Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

THE INDO-EUROPEAN BIG BANG

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/the-indo-european-big-bang-9dba2fd24342

Xavier Rouard searches and researches the linguistic world, scientific research of course, for the origin, the cradle, the homeland, or the motherland, of Indo-European. He is not the only one in the world, but he goes against practically all the others by positioning this linguistic nursery in Central Asia based on a Eurasian or trans-Eurasian language or languages. But precisely Eurasian languages only came into existence from the moment when syntactic-analytic Indo-Iranian languages left the Iranian plateau where they had stationed themselves when they arrived from Black Africa, some 40,000 years ago, or BCE, not much difference here. They had to go through the Ice Age first and finally get on the move after this climate event probably around 15,000 BCE, some east to the southern Asian continent, with Pakistan and India, others west down into Mesopotamia and from there to Europe. These people, on both side, encountered people who spoke other languages, Turkic agglutinative languages, and isolating Sino-Tibetan languages, mostly. These languages had integrated the Denisovans and their own language(s). Thes encountered people were hybrid Homo Sapiens with a varying proportion of Denisovan DNA in Central Asia, and the same in Mesopotamia with             a varying proportion od Neanderthalensis DNA. When they reached Europe, the population was essentially of Turkic language and origin with a varying level of hybridization with European Homo Neanderthalensis. It is such encounters that generated or engendered the various Indo-European or Indo-Aryan languages

My approach is phylogenetic and thus it is absolutely impossible for me not to take into consideration the migrations and geographic, hence social, cultural and linguistic movements of these populations. That’s the basic principle of Joseph Greenberg who considered that all these migrations had only one matrix or melting pot that produced the emergence of human articulated language on the basis of what these emerging Homo Sapiens inherited from the other Hominins from which they were descending.

But Joseph Greenberg and his disciples encountered a problem: in all language you should find a certain number of words whose “roots” are universal and stable in meaning. These are the roots coming from Black Africa before any migration  out of Black Africa. The problem is then that it does not enable any topology of languages. So, they, Greenberg and his disciples, tried to introduce “grammatical” or “syntactic” words, but even so it does go that far.

To get somewhere you have to ask the question about the phylogeny of articulated language(s), and there you only find three articulations in a precise order: root-languages (by the way vastly ignored by Xavier Rouard), Isolating character languages, and agglutinative as well as synthetic-analytic languages according to the migrations out of Black Africa. If you do not consider this phylogeny, then you put all sorts of languages together in the melting pot and you let things happen all by themselves. In my approach, languages are in contact thanks to the contacts established among the various communities speaking different languages, with exchanges, borrowings and communication.  But finding out that words are vastly common among the languages of this Central Asian area does not prove anything. It is just the proper way languages works at the level of words.

60% of English words are of French origin. That does not make English a Romance language because the syntax of English is definitely Germanic, and this makes English a Germanic language. That’s why  a language can borrow words from another language because the syntax is not changed. Syntactic changes  can only come from the phylogenic evolution of the concerned language, within the phylogeny of its linguistic family, within  the phylogeny of language as a human competence.

Welcome and enter the debate.

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2024

14 Pages

Languages and Linguistics,  *  Black/African Diaspora,  *  Indo-European Studies,  *  Human origins (Anthropology),  *  Phylogeny

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:19 AM