a recent post in this blog we had an interesting discussion about the Celts. One of the commentators, Ian, suggested a book about this topic: Stephen Oppenheimer’s The Origins of the British (see below for full bibliographic details). I had never heard about this book before, and I found it interesting so I ordered it on the Internet and a week later I had it in my hands. Reading it was just a matter of days. No doubt about it, this is the ‘21st-century’ at work! Speed and availability. Ideal for inquiring minds.

In his book, Stephen Oppenheimer offers a detailed analysis of the history of human populations in the British Isles. Being a geneticist, he focuses primarily on the genetic material of these populations, combining it with other sorts of evidence, e.g. from archaeology or history texts. His research is quite comprehensive: he analyses and discusses the results obtained by previous authors, e.g. Sykes and Richards, and offers new, generally more accurate explanations for the history of British gene clusters. I had never seen such a complete and detailed account of western European genetic history, and, not having yet read any review of this book by other geneticists, I am not in a position to say if all the details of Oppenheimer’s theory are acceptable or not. In any case, I have the impression that the overall picture offered in this book is coherent and logical, and is bound to become a reference point in any future study of western European prehistory. Now, what is this ‘overall picture’? It is difficult to summarize Oppenheimer’s book in just one post, and I suppose I’ll be talking about it in future occasions. There is an article by Oppenheimer (published in Prospect), where you can find some of the main points in his theory.

The re-colonization of the British Isles took several steps, starting about 16,000 years ago after the LGM. The first colonizers came from the Franco-Spanish refuge, an area in northern Iberia and southwestern France where human life had not been interrupted by the ice. This Iberian gene flow is by far the most important element in the genetic components of the populations in the British Isles, especially in Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and other western areas. At about 12,300 BP there was another glacial period, called Younger Dryas, which also had an impact on this area. It is thought, however, that human population did not disappear from the British Isles in the Younger Dryas, even though there was a significant demographic drop. The Younger Dryas was much shorter than the LGM: by 11,000 BP the climate started to become much milder, like the one we have today. This period, known as Mesolithic, saw a new process of colonization from the continent, which two main lines: from Iberia and from northwestern Europe. This double migration path is actually a recurrent pattern in the prehistory of the British Isles, which is repeated in later times (Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age). According to Oppenheimer, this pattern of migration set the basis for the separation between Celtic and Germanic areas in the British Isles. In other words, the boundaries between these two areas are not the consequence of recent historical events, like the Anglo-Saxon invasion, but were established in a process that started in the Late Upper Paleolithic, after the LGM. Basically speaking, what we have here is a pattern of continuity of human populations. The genetic input from the earlier times (Paleolithic or Mesolithic) is the most relevant component in the genetic material found in populations of that area today. The contribution of later migrations, e.g. in the Neolithic, is considerably lower, which means that the expansion of agriculture and metallurgy was not the consequence of massive migration, but a local development. This is especially true in the case of Ireland, as we will see.

It is not clear if Ireland was re-colonized by humans immediately after the LGM, but there are some indications pointing in this direction. There is clear evidence, however, of human migration into Ireland during the Mesolithic, mainly from Iberia. On the left you can see a map from Oppenheimer’s web-page, with the distribution of one of the gene clusters from Iberia, following a typical pattern. The impact of later migrations into Ireland is generally considered low, in comparison with eastern Britain, which was under the influence of migrations from northwestern Europe. According to Oppenheimer, intrusive lines in the Neolithic account for 6-9 % of all Irish genes. This doesn’t mean that Ireland was isolated from the rest of the world in prehistory; in fact there were strong links between Ireland and other Atlantic European areas, as shown by Cunliffe and other authors who talk about the ‘Atlantic Façade’. But it is clear that the Neolithic and other later prehistoric periods did not involve a relevant population input in Ireland. Now, let’s go back to the initial question of this blog: Who brought Celtic languages to Ireland? And when? – There are several possibilities: in the Mesolithic, as the Continuity Theory proposes; in the Neolithic (Colin Renfrew’s theory); or in the Iron Age, as some people still think. - At this point, Oppenheimer asks a couple of interesting questions (p. 246): “how could a new language arrive during the Neolithic without people? (...) Was 6% invasion enough to change culture and language?” For him, the possibility of a Paleolithic or Mesolithic origin of Celtic languages in Ireland is “unlikely” (p. 222), but not impossible. It is clear that the door is open for new research on the languages and populations of the British Isles, and of Ireland in particular, with new perspectives and new tools that were not available just a few decades ago. And it is also becoming quite obvious that the Central-European theory of Celtic origins, which puts them in connection with the Halstatt or the La Tène Iron-Age cultures of the first millennium BC, is quite unacceptable.

References:
- Oppenheimer, Stephen (2007). Origins of the British. London: Constable and Robinson [first edition, hardcover: 2006, London: Constable and Robinson].

The first year: overview and prospects

2009-06-01T00:14:00.034+02:00

Well, it’s the first anniversary of Language Continuity, and in general terms I’m quite happy about it. I’ve published 44 posts so far, covering a variety of subjects, mainly in the field of historical linguistics (see OVERVIEW below). The number of readers has grown steadily since the beginning, with a total of 4,942 visits in one year (10,806 page views), averaging 13.5 visits and 29.6 page views per day (statistics from SiteMeter; period: 1st June 08 – 31st May 09).

In Language Continuity I am particularly interested in new theories and proposals that challenge traditionally held views on language. I’m sure that some readers must have been surprised at some of the proposals, but I must say I generally present them as possible (and interesting) new directions in linguistics, and not as the new ‘dogma’ destined to substitute the old one. Publishing posts has encouraged me to go on reading and researching, and at the same time has provided me with interesting feedback from readers, which I greatly value.

Now, what about the future? I hope to continue publishing the blog, and I actually have a lot of ideas for new posts. But I also have other plans. I will very probably start my PhD very soon (I hope my project is accepted), and it will be, not surprisingly, about languages in prehistory. The fact is that I started my post-graduate studies many years ago, in the early nineties, but I never finished my PhD (on the left you can see a picture of me at that time, in Whitby Abbey, Yorkshire). I decided that I wanted to do other things in life, partially because at that time I was not sure about what type of research I was really interested in. But I kept reading about linguistics (and many other things) and thinking that one day I might find the right motivation or the right mood to start researching. So here I am, at 41, ready to start my PhD, after about fifteen years in the ‘real world’. Maybe it’s not a bad idea after all. Who knows? I suppose it just depends on the person and the circumstances.

