Zompist Bboard Again

[I posted this to the CONLANG list yesterday, and as I am not sure whether this fits into the Great PIE Thread, the Paleo-European Thread or neither, I am posting it in a thread on its own. I hope Salmoneus doesn't tear it into bits ]

On New Year's Day, I posted [on the CONLANG list] about doubts I had against the paleolinguistic model on which my Hesperic family is based on. Since then, I have spent some thoughts on this matter, which I shall discuss in this post.

The Bell Beaker culture is an archaeological culture (i.e., a network of finds of similarly styled artifacts of material culture, such as the ceramic vessels this culture is named after) appearing in large parts of western Europe - basically everywhere west of a line running from Szczecin to Budapest and from there to Trieste - shortly after 2800 BC. The artifacts which define this culture do not bear any inscriptions, hence tell us nothing about which languages the people who made and used them spoke.

Basically, there are four possible answers:

1. The Bell Beaker people spoke a dialect of Proto-Indo-European ancestral to those IE languages spoken in their area in historical times, i.e. Italic, Celtic and Germanic.

2. The Bell Beaker people spoke an extinct branch of Indo-European which perhaps diverged early and may have shown archaic traits, but was later completely eclipsed by Italic, Celtic and Germanic, on which it may have exerted substratum influence.

3. The Bell Beaker people spoke a non-Indo-European language, perhaps the ancestor of Basque.

4. The question is wrongly posed, as there was no Bell Beaker ethnicity, only a fad for a particular style of material objects, and the people who made and used those objects spoke many different languages, some related, others not.

None of these answers can be rejected out of hand. But they may be unequally likely. First, there is the question of the existence or non-existence of an ethnicity corresponding to the Bell Beaker culture. There are some reasons to assume that such an ethnicity actually existed.

One reason comes from genetics. The area of the Bell Beaker culture closely resembles the area where a particular genetic signature, the Y-DNA haplogroup R1b, is dominant in present-day Europe, and analysis of ancient DNA has shown that R1b was almost completely absent from western Europe before the rise of the Bell Beaker culture, but most Bell Beaker
males (females of course do not have any Y-DNA haplogroup) showed this haplogroup. This most likely means that a population characterized by this haplogroup spread across most of western Europe, and such a population would probably also have spread their language.

Second, there is some linguistic evidence of some degree of linguistic unity within the Bell Beaker culture, even if it is weak and not unequivocal. The Bell Beaker area again closely matches that of the Old European Hydronymy, a network of recurring names of watercourses discovered by German linguist Hans Krahe in the middle of the 20th century. This network, however, is hard to interpret as we do not know the original meanings of those names. Krahe interpreted these names within an Indo-European framework, but other interpretations have been advanced, most notably the interpretation advanced by Theo Vennemann (another German linguist) who interpreted them by means of Basque (most linguists are very sceptical of this, especially as Vennemann has proposed Basque interpretations for names that can be aptly interpreted
from known languages such as Gaulish or Old High German; also, his model of Proto-Vasconic is doubted by most Vascologists). However, neither Krahe nor Vennemann drew a connection to the Bell Beaker culture.

Moreover, the Italic, Celtic and Germanic languages share a number of lexical and structural features which may be due to a common ancestor specific to them, or the influence of a common substratum. One such feature is the "centum" change, a merger of the PIE palatovelars and plain velars, which, however, is also observed in Greek, Hittite and Tocharian. The notion of an Italic-Celtic-Germanic node within the IE family tree is accepted by many though not all relevant specialists.

So we have a close correlation of artifacts, genes and (though in the latter case, the evidence is meagre) and languages, which makes it likely that the Bell Beaker culture corresponds to an ethnic unit, which means that the question of their language is probably legitimate. Of course, this was not a single, homogenic language, given the large size of the territory in question, rather a language family.

But what kind of language family was this? At first glance, the notion that the Bell Beaker people spoke a language ancestral to Italic, Celtic and Germanic seems most parsimonious. These, after all, are the languages spoken in most of the area in historical times (though there are exceptions, namely Basque, Iberian and Tartessian in the Iberian Peninsula, and Etruscan in Italy). In contrast, the extinct IE branch hypothesis and the non-IE hypothesis obviously require a large-scale language shift. But there is a problem with this reasoning, and this concerns the Celtic languages. The Celtic languages we find in Roman times in the British Isles, Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula cannot have developed out of the Bell Beaker language in situ - they are simply too similar to each other. Rather, most Celticists assume that Proto-Celtic was spoken in the early Iron Age within the archaeological context of the Hallstatt culture in southern central Europe, c. 800-400 BC. And the Italic languages that are now spoken in much of western Europe are of course the result of the expansion of Latin in the Roman Empire. Hence,
we can conclude that at least in some regions, the languages spoken there in historical times must have arrived much later than the spread of the Bell Beaker culture. This does not mean that the Bell Beaker language cannot have been the common ancestor of Italic, Celtic and Germanic, but it invalidates a common argument in favour of this scenario.

