Zompist Bboard Again

missals wrote: ↑Tue Jan 14, 2020 9:08 pmThis one really surprises me - How far does the word "forget" go here? IIRC Zoroastrian tradition is aware of Alexander and his conquest of Iran (him being regarded as a villain for the destruction of sacred fires), and Cyrus is mentioned in the Bible. Does this mean the Iranians forgot about the details of Achaemenid history? Or they were unaware of when Cyrus reigned?

I'm thinking mostly of the Shahnameh, which has a long treatment of Alexander but almost nothing on the Achaemenids. In fact very little of it is even about Pars, the Achaemenid heartland; it centers on Seistan and what is now Turkestan. I don't think Cyrus is even mentioned, though I haven't got to that part yet.

Last I checked — though I am far from up to speed on the literature — very light skin and hair typical of Northern Europe, as distinct already from Mediterranean Europe, has arisen more by selection than by any population movements, due to the introduction of agricultural economy leading to less vitamin D intake. Before this fishing and marine hunting would have provided sufficient vitamin D even despite low sunlight in high latitudes (as they still do for circumpolar hunter-gatherers).

I've heard this before, and I worry that it's one of those things everyone accepts because it "makes sense," without any definitive proof.

For one thing, very little vitamin D is produced by exposure to the face and hands alone, so the main pressure on people suffering from vitamin D deficiency would be to take their shirts off, immediately increasing their vitamin D production by a factor of more than ten (greater than the increase they'd get by moving to the equator). If it's too cold to take their shirts off, then we have a temperature problem, not a sunlight problem, and this would presumably create the greatest pressure to develop light skin in areas where it's too cold to take your shirt off in the winter, rather than in areas of low sunlight. So light skin would be most common in farming populations of central Asia, Manchuria, and Korea, while in Europe skin would get darker as you moved from east to west. Southern Sweden would face the same lightening pressure as Shandong, and both locations would face lower pressure than Kashmir.

Also, light skin just happens to be most common in Europe in places where things like blue eyes are also most common. Last time I checked, there was no practical explanation of blue eyes. So we're ready to accept that blue eyes are a random variation spread by happenstance or sexual selection, but when it comes to light skin we look for a practical explanation. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that we all accept it a little too blindly.

Moose-tache, I think you have found a major problem with the vitamin D hypothesis - one that never occurred to me but now seems glaringly obvious. That said, I haven't yet heard of any vitamin D deficiency problems in Afro-Americans in places like New York or Chicago (though that may of course simply because they take in enough vitamin D in their food, like everyone in the more prosperous countries of the world.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Wed Jan 15, 2020 10:20 am Moose-tache, I think you have found a major problem with the vitamin D hypothesis - one that never occurred to me but now seems glaringly obvious. That said, I haven't yet heard of any vitamin D deficiency problems in Afro-Americans in places like New York or Chicago (though that may of course simply because they take in enough vitamin D in their food, like everyone in the more prosperous countries of the world.

It seems that the effect only becomes significant at 50° latitude - a line that runs through Canada. For the UK, further north than the main body of the USA, rickets is now associated with dark skin -

Any child who doesn't get enough vitamin D or calcium either through their diet, or from sunlight, can develop rickets. But the condition is more common in children with dark skin, as this means they need more sunlight to get enough vitamin D, as well as children born prematurely or taking medication that interferes with vitamin D.

quoth https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/rickets-and-osteomalacia/. How much that is due to cultural concomitants, I don't know. The advice does state

For example, rickets is more common in children of Asian, African-Caribbean and Middle Eastern origin because their skin is darker and needs more sunlight to get enough vitamin D.

but that probably doesn't adequately control for behaviour.

Thank you, Richard. I wasn't aware of that.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Wed Jan 15, 2020 10:20 am That said, I haven't yet heard of any vitamin D deficiency problems in Afro-Americans in places like New York or Chicago (though that may of course simply because they take in enough vitamin D in their food, like everyone in the more prosperous countries of the world.

Subclinical vitamin D deficiency is common in the US - see here:

A group of international experts concluded that about one-half of patients age 65 years and older in North America and 66% of patients of all ages internationally failed to maintain healthy bone density and tooth attachment because of inadequate vitamin D levels. ...

Geographic location also factors heavily in UV exposure—one study found that about 50% of white preadolescent girls in Maine were deficient in vitamin D. ...