As I said earlier, I’d like to go on with the blog, publishing at least one or two posts a month. But at this moment I feel it would be interesting for me to hear your opinions about it: Do you find the blog interesting or useful? Would you change anything? Do you think blogs of this kind make any sense at all? Do you think it’s a good idea to resume my doctorate studies now or should I keep on as an independent researcher?... You can use the “comments” facility (or send me an e-mail) to express your opinions. Remember that, even though the blog is written entirely in English, you can write your comments in other languages too (French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Occitan, Galician,...).

Finally, an OVERVIEW of Language Continuity in its first year:

- I have published some posts with criticism of some traditional views on language change (here), language family trees (link), proto-Indo-European vocabulary (link), the domestication of the horse in connection with Indo-European expansion (link) and the Laryngeal Theory of PIE (here and here).

- I have presented various aspects of the Paleolithic Continuity Theory, with a series of proposals aimed at revising some important concepts in historical linguistics. First, a general introduction (here) and a post about alternative names for the theory (link); then some practical applications: language continuity in Scandinavia (link), Greece (link), Switzerland (link); origins of the Celts (here and here); Alinei’s theory about the Etruscans (link).

- In some other posts I have talked about some further applications of the Continuity Paradigm: social stratification in antiquity (link), languages in the Roman Empire (link), the formation of Romance languages (here, here and here), the expansion of Arabic (link), population and languages in the Mediterranean since the Paleolithic (link).

- Some posts are dedicated to individual scholars, with an analysis of their main contributions to linguistics or anthropology: Mario Alinei, Xaverio Ballester, Steven Pinker, Matteo Meschiari and Paul Shepard, Georges Dumézil, Francesco Benozzo, Gabriele Costa, Colin Renfrew.

- Another area of interest in Language Continuity is linguistic anthropology, with some posts about zoonyms (here and here), anthropology in connection with ancient European literary traditions (here and here), and Dumézil’s theories (link).

- I have also written about human evolution and the origins of language: general introduction (here), the Out of Africa theory (link), and the Neanderthals (link). (Population) genetics is also a common theme in this blog, as can be seen in several of the previously mentioned posts and in this one about Darwin’s geneaological trees.

- General linguistics and human languages are also present in the blog: criticism of traditional philosophical writing (link), concepts about language (3 posts: here, here and here), toponymy (link), and criticism of American linguistics (link).

Colin Renfrew. The Anatolian Hypothesis

2009-05-22T09:01:00.009+02:00

For many years, basically until the second half of the 20th century, the study of Indo-European (IE) was exclusively in the hands of linguists. They analyzed ancient languages, devising laws and family trees, and imagined the emergence and expansion of Indo-European as an event which involved a series of massive migrations or invasions occurring (what a coincidence!) a few centuries before the first attested documents written in IE languages. In the 1950s and 60s, the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marjia Gimbutas provided the archaeological evidence to support the traditional view. Her theory, generally known as the Kurganic Theory, was later developed by other authors, e.g. J P Mallory. It can be summarized as follows: the original homeland of the proto-IE (PIE) speakers was in the Russian steppes; they started to spread into other Eurasian territories between 4000 and 3000 BC. Gimbutas identified these early proto-Indo-Europeans with a series of prehistoric cultures of that time, especially the one that built the Kurgans, a type of burial mound. Another important aspect of this theory is the role of the horse, linked to with pastoralism and warfare. Needless to say, Gimbutas’ theory fitted perfectly well with the orthodox IE paradigm, and it soon became the most widely accepted explanation for IE origins. The first scholar who posed a real challenge to this view was the eminent British archaeologist Colin Renfrew (image on the left). His theories are based on a simple fact: a phenomenon of such proportions as the expansion of IE languages can only be explained in connection with a really significant event in prehistory. And this event, according to Renfrew, is the expansion of agriculture in the Neolithic. This puts the chronology of PIE a couple of millennia back in time (around 5000-6000 BC), and the PIE homeland somewhere in the Anatolian Peninsula, from where, alongside agriculture, IE languages (and peoples) spread towards Europe and Central Asia. For this reason, his theory is often referred to as the Anatolian Hypothesis.

There’s no doubt that Renfrew’s theories about IE origins are an important step forward in this field of study, and a stimulus for further reassessments of the IE question. The most important thing is that he proved the inconsistencies of the traditional view, for example the ones regarding the role of horses in the expansion of Indo-Europeans. Needless to say, Renfrew’s theory has generally been rejected by mainstream Indo-Europeanists, who prefer the more traditional view, based on a series of obsolete assumptions about language change and prehistory. Personally, I think that the diffusion of agriculture in the Neolithic must necessarily have had some relevant linguistic consequences, associated with the new technology and the socio-economic changes that it brought about, but it doesn’t seem to be the best explanation for the expansion of IE. As we have variously seen in this blog, this explanation could be found further back in time, in the Paleolithic.

Further reading:
- MALLORY, J. P. (1989). In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Language, Archaeology and Myth. Thames and Hudson.
- RENFREW, Colin (1987). Archaeology and Language. The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. Pimlico.

Populations and languages: the Strait of Gibraltar

2009-04-25T11:52:00.019+02:00

Many years ago I made a trip to Gibraltar. At that time I was a post-graduate student at the University of Valencia, and one of the courses I took was about dialectology and sociolinguistics. We had to do some research as the final assignment of the course and in my group we decided to go to Gibraltar to do some field-work about the linguistic situation of this peculiar place. We spent three days there, with our questionnaires and interviews, and we also had time to do some sightseeing: we walked around the city, we saw the famous monkeys and we finally climbed the Rock, from where we had some spectacular views of both Spain and the African coast, which is a mere 14 km away. We can imagine that, throughout history and prehistory, many humans living on either side of the Strait must have felt curious to know about the land that they could see across the water, and this curiosity could have led to a significant movement of human populations in both directions.
The surprising fact, however, is that the Strait of Gibraltar has been a barrier for human migration in all ages, especially in prehistory. The main reason for this is geological: the Strait of Gibraltar has remained as it is now for the last 5 million years, even at the various glacial ages, where the sea level lowered significantly all over the world. We also have other types of evidence, e.g. the archaeological record, but the most important confirmation has come from population genetics. I recently read an interesting article about this subject: Bosch et al, 2001, High-Resolution Analysis of Human Y-Chromosome Variation Shows a Sharp Discontinuity and Limited Gene Flow between Northwestern Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, American Journal of Human Genetics, 68:1019-1029). In this article, the authors analysed the genetic components of various populations in Spain and Morocco, combined with other evidence from archaeology and history, and reached a series of interesting conclusions. It seems for example that in both cases, the populations of today are mostly the descendants of the people who lived in these areas in the Paleolithic, with a minor impact of migration from the Middle East, probably associated with Neolithic expansion. On the other hand, the genetic components of Iberian and NW African populations show that they come from different origins. Human settlement in Iberia is connected with the expansion of modern humans into Europe from Eurasia or Anatolia, whereas the population of NW Africa is mostly connected with components that originated in the African continent. The gene flow across the Strait of Gibraltar is not considered relevant; it can be estimated at about 5%, and it could, at least partially, show the traces of some recent historical phenomena, like the expansion of the Roman Empire or the Arabic conquest of Iberia. There’s no doubt that the Strait of Gibraltar, as a natural barrier, has played a decisive role in the distribution of human populations, both for modern humans and for older types of hominids. Instead of crossing the 14 km stretch of water that separates Africa from Europe, it took humans a few thousand years to go all the way to the Middle East and eastern Europe until they reached the Iberian Peninsula. This is what I would call a ‘Grand Tour’.