The question of the Bell Beaker language may be accessed via genetics. Of course, genes do not speak languages, and language shifts are common enough, but when a population spreads across an area, as the genes show, they usually also spread their language. The question is: Where did the Bell Beaker people come from, and who are their closest relatives? Before modern genetics, archaeologists were divided on this question. Many assumed an origin of the Bell Beaker culture in the Iberian Peninsula; others sought their origin in the Netherlands or in Hungary. Genetic studies have shown that the Bell Beaker people mostly have a steppe origin (though less so in the Iberian Peninsula than elsewhere). They seem to be descendants of a western extension of the Yamnaya culture, which expanded out of the Pontic-Caspian steppe around 3000 BC. The Yamnaya culture is today widely accepted as the most likely candidate for the community who spoke Proto-Indo-European, which probably means that the Bell Beaker people spoke an Indo-European language. It seems thus unlikely that their language was unrelated to IE and an ancestor of Basque.

But what kind of Indo-European? This is where things become difficult. As discussed above, even the hypothesis that the Bell Beaker people spoke "Proto-Italo-Celto-Germanic" does not work without later major language shifts (or migrations), which does not prove it wrong, however. At first glance, it seems tempting to equate the daughter cultures of the Yamnaya culture such that the Corded Ware people spoke the PIE dialect ancestral to Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian, the people of the Balkan-Danubian complex the dialect ancestral to Greek, Albanian, Illyrian, Thracian, Phrygian and Armenian, and the Bell Beaker people the dialect ancestral to Italic, Celtic and Germanic. The Afanasievo culture in southern Siberia would have spoken a dialect ancestral to Tocharian, which seems to stand entirely outside the IE dialect network, as if spoken by a group of Yamnaya people who migrated off early. But whence then Anatolian? There is good linguistic evidence that this branch broke away even earlier than Tocharian. There is some steppe DNA influx into the Balkan Peninsula before the Yamnaya expansion, such as the "Golden Man of Varna" (a man interred at Varna, Bulgaria, around 4200 BC, with a large number of gold items), who seems to have had one grandparent from the steppe. This influx may have been connected with the influx of a language from the steppe.

But was that language Indo-European? Probably not! The steppe grandparent of the "Golden Man of Varna" would have come from the Sredny Stog culture north of the Black Sea, which was one of the two parent cultures of the Yamnaya culture - but the *dominant* parent culture, and thus probably the one contributing the main framework of the language, was the Khvalynsk culture further east, along the lower Volga. (Also, Khvalynsk is closer to the homeland of Proto-Uralic than Sredny Stog.) Hence, the Sredny Stog language probably was not IE, and thus not the ancestor of Anatolian.

Of course, there are those who opine that Anatolian did not go through the Balkan Peninsula at all, but via the Caucasus. Alas, evidence does not look good for that, either. The Caucasus is of course full of non-IE languages, and in the Bronze Age, there was an unbroken chain of non-IE languages - Hattic, Hurrian-Urartian, Kassite, Sumerian, Elamite - stretching from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf. Also, the most divergent Anatolian language is Lydian - the westernmost of all Anatolian languages. Hence, Anatolian probably entered Anatolia from the west.

Also, while Anatolian seems to have broken off early, this cannot have been *that* early. While the Hittite morphology appears to be more archaic than that of Late PIE, the Anatolian languages do not require any reconstruction of the Early PIE phonology different from the "classic" one. Early PIE and Late PIE seem to have had the same phonological system; while the phonetic values of some phonemes may have changed, there apparently were no splits and no mergers. This limits the time difference between Early and Late PIE to a few centuries.

It is in my opinion more likely that the Balkan-Danubian complex was instead linked to a PIE dialect ancestral to Anatolian. But what then about the Bell Beaker dialect? Shouldn't that dialect then have been even more archaic than Anatolian? The Balkan-Danubian complex probably emerged from a western extension of the Yamnaya culture in the lower Danube valley, which was set off from the main massif of the Yamnaya culture by a geographic bottleneck between the curve of the Carpathian mountains on one side and the marshes and wetlands of the Danube delta on the other. In such areas, languages tend to be more archaic, and it is this we see in Anatolian. But the Bell Beaker culture probably originated even further west. The Yamnaya culture had an even further western extension in southern Hungary and northern Serbia - set off by an even narrower bottleneck formed by the Iron Gates, a narrow gorge where the Danube passes between the Carpathians and the Balkan mountains. It seems absurd to assume that the innovations of Late PIE would spread there, skipping the Lower Danube extension!