Sun-related factors that dramatically influence the skin's production of vitamin D3 include alterations in the zenith angle of the sun caused by a change in latitude, season of the year, or time of day. Above the 33rd parallel north (about the latitude of Atlanta, Ga.) and below the 33rd parallel south (about the latitude of Santiago, Chile), vitamin D3 synthesis in the skin is very low or absent during most of the winter. ... In older adults, deficiency is related to age and reduced efficiency of vitamin D synthesis by the skin. Even patients living in areas of maximal sun intensity and duration are at risk of impaired vitamin D production if most of their skin is shielded; studies in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Turkey, India, and Lebanon confirm that 30% to 50% of children and adults have calcidiol levels under 20 ng/mL.

But most of that is because people wear shirts and don't get out much. Food fortification helps a little - we don't have a rickets problem - but the RDV was badly miscalculated. Standard advice for Vitamin D pill supplementation now is around 6000 IU rather than 400, and that's probably cautious. I know someone who was advised to supplement with 20,000 IU. (He hardly ever goes outside.)

I didn't mean to suggest that skin color has no effect on vitamin D deficiency; it clearly does. I've seen studies from the US and Switzerland confirming that. My point was that the reduction of vitamin D production caused by latitude is much less than the reduction caused by clothing, and so the pressure to evolve lighter skin would only apply in areas where upper body clothing is essential for months at a time. Evolving lighter skin is a tiny advantage compared to just stripping down for an hour or two during the day. Instead, we see skin color patterns that do not perfectly match the difficulty of vitamin D production, or temperature, or total solar radiation, etc. We have to accept that there is a lot more going on here than "north=white."

EDIT: But I realize we've gotten way off topic, so I will return:
The pre-neolithic population of Europe is believed to have had dark skin and blue eyes. Both of these genes seem to have gone extinct by the time of Bell Beaker. Western Europeans, and any Europeans unaffected by the demographic influx from the steppe around the time of Corded Ware mostly show genetic affinity with neolithic peoples of the Near East. They do carry (as do people today, especially in places like Sardinia) genes from that ancient hunter gatherer population, but not their dark skin or blue eye genes. To me, this suggests that these adaptations were not essential.

Meanwhile, I have changed my mind after reading some literature about the Bell Beaker phenomenon. And the result is, that there were no "Bell Beaker people" and thus no "Bell Beaker language". Bell beakers were little more than a fad for a new style of drinking vessel, perhaps connected with a new religious ideology. Apart from making and using bell beakers, the people involved continued building the same kinds of houses, making the same kinds of (other) pottery, etc. The Bell Beaker phenomenon started in the Iberian Peninsula about 2800 BC and spread via France to Central Europe by about 2500 BC. The Central European "Bell Beaker people" may have been Indo-Europeans, but the Iberian "Bell Beaker people" probably had nothing to do with them, except using bell beakers. They probably were descendants of the Cardial Neolithic and may have spoken a language ancestral to Basque.

Yet, archaeologists have been puzzled about the "reflux" phenomenon: it appears as if there was a movement back to the west within the Bell Beaker horizon after about 2500 BC, this time also encompassing the British Isles, where the Bell Beaker phenomenon seems to have been taken by immigrants from Central Europe. This "reflux" may have been a migration wave from Central to Western Europe, and it may have been these migrants who spread the Y-DNA haplogroup R1b across Western Europe. And these people may have spoken the "Aquan" language which I had previously assigned to the fictitious Bell Beaker people.

Great read! Please watch the oddly-placed line breaks, though, because they mess up the flow.

Hallo conlangers!

I just can't stop thinking about the "Bell Beaker language". The Bell Beaker phenomenon is a complex matter, it seems. The bell beakers emerged as a fad for a particular style of drinking vessel, perhaps in combination with some religious or other ideas and also the knowledge how to smelt copper, in the Iberian Peninsula about 2800 BC, in people who had nothing to the Yamnaya people (the speakers of PIE). They thus did not speak an IE language, but perhaps one related to Basque. From there, the fad spread across France and into Central Europe.

There it was picked up by people who did descend from Yamnaya, characterized by a high frequency of the Y-DNA haplogroup R1b, while another Yamnaya-descendant group, the Corded Ware culture, had a higher frequency of R1a. These "Yamanya-Bell Beaker" people then spread across most of Western Europe including the British Isles, where they became the new dominant population and, having access to tin in Cornwall, invented bronze independently from the Near East, around 2200 BC, and spread the new metal over their trade network all over Western Europe.