Now, what are the linguistic consequences of all this? Is there also a linguistic barrier as well? Has this language barrier existed from prehistoric times? In a previous post I wrote about the expansion of Arabic as a consequence of the Islamic Empire. The main conclusion I reached was that Arabic dialects are spoken today only in areas where other Afro-Asiatic languages (formerly known as Hamito-Semitic) were already spoken before the arrival of the Arabs, and not in areas where there were other types of languages, e.g. in Persia or Iberia. I’m not sure if anyone had realised this simple fact before, but it looks quite clear in my opinion. The important factor here is affinity. The language of the conquerors (in this case Arabic) has a varying degree of influence on the languages of the conquered depending on the affinity between them. When the Arabs arrived in northern Africa they found Berber-speaking populations, and Berber languages belong to the Afro-Asiatic group. The subsequent process of hybridization led to the linguistic situation that we find in the area today, with a series of dialects which are considered regional variations of Arabic (with the exception of the areas where Berber languages have survived until today). What about Iberia? The languages spoken in this territory were quite different from Arabic; they were connected with Latin, an Indo-European language belonging to the Italic group. The Islamic conquest brought about a process of hybridization, with a significant exchange of linguistic (mainly lexical) material in both directions, as can be seen in the vocabulary of Spanish, Portuguese and other Ibero-Romance languages, and also in many features of the Hispano-Arabic dialect. However, Arabic and Romance languages were always perceived as something different. There were not enough opportunities for hybridization to produce significant hybrids between them; people spoke one of the languages, or both, but not a mixture of them (except perhaps in some local, pidgin-like cases). Another example of the importance of affinity in situations of language contact can be seen in the Roman conquest. The influence of the Romans was linguistically relevant in the Iberian Peninsula, where there was already a background of Indo-European languages, whereas it was rather insignificant in northern Africa, with no Indo-European background (see this post for more details and some maps).

It seems therefore that the population/language distribution in NW Africa and Iberia corresponds to a pattern that dates back to Paleolithic times, when modern humans arrived in these areas via different routes. The Strait of Gibraltar, as a natural barrier, was the main factor behind the whole process, limiting the possibilities of genetic or cultural exchange. Later developments, associated with the rise and fall of empires and the expansion of religions, were not strong enough to change the overall picture.

Notes on the illustrations:
- First picture: The Strait of Gibraltar from Spain. Source: OjoDigital (here).
- Second picture: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Alboran Sea. Source: NASA (here).

Origins of the Celts

2009-04-04T20:11:00.014+02:00

There is no doubt that the Celts occupy a central position in the history and prehistory of Europe. They spread through an extensive territory and their language and traditions have survived until today. Now, who were the Celts? Where did they come from? Several theories have been put forward to answer these questions. I will focus on two of them: the ‘traditional’ ones (e.g. Marija Gimbutas’ theory), and the recent proposals made by Mario Alinei and the Paleolithic Continuity Theory (PCT).

- It has traditionally been thought that the Celts emerged as a differentiated IE group in Central Europein the Late Bronze Age, i.e. at around 1,000 BC. Later, in connection with the expansion of the Iron Age Hallstatt and La Tène cultures, the Celts reached other European areas, where they settled.

- In the context of the PCT, the original territory of the Celts basically coincides with the areas where Celtic groups and languages were present at the beginning oh history, and in some cases even today: the British Isles, Belgium, and the Atlantic areas of France and Iberia (Portugal, Galicia, Cantabrian regions). Celtic languages were spoken in these areas from the Late Paleolithic or Mesolithic, and there was no relevant discontinuity until the times of the Romans. The expansion of Celtic elements, associated with metallurgy and other technical developments, took a west-east direction, and was carried out by intrusive elites rather than through massive migration.

What theory do I prefer? The answer is clear: I prefer the one proposed by the PCT. This will come as no surprise to the readers who are already familiar with this blog, as I have very often talked about the PCT in its various aspects and proposals. If you are new in Language Continuity, I think it’s a good idea to take a look at the posts under the “Continuity Theory” Label on the right, because this way you can have a better view on this. I won’t go into the details of the theory now, but at least I’ll try to give some reasons why I think its proposals about the Celts are reasonable.

First of all, and most importantly, I think that it is a question of common sense. According to the traditional view, the Celts emerged somewhere in Central Europe and then expanded from there to other areas, with the incredible result that they actually disappeared from their original homeland! This is really unheard of, or at least highly unusual. Following the traditional explanation, an area like Ireland, which is so clearly and deeply ‘Celtic’, is just a later settlement of those Celts who originated in Central Europe, where they had gathered a great amount of strength to start their European expansion. How is it possible that this ‘powerful’ Celtic core in Central Europe just vanished from history, whereas the Celtic element remained vigourously in the supposed ‘new’ areas? Does it make any sense to propose a framework where prehistoric peoples move from one place to another at incredible speed, or where entire populations decide to abandon their language and adopt a new one for reasons that are hard to believe, as if the supposed pre-IE populations were just dreaming of becoming IE? Obviously, this explanation is constrained by the traditional chronology of IE, which sees the origin of PIE (proto-Indo-European) at about 4,000 BC. This leaves a very short stretch of time to offer a plausible explanation of the Celtic ‘mystery’, and fosters the invention of unrealistic stories like the ones mentioned above. The PCT, with its new chronology for PIE, is not limited by such constraints.