This makes it likely that the Bell Beaker people spoken an even more archaic dialect of PIE. But how archaic? There seems to be some evidence that this dialect may not even have undergone ablaut, a change that is reflected even in Anatolian. The Old European Hydronymy shows a phonology different from that of Late PIE including Italic, Celtic and Germanic. Where Late PIE and even Early PIE show ablaut, the language of the Old European Hydronymy seems to show a uniform */a/. The same
predominance of */a/ is found in many of those words in western IE languages which are not found further east. It seems as if the Bell Beaker people spoke a language with just three vowels, */a i u/, of which */a/ was by far the most frequent. (It is conceivable, however, that this language has just levelled ablaut by sound changes merging */e/, */a/ and */o/ and eliminating vowel length distinctions.)

There are also some apparent substratum loanwords which nevertheless show affinity to PIE words. One is */hal-/, an element found in many names of ancient salt production sites in Germany and Austria. The correlation with salt production shows that it probably meant 'salt', and it may be related to PIE *sh2el- 'salt'. The 'sulfur' words in Latin and some Germanic languages may have a similar origin; they somewhat resemble PIE *swel- 'to burn slowly, to smoulder', but do not play ball phonologically. We may even possess a trace of the self-designation of the Bell Beaker people! This may be the Germanic word that in English has become elf. What? The ancient Germanic Elves were nothing like the tiny winged fairies fluttering through Victorian fairy tales, nor like Santa Claus's little helpers. They were a majestic people, beautifully restored by J. R. R. Tolkien. This may have been a memory of a sophisticated culture in the British Isles. The Irish had tales of similar beings living in Ireland before the Celts came there, and the Greek tales of Hyperborea and even Plato's Atlantis may refer to a lost civilization in Britain. And what did that name mean? It may be related to Latin albus 'white', and the Bell Beaker people named themselves the 'Whites' because of their pigmentation. Among the results of ancient DNA studies is that the Neolithic farmers who lived in western Europe before the spread of the Bell Beaker people were of darkish complexion, brown-skinned and dark-haired. They may have looked like people from northern India today. And the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were also
dark. The Bell Beaker people, in contrast, probably were as pale as the people who now live in their former domain, and often blond.

There is another interesting genetic observation. Europe today is dominated by two Y-DNA haplogroups, R1a in the east (roughly the former Corded Ware area) and R1b in the west (roughly the former Bell Beaker area), with a mixture zone in central Europe (where both cultures intermeshed). In Scandinavia and on the Balkan Peninsula, neither of the two dominates, but they are not uncommon. Both haplogroups came from the Pontic steppe. They are related to each other, but that relationship is much deeper than PIE. So they were both represented in the Yamnaya culture.

But how did the mixture of these two haplogroups separate themselves that way? Examinations of kurgan burials almost exclusively reveal R1b, but the kurgan graves of course are burials of the upper class. The lower class, whose graves were plain and simple and now lost, may have been mostly R1a. This can be explained by the hybrid origin of the Yamnaya culture: it resulted from the take-over of the Sredny Stog culture by the Khvalynsk culture. The Sredny Stog were mostly R1a, the
Khvalynsk mostly R1b. And the Khvalynsk people supplied the upper class in this merger. What we may be dealing with are two migration movements originating in different social strata: the Corded Ware culture would have been founded by Yamnaya commoners who moved northwards to free themselves from their rulers, while the Bell Beaker culture was founded by Yamnaya nobles (perhaps younger brothers of heirs) who sought out new domains in the west. Now, in a stratified society like Yamnaya, the upper classes tend to speak a more archaic sociolect than the lower classes, as the upper class language is often also the language of ritual which always tends to be more conservative. So, the Bell Beaker people may have spoken a more archaic form of PIE than the Corded Ware people.

Alas, this is just speculation, and my own trying to make sense of the facts; I am not convinced that this is right. But I hope it is at least plausible enough to build an "Archaic PIE"-based conlang family on it! Or are there some major problems I have failed to consider?

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 8:08 am ...the Corded Ware culture would have been founded by Yamnaya commoners who moved northwards to free themselves from their rulers, while the Bell Beaker culture was founded by Yamnaya nobles (perhaps younger brothers of heirs) who sought out new domains in the west.

...