Today, Western Europe is mostly populated by descendants of the "Yamnaya-Bell Beaker" people, while Eastern Europe is mostly populated by Corded Ware descendants. But which languages did those people speak? They probably both spoke some sort of Indo-European. We now have "centum" languages (Germanic, Italic, Celtic) in the west and "satem" languages (Balto-Slavic etc.) in the east, with the boundary mostly coinciding with the R1b/R1a plurality boundary. But does this pattern really date back to the Bell Beaker/Corded Ware dichotomy, or was there something else involved? My old assumption is that the "Yamnaya-Bell Beaker" people spoke a lost branch of IE that formed a kind of "third prong" on the Anatolian/rest-of-IE fork, perhaps one even more archaic than Hittite, and it is this idea my Hesperic conlang family is based on.

But that would require a later language shift propagating through the area from east to west. Given that language shifts happen when a language is more prestigious than another, either because it is connected to a more sophisticated culture, or because it is the language of an elite, or both. But the "Yamnaya-Bell Beaker" people, having bronze, were probably more prestigious than the Corded Ware people, who did not. At least, they managed to push back Corded Ware in Central Europe. It thus seems more parsimonious to assume that there was no such language shift, and the "Yamnaya-Bell Beaker" people spoke "Proto-Centum" and the Corded Ware people spoke "Proto-Satem".

But (apart from blowing Hesperic out of the water, which is of course a non-argument here; after all, Hesperic is just a conlang family) this is not entirely without problems, either. Few if any Indo-Europeanists believe in "Proto-Satem" and "Proto-Centum" anymore. The satem-centum isogloss is just one of many criss-crossing isoglosses in the old IE world, which was overrated for a long time because it is so conspicuous. Germanic, for instance, is otherwise closer to Balto-Slavic than to Italo-Celtic, it seems.

And then there is the question of the "Old European Hydronymy", which appears to show the former presence of a lost IE language, one that is not the ancestor of the IE languages spoken there in historical times, in pretty much the same area as that of the Bell Beaker culture. This, however, may be a mirage, and the fact that Theo Vennemann managed to ascribe that to his hypothetical "Vasconic" family in a way that is probably misguided but cannot be dismissed out of hand, shows that caution is in order here. Perhaps the "centum" development of Italic, Celtic and Germanic (Greek may be an independent parallel development, and Tocharian is most definitely so), which is simply a neutralization of the opposition between palatalized and plain velars, is due to an "Old European Hydronymy" substratum which was "Bell Beaker IE"?

Also, we don't get along without further prehistoric language shifts anyway. It is quite clear that the four branches of Celtic (Irish, British, Gaulish, Celtiberian) are more closely related to each other than to Italic and Germanic, and the existence of a Common Celtic word for 'iron' means that Celtic probably still was pretty much a single language when this metal came into use in Western Europe about 800 BC. So the Celtic languages cannot have evolved from "Bell Beaker IE" in situ, but we need a language shift anyway to explain the spread of Celtic.

One argument in favour of an archaic lost branch of IE is that the "Yamnaya-Bell Beaker" people seem to have originated from the westernmost extension of the Yamnaya culture in what is now Hungary, while Anatolian probably originated from further east on this western extension in the Lower Danube valley (Romania/Bulgaria border) and Core IE in the main massif of Yamnaya in the steppe. It would be perverse that the westernmost part would show innovations that missed Anatolian.

What do you think?

I dont believe in palatovelars, so there is no substratum influence necessary ... centum was the original inventory all along. this better explains why it shows up in Anatolian & Tocharian and why Armenian is in the middle of an otherwise satem territory. Shifting palatals to velars is rare, and so some people say that it was really velar/uvular, but then they have to explain why all the languages lost the uvulars with no relics at all.

i dont mean to dismiss your whole post with just this .... the rest of it is mostly over my head, to be honest, and so I cant say much about your main idea.

Perhaps the language shift the Aquan hypothesis ("Aquan" is my name for the hypothetical lost branch of IE spoken by the Bell Beaker people, from Latin aqua and OHG aha 'river' which may continue their word for a watercourse) requires happened when a new weapon and with it a new warrior elite appeared on the scene in the Bronze Age: the sword. Swords weren't used in Central Europe before about 1600 BC, and there apparently was quite much social upheaval, with old cultures such as the Bell-Beaker-derived (but with Corded Ware influence) Únětice culture collapsing. These changes may have been triggered by weather chaos caused by the Santorini eruption, which may have been the reason why the Nebra sky disk was disused and buried in the ground - it "no longer worked" because winters were longer and spring coming later than before, or the new sword-wielding elites simply no longer appreciated it. (This idea just came up in my mind when I finished reading a book about the Nebra sky disk. If "Nebra sky disk" says nothing to you: Wikipedia is your friend; it is essentially a kind of "portable Stonehenge" made of bronze.)