Apart from these general considerations, there are also significant data, from a variety of sources, pointing in the direction of a continuity of Celtic elements in the Atlantic ‘façade’ of Europe. If we analyse the evidence from archaeology or population genetics, there is nothing suggesting any kind of relevant discontinuity caused by the arrival of exogenous elements. A very clear exposition of this theory can be found in a recent article by Mario Alinei and Francesco Benozzo (2008): Megalithism as a manifestation of an Atlantic Celtic primacy in Meso-Neolithic Europe (you can also find it in Italian, here, and in Portuguese, here). In this article, which I strongly recommend, the authors offer an innovative analysis of megalithism in the framework of the Continuity Theory. The oldest megaliths (5th millennium BC) were erected in Brittany, on the French Atlantic coast, and in the following centuries they spread to other Atlantic areas, especially those connected with the Celts, and later to other areas, e.g. in the Mediterranean. Menhirs and dolmens can be found in the Isle of Man, in Galicia and in any other corner of the Celtic world; they all seem to echo the maritime context which gave birth to the Celts in prehistory. It is curious, for example, that the higher distribution of megaliths in Britain corresponds to the Celtic speaking areas of the north and west, especially in Wales and Scotland, whereas in central and eastern parts of England megaliths are much less common. On the other hand, the magico-religious and linguistic elements associated with megaliths suggest an uninterrupted continuity which has even reached modern times.

Maybe some of the details of the theory need to be discussed or refined, but I think there is evidence to suggest that the people who built the first megaliths in western Europe were speakers of Celtic languages.

NOTE: the pictures have been taken from the Alinei-Benozzo article mentioned above.
- First picture: Dolmen at Forkhill, County Armagh, Ireland.
- Second picture: A megalith at Ysbyty Cynfyn, Wales.

Sirens and labyrinths

2009-03-22T17:58:00.022+01:00

Philosophers such as Empedocles, Heraclitus and Parmenides, who lived in the 6th and 5th c. BC, are usually grouped together under the term Pre-Socratic (or rather Pre-Platonic, as some scholars prefer), i.e. they are seen as the immediate predecessors of classical Greek philosophy, the golden age of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. However, it is also possible to analyze Pre-Platonic philosophy from a different perspective, not only as the initiators or precursors of something, but also as the recipients of a long-ranging oral and sapiential tradition that dates back to prehistoric times. In his recent book on the subject, La sirena di Archimede. Etnolinguistica comparata e tradizione preplatonica (Edizioni dell’Orso, 2008), the Italian linguist Gabriele Costa offers a comprehensive analysis of Pre-Platonic philosophy, identifying many of its elements as a manifestation of the above mentioned sapiential tradition: initiation rites, the use of ritual incubation for healing or divination, the use of breathing techniques or drugs to reach a ‘higher’ level of self-consciousness, the use of symbolic images, like the flight of the soul, to describe ecstatic experiences, the use of mystery and wordplay, including enigmas, the defense of the oral tradition as the only recipient of wisdom, the multifaceted nature of the philosopher as a guide or a poet, magician, diviner, healer, and more generally the repository of knowledge in the community. Can these elements be seen as the original invention of Pythagoras or other Pre-Platonic thinkers? Most probably not. In his book, Gabriele Costa sees these elements in connection with the world of shamanism, offering many examples that show clear parallels between them. On the other hand, similar elements can be found in other Indo-European (IE) traditions: in Rome, India, Iran, and also in the Celtic and Germanic areas, even at the level of poetic forms and language. What we see here is the continuity of these IE elements from prehistory to the beginning of classical antiquity, with oral poetry as the main vehicle of transmission. Apart from this sapiential or esoteric tradition, which focuses on the individual experience of the initiated, there is another main line of cultural transmission concerning the narration of the heroic past of the group, and expressed as a more collective type of poetry. As the Greek example shows, both types of poetry are rooted in the same prehistoric, already IE context. Classical philosophy was not just a ‘miracle’ or a creation ex novo. Philosophical and scientific speculation had already been born in the context of the ritualised and esoteric schools that preceded the classical age.

Apart from philosophical texts (including the ones attributed to Pre-Platonic authors and especially the ones written about them), the presence of this long-ranging tradition can also be felt in the narrative of myths. Costa offers some examples taken from the Odyssey and other ancient texts. Mythical stories such as the labyrinth of the Minotaur can be seen originally as the depiction of an initiation rite, which also includes a symbolic flight towards divinity. The story of the sirens, in Homer’s Odyssey, is interpretable in similar terms, where just one of the crew members of the ship, Ulysses, has to go through the ordeal of listening to the chant of the sirens. It’s not just that these scenes remind us of initiation rites; there is also a great deal of data, for example from the linguistic analysis of the terminology, pointing in this direction and making the comparison more than plausible, as the author shows with great richness of detail and depth of analysis.

In conclusion, La sirena di Archimede is one of these books that really opens new perspectives to the reader, and I strongly recommend it.

Linguistic diversity. My trip to Carcassonne

2009-03-14T16:42:00.016+01:00

In memory of Eusebi Penadés

Last December I went on a trip to the south of France (Departments of Aude and Ariège) with a group of people. We visited the walled city of Carcassonne (see photo below, left) and some nearby places like Mirepoix, the Abbey of Saint Hilaire and Foix and its castle, with the snowy summits of the Pyrenees in the background. We also stopped at a winery in Limoux, where we had the chance to taste some of the local wines. The one I found particularly tasty was Blanquette, a type of sparkling white wine that has been produced here since the 16th century. The photo below was taken during our visit to the winery in Limoux:In this photo there are two noticeable elements: a person on the right (me) and a big poster on the wall, with a smiling wine-grower and a sentence written in Lengadocian, the Occitan dialect spoken in the area. Let’s take a closer look at this sentence:

A Limoux, avèm le solelh demaï.

The French translation, which is also written on the poster, runs like this: “(À Limoux) on a le soleil en plus”. At first sight, some clear similarities can be seen between the Occitan text and its French counterpart: the preposition “a”, the definite article “le”, the word solehl (soleil), and the use of the verb avoir meaning possession. French (originally Langue d’Oïl) and Occitan (Langue d’Oc) are neighbouring Romance languages and ones expects these similarities. But Occitan is even closer to Catalan. In our sentence, for example, we have the ending “-em” of the verb (1st person plural), which is also typical of Catalan, for example in havem (also hem). However, in Catalan, like in Spanish, this verb does not mean possession; it is used exclusively as an auxiliary. Another similarity is the word mai, comparable to Catalan més (both connected to Latin magis). What we find here is a classical example of various linguistic isoglosses affecting the languages of a given territory, in this case Western Mediterranean Europe. Somehow, my trip from Valencia to Carcassonne was also a trip across a linguistic continuum, starting in the Valencia/Catalan area, with its own internal isoglosses; from south to north: Valencian (belonging to the Western Catalan group), Central Catalan, and Roussillon dialect (already in France). Then, the region of Languedoc, belonging to the Occitan area. If we had continued our trip further north, we would have found other Occitan dialects, and then a series of Oïl dialects, including the one we call ‘French’. Rather than language boundaries, what we have here is a language continuum, or transitional stages between dialects. Now, is this exactly the linguistic situation that we can find today? The fact is that much of the linguistic variation has disappeared after the emergence and expansion of a series of standard languages, generally associated with power and prestige. First it was Occitan and Catalan (in Medieval times), then it was French and Spanish. The expansion of literacy in recent centuries, primarily associated with the languages of prestige, has been one of the major factors in the disappearance of linguistic variation in favour of standard forms of language. On the other hand, the emergence of powerful centralised states has brought about the delimitation of stronger language barriers. The truth is that nowadays, for example, Lengadocian is spoken by a minority of the population in Languedoc, whose inhabitants generally see French as their ‘language’. But the existence of a pre-modern distribution of dialects can still be felt, as the example of the Limoux poster shows, even if the sentence looks a bit like a picturesque note for tourists. It is clear that whenever we want to deal with the languages of the past, we have to bear in mind that concepts such as ‘language’ or ‘language barrier’ cannot be understood as we see them today, in our highly-developed societies.