But I hope it is at least plausible enough to build an "Archaic PIE"-based conlang family on it! Or are there some major problems I have failed to consider?

I would say that describing Germans as herrenvolk and Slavs as underlings will long be a major problem.

Technically, the tree model seems to be a poor fit for Germanic. Germanic shows massive introgression from Eastern dialects, as befits its more central position.

Richard W wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 10:51 am

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 8:08 am ...the Corded Ware culture would have been founded by Yamnaya commoners who moved northwards to free themselves from their rulers, while the Bell Beaker culture was founded by Yamnaya nobles (perhaps younger brothers of heirs) who sought out new domains in the west.

...

But I hope it is at least plausible enough to build an "Archaic PIE"-based conlang family on it! Or are there some major problems I have failed to consider?

I would say that describing Germans as herrenvolk and Slavs as underlings will long be a major problem.

Of course, and I didn't mean to do that! I don't believe that in a stratified society, the upper classes are intrinsically "better" than the lower classes (nor do I believe the inverse). Even if the western Europeans descend from Yamnaya nobles and the eastern Europeans from Yamnaya commoners, that doesn't mean that any of the two are in any way superior over the other. This indeed needs to be pointed out; thank you for alerting me of this pit-fall!

Technically, the tree model seems to be a poor fit for Germanic. Germanic shows massive introgression from Eastern dialects, as befits its more central position.

You are knocking at an open door here! Indeed, I have been sceptical of the family tree model for long, and favour the wave model. The branches of IE clearly evolved from dialects of PIE, and dialects can't be easily forced into a family tree because there is just a mesh of intersecting isoglosses propagating through the dialect continuum. Germanic is indeed similar to eastern dialects, specifically Balto-Slavic, to about the same degree as it is to Italo-Celtic (if that is a thing at all), even if the difference seems to be greater due to the very conspicuous satem-centum isogloss, but that is just one isogloss which must not be overrated, but has been overrated much in the past. This is another argument against the "Bell Beaker people spoke Proto-Italo-Celto-Germanic" hypothesis.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 12:05 pm Germanic is indeed similar to eastern dialects, specifically Balto-Slavic, to about the same degree as it is to Italo-Celtic (if that is a thing at all), even if the difference seems to be greater due to the very conspicuous satem-centum isogloss, but that is just one isogloss which must not be overrated, but has been overrated much in the past. This is another argument against the "Bell Beaker people spoke Proto-Italo-Celto-Germanic" hypothesis.

It's not as strong an argument as it looks - compare the hominid trees at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanze ... n_ancestor and the 'previous versions' of the diagram. I can find quotes like "Although [70 percent] of the human genome is indeed closer to chimpanzees, on average, a sizable minority of 15 percent is in fact closer to gorillas, and another 15 percent is where chimpanzees and gorillas are closest", and sources ascribing some of this mixture to introgressions rather than incomplete assortment. It doesn't really stop one thinking of proto-hominine etc. I would suggest though that Proto-Western IE might be a better description.

Another possibility is that the R1a and R1b people simply lived in different regions of the Yamnaya cultural area, and there never was a rule of one over the other.

I know very little about all this stuff. So consider this an outsider's opinion. Also, I'm only going to comment on the dubious bits, so don't think I'm disagreeing with everything!

An overall thought: you have a lot of linked hypotheses going. As a reminder, if you have independent theories A, B, and C which are each 90% likely, then the combination A+B+C is not 90% likely, but 73%. Of course, that's good news for you as a conlanger as you have more freedom.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 8:08 am The Celtic languages we find in Roman times in the British Isles, Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula cannot have developed out of the Bell Beaker language in situ - they are simply too similar to each other. Rather, most Celticists assume that Proto-Celtic was spoken in the early Iron Age within the archaeological context of the Hallstatt culture in southern central Europe, c. 800-400 BC.

This is the 2nd-weakest link in your argument, I think. We're talking about a time 2000 years before the earliest undisputed attestations of Celtic. Assuming that the Bellbeaker people were IE (which is reasonable), what we therefore know about the location of the Celts at that time is: diddly-squat. They could be anywhere in that region; they could be a small or a large group; they might be joined by any number of lost IE branches. (Once we get to historical times, we have all sorts of migrations all the time— e.g Celts ending up in Anatolia. Prehistory was probably just as complicated.)

Also, while Anatolian seems to have broken off early, this cannot have been *that* early. While the Hittite morphology appears to be more archaic than that of Late PIE, the Anatolian languages do not require any reconstruction of the Early PIE phonology different from the "classic" one.