Ibn Mardaniś, the Wolf King

2009-03-01T23:28:00.037+01:00

The conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Muslim Empire started in 711, when the last Visigothic King, Roderic, was defeated; only some areas in the north remained independent, the rest of the Peninsula (Al-Andalus) being under the rule of the Emirs (and later Caliphs) of Cordoba. In the following centuries, the Christian territories (Asturias, Castile, Leon, Galicia, Aragon, Catalonia, etc.) became stronger and started their gradual expansion towards the south, which ended in 1492 with the conquest of Granada. All in all, the presence of Muslims in Al-Andalus comprises a period of more than seven centuries, which resulted in an important legacy that is still felt today, e.g. in the Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula, where there are many words from Arabic. Now, what was the linguistic situation in the territories under Muslim rule?

It is generally thought that the Muslim territories were basically bilingual in the first centuries of this period, with one language (Arabic) connected with power, religion and administration, and a series of Romance dialects, generally referred to as Mozarabic, spoken by a high percentage of the population. When the Castilians conquered the city of Toledo in1085, they found a multicultural society, with Christian, Muslim and Jewish elements. However, this situation of relative, diglossic balance in Al-Andalus started to break at the end of the 11th century, with the arrival of the Almoravids, who established their Kingdom from 1085 to 1145. The Almoravids had a more rigorous view on religious matters and pursued a repressive policy against the non-Muslim or non-Arabic. But they were not the only ‘fundamentalists’ who arrived in Al-Andalus. They were followed by the Almohads, who ruled between 1147 and 1227. It is clear that in those years the Romance dialects spoken in Muslim territory were in a very weak position, and some scholars think that by the 13th century their presence in those territories was minimal. It is supposed, for example, that when King James I of Aragon conquered Valencia in 1238, the population of this city was predominantly or (for some scholars) nearly exclusively Arabic-speaking. This, however, has been a matter of hard-fought debate, because of its ideological implications. In general, Arabic continued as a living language in the new Catholic kingdoms, but in a position of inferiority to the languages of the new elite. The repressive measures against the Muslim population increased after the end of the ‘Reconquista’, and culminated in 1606, when the remaining 'Moriscos' (Muslims 'converted' to Christianity) where expelled, ending a nine-century period of Arabic as a spoken language in the Iberian Peninsula.

As we have seen, the emergence of fundamentalist ideologies, triggered by a series of complex historical events, put an end to a long history of cultural hybridization and coexistence in Al-Andalus. If we look at some of the historical figures of this period we can get a rich picture of the times they lived in. One of them is Muhammad Ibn Mardaniś (1124 or 1125- 1172), also known as the Wolf King. He ruled over the Kingdom of Murcia (one of the Taifa Kingdoms into which Al-Andalus was divided at the time) and became an important political figure of his time, and also a controversial one. He expanded the limits of his Kingdom, incorporating new territories in eastern Spain, among them the region of Valencia. King Mardaniś was an example of hybridization. He came from a Hispanic family who had converted to Islam (his surname is supposed to derive from the same source as Martínez or other similar Romance names). His attitude towards the Catholic Kingdoms or the presence of Hispanic elements in his troops, and also some aspects of his private life (for example the clothes he used to wear), reveal the mixture of cultural elements in his personality. During his reign he had to fight the Almohads, who were trying to impose a unified, ultra-orthodox state in Al-Andalus. It was only after his death, in 1172, that the Kingdom of Murcia became a vassal to the Almohads. This defeat can also be seen as the end of an era in the history of the Iberian Peninsula, and the beginning of another. I find it surprising that his life, so full of events and marked by such a rich and controversial personality, has not yet inspired a major literary work or a feature film.

Notes:
- for more on Ibn Mardaniś you can read this article, by Ignacio González Cavero. In Spanish.
- further reading on the languages of Al-Andalus: Federico CORRIENTE (2008). Romania Arabica. Tres cuestiones básicas: arabismos, 'mozárabe' y 'jarchas'. Madrid, Trotta.
Images:
- first picture: Muslim architecture in the Mosque of Cordoba.
- second picture: Castle of Monteagudo, near Murcia, an important place in Ibn Mardaniś's life. Source: here.

Last Edit: 5 March 2009

American linguistics

2009-02-17T11:20:00.016+01:00

I have recently read an excellent book by the Spanish linguist Enrique Bernárdez: El lenguaje como cultura (Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 2008). This book covers a wide range of linguistic topics that I will discuss in future posts, especially his analysis of the concept of ‘language’ and his critique of some common assumptions in linguistics and human sciences. The title of the book (Language as Culture) is actually a clear indication of one of the main themes of his proposals. Today I am going to focus on one of the topics covered by Bernárdez in his book: the use of English in science.

It is clear that English has become the predominant language for international communication. It is the lingua franca of today, allowing the exchange of ideas between people who speak different languages. This is also felt in science, where English is by far the most usual language in all kinds of publications (books, articles in journals) and meetings (conferences, congresses, etc.). Linguistics is not an exception in this common trend: publishing books or articles in English is a priority for anyone who wants to be known as a linguist. Otherwise, you simply don’t exist as a linguist, especially for the American establishment. According to Bernárdez, American linguists tend to use bibliographic references that have been published in English, systematically ignoring the rest. The growing prevalence of English in science puts a lot of pressure on the authors who are not native speakers of this language, because they have to make an extra effort to produce 'acceptable' texts. And it is also a matter of style: the scientific discourse of English-speaking scientists, including their choice of vocabulary and conceptual imagery, is usually taken as a model. The driving force behind this ‘adaptation’ is the need to be considered ‘acceptable’ by the establishment. Otherwise, you simply don’t exist, especially by American standards. In linguistics, there is also a further negative consequence of this globalized process: Standard English is usually taken as the reference point for the study of 'language' (general principles, origins of language, etc.) and even for the comparative study of individual languages. A clear example of this is Chomskyan linguistics. Some authors, for example Takao Suzuki, have pointed out that the use of English, or European languages in general, as the reference point can lead to a wrong understanding of phenomena which are present in other languages of the world. But the truth is that, especially in American theoretical linguistics, this ‘monolingualism’ (understood in more than one sense) is not perceived as a potential shortcoming. Focusing on Standard English, they avoid the trouble of having to face real language (or languages) in the real world.

Now, is it true that American scientists tend to ignore articles or books that have not been published in English? I felt curious about it, and decided to take a look at my book-shelves to see if I could test this claim. I picked a book at random and this is the result of my 'analysis':

- Steven Pinker. The Stuff of Thought. New York, Viking, 2007. I read this book last summer and I found it quite insightful, written with Pinker’s usual display of intelligence and richness of detail. The book is quite thick (nearly 500 pages long) and it includes thirteen pages of bibliography, with a total of 597 references. I have taken the trouble to check these references one by one, to see the languages in which they were published. What is the result? Yes, you guessed right: all of them were published in English, 597 out of 597 references! 100 %! It must be said that in many cases these references were originally written in other languages and later translated into English, but the question is obvious: What about the texts that have NOT been translated into English? Do they not count? Even in the domain of linguistics, where the specialists are supposed to know more than just their own language, it is becoming increasingly normal to find only-English references. American (or American-like) mainstream theoretical linguistics, vastly influenced by Chomsky’s ideas, seems to be a self-sufficient, inbred, uniform world. But that is something I’ll be talking about in a future post.

Etruscans and Hungarians

2009-02-12T10:18:00.039+01:00

Etruscan is an ancient language of the Italian Peninsula, now extinct. Reading the Etruscan alphabet is not a major problem for the experts, who have deciphered a large corpus of inscriptions. Understanding the language, however, is a different issue. A limited list of words and a series of grammatical and phonological features have been identified, but, on the whole, Etruscan remains a bit of a mystery. And also a language isolate, because no clear connections have been found between Etruscan and any other known language. In 2003, the Italian linguist Mario Alinei published a book with a new theory about the origin of Etruscan, linking it to Old Hungarian (Alinei, Mario. Etrusco: una forma arcaica di ungherese. Bologna, Il Mulino, 2003; also translated into Hungarian: Alinei, Mario. Osi kapocs: A magyar-etruszk nyelvrokonság. Kiadó, Budapest, 2005).

According to Alinei, the Etruscans were an intrusive elite that expanded from the Carpato-Danubian area to northern Italy at around 1000 BC, spreading over a territory which was already (and still is) Italic-speaking. During the Bronze Age, the Carpathian Basin was the most important metallurgic centre in Europe. This is where the common ancestor of Old Hungarian and Etruscan was spoken, a language belonging to the Uralic group but highly influenced by Turkic elements through a process of acculturation. Needless to say, this theory can only be understood in the context of the Paleolithic Continuity Theory, with its revised chronology for European languages and an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to the study of languages in prehistory. Alinei’s book is 481 pages long and it includes an impressive amount of evidence from various disciplines, especially from archaeology, to support his theory, which is inevitably bound to be controversial, because it challenges both the linguistic establishment and the historical tradition that sees the arrival of the Magyars at their current territory as a result of Arpad’s conquest in 895 AD. Obviously, the only way to understand the full extent of Alinei’s theory is by reading the book itself. Unfortunately, it has not yet been translated into English. On this web-page, you can find a summary of the book written in English, and also some additional material. It is a useful summary, but I must say I don’t like it much, because the main points of the theory are presented without a clear context, and the layout is rather inelegant. However, one of the good things about this summary is that it provides some practical examples adapted from Alinei's book, where relevant, sometimes striking similarities are found between the texts of Etruscan inscriptions and Hungarian (see pp. 14-15 of the summary: grammatical words and morphemes; pp. 16-17: names of political leaders, officers and public institutions; p. 17: kinship terminology; p 18: religion; p. 19: professions; p. 20: place names; pp. 21-28: translation of inscribed texts, for example the Vetulonia kyathos, see images below).

To get a more complete view of Alinei’s Etrusco-Hungarian theory I recommend a series of alternative sources, some of them included in the above mentioned web-page:

- Léonard, Jean-Lèo. Review of M. Alinei, Etrusco: una forma arcaica di ungherese [L'etrusque: une forme archaïque du hongrois], Bologna, Il Mulino, 2003, published in "Etudes finno-ougriennes", 38 (2006), pp. 228-237. The author of this review provides a complete summary of Alinei’s book, including the most relevant information and putting it in the right context. He also discusses some previous reviews of the book, by Gheno and Szilágyi. Let’s see a quote from Léonard’s article: (p. 229): “Le livre récent de Mario Alinei, qui présente une thèse à première vue audacieuse sur la filiation entre l’étrusque et le (paléo)hongrois, n’est pas un délire étruscomaniaque ou magyaromane de plus. On pourra en critiquer de nombreux details, corriger des correspondances étrousco-ougriennes et des interprétations philologiques, mais on pourra difficilement ignorer la solidité de l’édifice construit par l’auteur”.

- Morris, Jonathan. Review of Mario Alinei, Etrusco: Una Forma Arcaica di Ungherese [Etruscan: An Archaic Form of Hungarian], Il Mulino, Bologna, 2003, published in "Mother Tongue", n. 9 (2004). A detailed review of Alinei’s book, written in English by Jonathan Morris. I would like to quote the final remark of this review, which is quite significant: “Alinei’s linguistic conclusions may thus be as important for Uralic studies as Ventris’ decipherment of Linear B was for Greek”.

- Tamas-Tarr, Melinda. Corrispondenza con Mario Alinei e documentazione e riflessioni sull’eco ungherese a proposito del volume “Etrusco: una forma arcaica di ungherese”, published in “Osservatorio Letterario”, n. 47-48, Nov-Dic/Jan-Feb. 2005-2006. In this interesting article, Melinda Tamas-Tarr offers an accurate account of Alinei’s theories and also quotes some Hungarian authors who have expressed their opinions about the book. Alinei’s response to this criticism is also included. One of the commentators (András Bencsik) relates a funny anecdote. Some years ago he attended a speech given by Alinei in Budapest. The Italian linguist greeted the audience with the following words: “I have never spoken in front of so many Etruscans”.
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In my opinion, the link between Hungarian and Etruscan, whose validity must still be further tested, is a very interesting hypothesis in the field of historical linguistics.