All this strikes me as irrelevant. Hittite is attested c. 1800 BCE in Anatolia— about all that tells us is that the family was quite distinct at that time, and probably centuries earlier. It certainly doesn't tell us anything about the nature of the western dialects of IE. The territories and timespans here are so large that you could fit all sorts of chronologies of the Hittite/rest-of-IE split.

We may even possess a trace of the self-designation of the Bell Beaker people! This may be the Germanic word that in English has become elf. What? The ancient Germanic Elves were nothing like the tiny winged fairies fluttering through Victorian fairy tales, nor like Santa Claus's little helpers. They were a majestic people, beautifully restored by J. R. R. Tolkien. This may have been a memory of a sophisticated culture in the British Isles. The Irish had tales of similar beings living in Ireland before the Celts came there, and the Greek tales of Hyperborea and even Plato's Atlantis may refer to a lost civilization in Britain. And what did that name mean? It may be related to Latin albus 'white', and the Bell Beaker people named themselves the 'Whites' because of their pigmentation.

This is the weakest bit! Indeed, talking about a conquering and highly civilized "white people" seems... let's just say, old-fashioned. There's no reason this alleged people would be whiter and blonder than the Nordics; and if (as is most likely) they were the ancestors of most Western European people, they were a mixed bag anyway.

And Atlantis, really? In cases where we can check, preliterate peoples generally don't recall the history of their region from 500 years before, much less 2000.

(The elves are a nice conworlding bit, but not convincing as prehistory.)

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 5:16 pm In cases where we can check, preliterate peoples generally don't recall the history of their region from 500 years before, much less 2000.

That doesn't correspond to what I have read about Australian Aborigines: https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... 000-years/

MacAnDàil wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 7:22 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 5:16 pm In cases where we can check, preliterate peoples generally don't recall the history of their region from 500 years before, much less 2000.

That doesn't correspond to what I have read about Australian Aborigines: https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... 000-years/

I thought of this too.

I hadn't seen that... interesting. I'm not entirely persuaded but let's say they do remember.

But, counterexamples:

-- the Hebrews didn't remember that, in the period they were supposedly conquering Canaan, it was ruled by Egypt for hundreds of years
-- the Vedic peoples didn't remember the Harappans, nor that they came from somewhere outside India
-- the Iranians remembered a bunch of stuff about eastern Iran, but forgot about the Achaemenids
-- no one in Peru remembered the Caral-Supe (Norte Chico) culture
-- the Maya do not (IIRC) remember the Classic period
-- no IE people remembered where they came from
-- no Native American people have stories of coming from Siberia
-- I don't think any Europeans remembered the Ice Age (10,000 BCE)

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 10:08 pm I hadn't seen that... interesting. I'm not entirely persuaded but let's say they do remember.

But, counterexamples:

-- the Hebrews didn't remember that, in the period they were supposedly conquering Canaan, it was ruled by Egypt for hundreds of years
-- the Vedic peoples didn't remember the Harappans, nor that they came from somewhere outside India
-- the Iranians remembered a bunch of stuff about eastern Iran, but forgot about the Achaemenids
-- no one in Peru remembered the Caral-Supe (Norte Chico) culture
-- the Maya do not (IIRC) remember the Classic period
-- no IE people remembered where they came from
-- no Native American people have stories of coming from Siberia
-- I don't think any Europeans remembered the Ice Age (10,000 BCE)

I've been looking at some articles about the accuracy of oral history, and it looks like historians consider it to be equally as useful as written history, or even more so due to greater time depth. One of your examples at least is inaccurate - although it's hard to find a primary source on this, apparently Pawnee oral histories document events from at least 11,000 years ago such as crossing the Bering Strait into America. Of course oral history also involves a lot of intentionally legendary figures, so the inaccuracy comes from confusion between legends and genuine history, and there is the possibility of coincidental similarities arising. I can't find any proven examples of oral histories referring to an extinct people, and virtually all of the examples involve non-literate peoples (i.e. indigenous Australians and Americans). Also, historians probably generally ignore the inaccurate aspects of oral histories when espousing the accurate examples; for the handful of accurate histories there will be many in which any original factual basis has been completely obscured. Because not all major events survive in oral history and not all oral history is accurate, I'd be doubtful of the example with "elf" deriving from self-designation without more evidence.

Darren wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 10:41 pm I can't find any proven examples of oral histories referring to an extinct people

Dorset ~ Tuniit. maybe also ebu gogo ~ Homo floresiensis

do Greenlanders remember the Norse settlements?