Last Edit: 8 June 09

A new journal: Liburna

2009-02-01T12:08:00.032+01:00

The word liburna refers to a type of ship used by the Romans, who took the idea from the Liburnians, an ancient people of the Adriatic. It is also the name of a new journal about human sciences, whose general editors are Xaverio Ballester and Eduardo Ortiz. In the first and current issue, published in November 2008 (see image on the left), we can find some general information about the journal. Let's see an excerpt: "Liburna is dedicated primarily to the publication of articles and book reviews with an interdisciplinary approach to all areas of the Humanities, as well as previously unpublished translations". The eclectic nature of this journal is one of its identifying marks. There are articles about archaeology, literature, linguistic anthropology and other scientific areas, and also a series of poetic texts translated into Spanish (the journal starts with a beautiful poem by Fernando Pessoa called Oda Marítima). One of the aims of Liburna is the publication of articles about languages and literatures that do not generally appear in journals written in the major Western languages. In the first issue, for example, there is an article about the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova and a selection of his poems.

Liburna is a serious scientific journal, but also a peculiar one indeed. Let’s take a look, for example, at the following editorial requirements: “The journal’s only “Guidelines” are that bibliographical or explanatory footnotes will not be permitted and authors may not make reference to their own work or to forthcoming publications”. When you look at the articles, with no footnotes, you realize that they look quite different from the ones you usually find in journals. On the other hand, the absence of ‘self-reference’ or ‘self-citations’ results in a different way of organizing the information in the articles, which is quite interesting in itself. For some scholars, writing an article without quoting their own previous publications may be a real challenge!

Another requirement is that “texts will only be published by authors with a Ph.D.”. That excludes me, because I only have a BA and an MA. At least for the moment, because I’m actually planning to start my PhD soon. I must say I’m quite happy to be an ‘independent’ linguist, reading, writing and researching outside the world of academia, but I think that completing a PhD is not a bad idea either. It would be about historical linguistics and I would probably do it at the University of Valencia (other offers are welcome too!).

One of the most interesting sections in Liburna is Consignatario, which includes book reviews. I made my own little contribution to it with a short review (written in English) of Christiansen and Kirby, eds. (2003), Language Evolution, OUP, a book that I have already discussed in this blog (see here).

Darwin's tree

2009-01-23T23:36:00.030+01:00

It is easy to see some parallelisms between traditional historical linguistics and biology, where genealogical trees are a usual depiction of how new species split from the common trunk. However, as we have variously seen in this blog, the application of the genealogical approach to linguistics is misleading, or basically wrong (vid. this post and this one about alternative concepts such as hybridization, and also here and here for some criticism of language family trees). The surprising news is that, according to some research, genealogical trees may also be false in biology!

I have read an interesting article by Graham Lawton recently published in The New Scientist (21 January 2009): Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life, in which it is suggested that a process called HGT (Horizontal Gene Transfer), initially seen as a minor phenomenon in species evolution, mainly affecting microbia and other simple forms of life, has turned out to be much more relevant than first thought, affecting other types of species and being identified as the cause of some important events in evolution. The exchange of genetic material between different species can explain many aspects of DNA variation that remain unexplained in the context of the traditional tree-of-life model. It is suggested that the whole process of biological evolution should be seen as a much more complex phenomenon: rather than the clear, straight lines of the typical genetic tree, it looks more like a web-structure. Some researchers think that the idea of genetic trees in biology should be abandoned; other researchers think that the tree model can still be used in biology, combining it with HGT. In any case, this current debate in biology resembles some of the things I have said about language trees and language change in this blog. Let's see an excerpt from Lawton's article, where he quotes John Dupré, a philosopher of science. These are Dupré's words: "Our standard model of evolution is under enormous pressure. We're clearly going to see evolution as much more about mergers and collaboration than change within isolated lineages". Something like this could also be said about historical linguistics. Some biologists even use the word hybridization to refer to some aspects of the new model. Note: in the picture you can see a drawing made by Charles Darwin in one of his notebooks (1838), which is actually the first depiction ever made of a "Tree of Life", an essential element in evolution theory. I have taken the picture from The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online: link.

The Laryngeal Theory revisited

2009-01-11T18:00:00.023+01:00

A recent article in Language Log, written as a guest author by the American linguist Donald Ringe, has triggered an interesting discussion about historical linguistics and Indo-European (IE) studies, in which I have also participated. You can read the post and the comments here: The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe.

One of the discussion topics was the Laryngeal Theory, a stronghold of traditional IE studies. In a previous post in this blog (Laryngealists) I already gave my opinion about this theory, so it’s not necessary to repeat the same arguments again. In the recent discussion at Language Log, however, I added some more information. For example, the fact that there are some linguists who have never accepted the Laryngeal Theory. Among them, Giuliano Bonfante and Witold Manczak. In the PCT workgroup we have Ballester and Alinei.

As you can see, the IE Laryngeal Theory is not as generally accepted as some people would like to believe. The surprising thing is that it is still taken seriously by many linguists.

This discussion reminded me of an article by Xaverio Ballester that I included as reference material in my first post about the Laryngeal Theory. This is the full citation: Ballester, Xaverio, "/a/ y el Vocalismo Indoeuropeo", Alessandria 1 (2006) 3–37. In this article, Ballester criticizes many aspects of the various reconstructed phonemic systems that have been proposed for IE, especially the ones that include laryngeals. In his opinion, these ‘systems’ are rather artificial and do not correspond with the distribution of phonemes that are usually found in most human languages. They look more like the invention of some linguists in order to justify the ‘structure’ of their proposals. The most striking example is the fact that the phoneme /a/ is not present in many of the proposed IE vowel sets. It seems that this basic phoneme was a problem for some theoretical linguists, a real obstacle for the purity of their method, so they preferred to devise an a-less model. Ballester’s article provides all kinds of evidence to prove the existence of /a/ in PIE and the absurdity of the Laryngeal Theory and other proposals which were born in the context of structuralism in linguistics.

Finally, a very simple experiment, for which we will use Wikipedia (I’m not very fond of Wiki but it’ll be useful for our purposes). Take a look at the article about Indo-European Sound Laws: Vowels and Syllabic Consonants. In the first column on the left we have the “old reconstruction”, that is the one that was proposed at the beginning of IE studies by linguists such as Franz Bopp (1791-1867; portrait on the left). As you can see, the letters in this column look familiar and simple. In the second column we have what is described as “New reconstruction”. Take a look at the symbols, and the combinations of vowels and laryngeals. What do you think of them? I agree with Ballester when he says that these things do not represent any human language at all. They are mere theoretical speculations.

Last Edit: 31 March 2009
Reason for edit: the inclusion of a link to Ballester's article.