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 11:11 pm

Darren wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 10:41 pm I can't find any proven examples of oral histories referring to an extinct people

Dorset ~ Tuniit. maybe also ebu gogo ~ Homo floresiensis

do Greenlanders remember the Norse settlements?

Oh right, of course. I knew about the Homo floresiensis example, but then forgot it... and for some reason I couldn't find it through indirect googling. It looks like Greenland oral history also records norse settlement, although that's a much smaller time gap.

-

mae wrote: ↑Mon Jan 13, 2020 1:13 am "Little people" stories are found throughout the Austronesian world (even in Taiwan), so the specific 'ebu gogo' story found in Flores almost certainly has nothing more than a coincidental relationship to H. floresiensis

True... looking into it with more depth, there are many more inconsistencies, such as ebu gogo being pot-bellied, that they were considered to have only recently being driven to extinction and the height difference. There may be a grain of truth in it but it's not the best example.

.

Okay, that's probably true. Most of the sources I was looking at were probably sensationalised for the public. There are some likely examples of long-term accurate oral history, although there are many more counterexamples. I wasn't trying to imply that oral history was generally accurate or ever exactly accurate, just that occasionally (possibly by chance) there are some general aspects of a true story which are passed down intact. Note that I did make clear several reservations in my first post:

Darren wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 10:41 pm [...] historians probably generally ignore the inaccurate aspects of oral histories when espousing the accurate examples; for the handful of accurate histories there will be many in which any original factual basis has been completely obscured. [...] not all major events survive in oral history and not all oral history is accurate [...]

Looking back, the last sentence is an unintentional understatement. I could have said "very few major events survive in oral history and most oral history is inaccurate."

Whimemsz wrote: ↑Mon Jan 13, 2020 1:40 am There are some historians who think this, but they're wrong (and their attitude usually has a political dimension). All of Zompist's examples are good illustrations of the truth, though, which is that it is simply not really possible for fully accurate history to reliably be passed down for many hundreds of years (the Australia examples don't sound convincing to me), though shorter-term accurate history is certainly possible, and some distorted version of the older, correct story may still survive (say, the eruption of Thera being reflected in various Greek and other neighboring myths). But that's not the same as oral history being as accurate and useful as other sources of information like written evidence, archaeology, etc.

The Australian examples are only widely-accepted ones that I'm aware of - most of them are about sea-level rise, a story which is shared between IIRC about twenty peoples, which makes a case for its basis in fact (only makes a case for, not proves by any means). As for the other examples, there are lots of references to them but the original paper is never easily available. The political aspect is there as well; - as I said previously, historians would concentrate only on accurate examples - and they would probably over-compensate for possible or historical racism.

For instance, there's a book I read about a famous series of rock paintings in Canada, in which the author uses oral history from two Ojibwe elders to reconstruct the meaning of some of the paintings and in the process relays some of their stories about their grandfather/great-grandfather, a famous Ojibwe chief Zhingwaakoons, who evidently painted some of the images. Zhingwaakoons lived from 1773 to 1854, and the two elders were born just at the turn of the 20th century and one was raised by a family member who had known Zhingwaakoons personally for many years, so not that long has passed, and their stories should be relatively reliable, right? Instead, many of them are completely impossible, and have Zhingwaakoons doing things that had to have occurred in the early 1500s and mid- to late-1600s. In oral history, everything is telescoped so there's no clear sense of when different events occurred, many deeds all become attributed to a single person, and metaphors turn into factual descriptions (a volcanic eruption becomes Prometheus getting his liver torn out by an eagle, say). So yeah, you can find elements of historical truth in oral history, but you need other sources to judge how to interpret the oral history and figure out what it's referring to and when that thing occurred and how it happened.

Exactly. I did mention that there are many inaccurate examples, and I've no doubt some are very recent compared to the Australian/Pawnee ones. Even in the so-called "accurate" examples, they are generally attributed to gods/spirits. I did note that "I'd be doubtful of the example with "elf" deriving from self-designation without more evidence," which can be expanded to any examples. The only reason any of these are generally thought to be correct is because there is more evidence supporting a similar historical occurrence.

Darren wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 10:41 pmOne of your examples at least is inaccurate - although it's hard to find a primary source on this, apparently Pawnee oral histories document events from at least 11,000 years ago such as crossing the Bering Strait into America.

Sorry but I don't buy this. Even assuming there's some basis to this claim, does the Pawnee oral history say "we crossed eastward from our old home to a really cold place where we were stuck for hundreds of years by mountains of ice, migrated thousands of miles south, did a bunch of stuff and migrated around for thousands of years, and split up from our kinsmen multiple times, most recently a few hundred years ago"? Does it include some of their more recent migrations and experiences? Or does it have some really vague or mythological references that if you squint at just the right angle and make a bunch of assumptions could be said to describe the Bering Strait crossing. (Incidentally, while I'm sure lots of Pawnees, like lots of American Indians in general, mostly insist on the reliability of their oral traditions, I'd be completely shocked if any of them ever claimed their oral traditions allude they crossed the Bering Strait--this would almost certainly only be the supposition of a non-Indian researcher. Almost no Indians, even otherwise highly educated and scientifically-minded and pro-academia ones, believe in the Bering Strait theory; most are creationists to some degree and believe their ancestors have ALWAYS lived in the Americas, and in many cases polygenesis of humans.)
(Along that last point, too, virtually every Indian group insists they have always occupied the specific area where they do now or did before removal, even though in many, many cases abundant historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence proves otherwise.)

As I said, finding a primary source is hard. I have no idea what the actual myths said, but I wasn't suggesting they described it perfectly accurately. This isn't a field I have a great deal of knowlegde in, so I'm just referring to (a few) anthropologists' opinions.

For what it's worth, oral history is selectively accurate and inaccurate, because just like early written histories it is composed for a reason. It's not surprising that oral histories about ethnic origins tend to tell people what they want to hear, like "We've been here forever" or "we came here from an island on a cloud." Normative ethnicity might be the reason for that oral history in the first place. But this is good news, because it can lead to some information being preserved over long periods of time. For example, the genealogy of chiefs is very important in many Polynesian cultures, and this has the side effect that many oral histories of small Pacific islands retain the knowledge of their foundation by colonial expedition, often many centuries after the fact. In the US, there are "family histories" that are pretty much independent of documentation, like Elizabeth Warren believing told she was Native American. Lots of people grow up hearing "We are from Ulster" or "Our family was minor nobility in Hesse" or "Your grandfather was part Blackfoot" for many generations without anyone ever consulting a birth certificate, and often these records turn out to be accurate, though not always. We just need a data-driven approach to understand what oral history can and cannot do. That doesn't mean it's useless, or that it is as accurate as written documents.

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 5:16 pm I know very little about all this stuff. So consider this an outsider's opinion. Also, I'm only going to comment on the dubious bits, so don't think I'm disagreeing with everything!

Fine. I am a self-taught amateur in all relevant disciplines, so there may be a lot of wrongness in what I posted, and what I posted, is not meant as a statement of truth, but just as a train of thought which I placed here for discussion.

An overall thought: you have a lot of linked hypotheses going. As a reminder, if you have independent theories A, B, and C which are each 90% likely, then the combination A+B+C is not 90% likely, but 73%. Of course, that's good news for you as a conlanger as you have more freedom.

I am aware of this. Errors multiply; linking a large number of hypotheses of which each is highly likely can still lead to a very shaky edifice! (And, of course, this speculation is ultimately meant to provide a "working hypothesis" for my conlangs, as you certainly already guessed.)

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 8:08 am The Celtic languages we find in Roman times in the British Isles, Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula cannot have developed out of the Bell Beaker language in situ - they are simply too similar to each other. Rather, most Celticists assume that Proto-Celtic was spoken in the early Iron Age within the archaeological context of the Hallstatt culture in southern central Europe, c. 800-400 BC.

This is the 2nd-weakest link in your argument, I think. We're talking about a time 2000 years before the earliest undisputed attestations of Celtic. Assuming that the Bellbeaker people were IE (which is reasonable), what we therefore know about the location of the Celts at that time is: diddly-squat. They could be anywhere in that region; they could be a small or a large group; they might be joined by any number of lost IE branches. (Once we get to historical times, we have all sorts of migrations all the time— e.g Celts ending up in Anatolia. Prehistory was probably just as complicated.)

This is true. Nobody knows for sure where and when Proto-Celtic was spoken. But the degree of variation among the attested Celtic languages seems more compatible with a time depth of the first millennium than the third millennium BC (though the Continental Celtic languages are only sparingly attested, and the same goes for the Insular Celtic of antiquity, so this kind of reasoning is somewhat hazardous); also, Proto-Celtic seems to have a word for 'iron', which probably means that it still was a fairly coherent language community at the dawn of the Iron Age. And we know that at that time, the Hallstatt culture was a centre of innovation that radiated across most of Western Europe. Sure, this is a compound hypothesis again, and may be wrong, but it is certainly clear that the relationship between the four branches of Celtic is a good deal closer than that between Celtic, Italic and Germanic, so Proto-Celtic is clearly considerably later than "Proto-Italo-Celto-Germanic", if the latter is a thing at all.