The year of the Neanderthal

2009-01-02T19:03:00.017+01:00

Who were the Neanderthals? Why did they become extinct? What was their relationship with early humans? Did they co-exist, or mix? Did they speak languages similar to ours? Did they disappear because of climate change? Or was it because they couldn’t compete with the emerging, better adapted Homo Sapiens Sapiens?... There are many questions about Homo Neanderthalensis and also many researchers trying to find the answers. The Web is full of sites devoted to Neanderthals or to human evolution. One that I found particularly interesting is a blog called Mundo Neandertal, written in Spanish. Its author, Martín Cagliani, has already published more than 500 posts in it, including all sorts of information about the subject and even interviews with some of the leading researchers. Definitely, the Neanderthals are generating a lot of news, both in the Web and in traditional press. The good thing is that behind the news there is usually an interesting research project. For example this one: the reconstruction of a Neanderthal vocal tract, based on the remaining fossil record (you can read the information about this experiment here, and even listen to a sample recording). Or this one: in 2006, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology launched the Neanderthal Genome Project, which has already yielded highly interesting results. Quite notably, the researchers in this project come from various scientific areas, including linguistics and primatology.

Cova Negra, near Xàtiva (Valencia, Spain), a cave where some Neanderthal fossils have been found.

Many of the questions about extinct hominids may never be answered, but the great amount of recent research, with a combination of new discoveries (fossils, archaeological sites) and the application of new techniques, for example DNA sequencing or climatic simulations, is at least suggesting important clues about our past. And that includes the study of human language and its origins. Are we the only hominids with a capacity to produce oral speech? Did the ‘languages’ of other species, especially the ones closest to us, e.g. the Neanderthals, influence our own way of producing speech? There is always a new question for the researcher.

The past year has seen important developments in the study of Neanderthals and it seems that there is more news on the way. Who knows? Maybe 2009 will be the year of the Neanderthal.

An article in a journal

2008-12-26T18:35:00.037+01:00

Culturas Populare s is an interesting journal about compared literature, anthropology and folklore studies which is published on the Internet. In the last issue (nº7, July-December 2008) there is an article written by me, in Spanish (you can find it here). This article originated as a revised and expanded version of a post that I published in my blog a couple of months ago (Ancestral Zoonyms).

This is the complete bibliographic citation of the article:
- SANCHIS CALABUIG, Jesús. "Antropología y lingüística histórica: encuentros y desencuentros". Culturas Populares. Revista Electrónica 7 (julio-diciembre 2008), 9 pp.

As you can see, I signed it with my full name, i.e. my first name (Jesús) and my two surnames (Sanchis Calabuig). This is the tradition in Spain and in other Spanish-speaking countries, where we have a two-surname system: the first one is your father’s, in my case Sanchis, and the second one is your mother’s, in my case Calabuig. I normally use the first one only, as you can see in the blog posts, but when I wrote the article I was not sure what version to use. As it was my first contribution to a journal, I had to think about it carefully. I finally decided to use the full one.

Well, the year 2008 is nearly over, and I must say it's been quite interesting for me. I hope to continue researching and writing in 2009 and beyond.

Dear readers of Language Continuity:
I wish you all a very Happy New Year!

Kandinsky: the Blue Mountain

Francesco Benozzo. La Tradizione Smarrita.

2008-12-22T20:15:00.015+01:00

I have just read an excellent book, written by Francesco Benozzo, an Italian scholar of Celtic studies. Its title is La Tradizione Smarrita (Roma: Viella, 2007), which could be translated as The Lost Tradition. In this book the author analyses the earliest forms of literature in Western Romance languages (Occitan troubadour poetry, chansons de geste, etc.), linking them with an oral tradition which goes back to the times of the Celts, well before the Roman conquest. According to the author, there are many formal and thematic parallelisms between these two traditions. On the other hand, the medieval “troubadour”, and also some imagery which is found in early Romance literature, can be seen as the remnants of a much earlier period, when the poet-sorcerers, or shamans, and their ritual, played an important role in Western European society. The book offers a great amount of evidence to support the author’s thesis: text and linguistic analysis, anthropological data, historical sources. All in all, La Tradizione Smarrita is recommendable for anyone interested in the history of Western European literature and the origins of Celtic mythology.

Francesco Benozzo is a member of the Continuity Theory (CT) workgroup, and he has applied the CT approach to his research on compared literature, anthropology and Celtic studies, as can be seen in his book La Tradizione Smarrita, and also in other writings (you can find some of his articles here). He has also translated a series of old Celtic texts into Italian and edited some modern literary works, apart from creating his own. But this is not all. When I entered his web-page for the first time I discovered yet another interesting thing about Benozzo: he is a musician, an expert in the Celtic harp. He regularly gives concerts, where he plays the harp and sings in old Welsh and other languages, and has also recorded several albums (you can take a look at his web-page for some samples of his music and further information about his discography).

Toponymy and historical linguistics

2008-12-14T12:22:00.009+01:00

This weekend I attended a conference on onomastics, i.e. the study of the history and use of proper names, including place names (toponyms) and people’s names (anthroponyms). It was held in Xàtiva, a town near Valencia (you can find the full programme of the conference here, written in Catalan). In general, I found the talks quite interesting, especially the ones given by Josep Moran (University of Barcelona), Emili Casanova (University of Valencia) and Agustí Ventura (former professor of Latin and an expert in local history and toponymy). There were also some insightful contributions by other participants, whose research focused on specific areas or villages, e.g. Enric Mut’s account of the toponymy of Guadassuar and Francisco Llácer’s new ideas about the toponymy of the Algemesí area, both in the Valencia province. The world of toponyms is full of little jewels that can be of great interest for the linguist. In recent times I have become increasingly interested in this field of study and, in fact, I’m currently doing some research on toponymy in collaboration with Xaverio Ballester (University of Valencia).

Toponyms and anthroponyms have never played a much relevant role in historical linguistics or in theoretical linguistics. As we have already seen in this blog (for example in the previous post, see here), historical linguists are mainly interested in establishing genealogical relationships between languages by means of laws and principles. Place-names and people’s names do not fit very well into this theoretical framework: they offer a much more real and complex picture of language, and that's not something that many linguists are comfortable with. The history of a toponym tells us about the different languages or dialects that have shaped it through the ages, regardless of genealogies or language families. Human languages are the result of people’s interaction, which happens in all directions. Concepts such as ‘language unity’ or ‘purity’, or ‘deviation from the norm or from the common ancestor’ are modern developments or purely abstract ideas, and are not very useful if we want to study the history (or prehistory) of languages. There are other approaches, other tools to look into language history or to analyse toponyms and anthroponyms in a scientific way, and I'm actually quite interested in them.