Also, while Anatolian seems to have broken off early, this cannot have been *that* early. While the Hittite morphology appears to be more archaic than that of Late PIE, the Anatolian languages do not require any reconstruction of the Early PIE phonology different from the "classic" one.

All this strikes me as irrelevant. Hittite is attested c. 1800 BCE in Anatolia— about all that tells us is that the family was quite distinct at that time, and probably centuries earlier. It certainly doesn't tell us anything about the nature of the western dialects of IE. The territories and timespans here are so large that you could fit all sorts of chronologies of the Hittite/rest-of-IE split.

It is indeed controversial whether Anatolian is an early breakaway or not, and the pendulum of opinion has been swinging back and forth since the discovery of Hittite. Edgar Sturtevant formulated the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis shortly after the discovery of Hittite, which later fell out of favour; but today, many Indo-Europeanists, including most specialists in Anatolian languages, consider it likely that Anatolian broke away early. Of course, with just two entities to compare and no outgroup available, it is always difficult to decide which features are archaic and which branch innovated.

And what regards the relevance of this to the Bell Beaker language: if we are dealing with three dialect groups in a linear arrangement, it is unlikely that a package of innovations arising at one end of the chain appear in identical shape at the other end while skipping the middle group. In my model, the feminine gender and the tripartite aspect system (and what else non-Anatolian IE innovated) arose in the "main massif" of the Yamnaya horizon in Ukraine/Russia and never made it into the Lower Danube valley (hence their absence in Anatolian); how then would these innovations make it into the Pannonian Basin to appear in "Proto-Bell-Beaker" in the same form as in the "main massif"? I admit that there are uncertainties here; it is not entirely impossible that these innovations spread from the Corded Ware language to the Bell Beaker language later, but this does not strike me as likely.

We may even possess a trace of the self-designation of the Bell Beaker people! This may be the Germanic word that in English has become elf. What? The ancient Germanic Elves were nothing like the tiny winged fairies fluttering through Victorian fairy tales, nor like Santa Claus's little helpers. They were a majestic people, beautifully restored by J. R. R. Tolkien. This may have been a memory of a sophisticated culture in the British Isles. The Irish had tales of similar beings living in Ireland before the Celts came there, and the Greek tales of Hyperborea and even Plato's Atlantis may refer to a lost civilization in Britain. And what did that name mean? It may be related to Latin albus 'white', and the Bell Beaker people named themselves the 'Whites' because of their pigmentation.

This is the weakest bit! Indeed, talking about a conquering and highly civilized "white people" seems... let's just say, old-fashioned. There's no reason this alleged people would be whiter and blonder than the Nordics; and if (as is most likely) they were the ancestors of most Western European people, they were a mixed bag anyway.

And Atlantis, really? In cases where we can check, preliterate peoples generally don't recall the history of their region from 500 years before, much less 2000.

(The elves are a nice conworlding bit, but not convincing as prehistory.)

OK, this is adventurous and a bit silly. You have misunderstood something, though. I never meant that the Bell Beaker people were "whiter and blonder than the Nordics". They were as white and blond as the present-day Western Europeans, who are after all their descendants. The idea was that they called themselves the "Whites" because they were less pigmented than the previous population. Some geneticists, including the distinguished Johannes Krause, from whose book Die Reise unserer Gene (a popular science book, but written by an authority in ancient DNA research) I have this notion, say that there is genetic evidence that the pre-Yamnaya people of Europe were of darker complexion than the Yamnaya people. Not black like Africans, but brownish.

What regards Atlantis, it is of course a tale Plato made up to illustrate a philosophical argument (namely, that imperialism is ill-adviced and immoral, as far as I understand it), though he may have drawn on various tales of lost civilizations that were in circulation in his time, and one of these tales may have been one of a lost civilization in Britain. Admittedly, archaeologists haven't yet found much to support the former existence of such a civilization, though. Perhaps they were just a bit more sophisticated than their neighbours on the mainland; but certainly, they didn't build pyramids, nor stone temples greebled with hieroglyphs, or whatever.

And I have meanwhile abandoned the "R1b nobles/R1a commoners" idea. It is not very likely, and utterly unnecessary. Rather, the two haplogroups probably just had different frequencies in different parts of the Yamnaya horizon. According to Eupedia and Carlos Quiles (admittedly, not very trustworthy sites; the Eupedia maps are clearly inaccurate, e.g. placing Khvalynsk too far south, and Quiles's association of R1a with Uralic is bullfrogs; but they at least seem to draw on real paleogenetic work), R1a was north of R1b. It seems as if the western expansion of Khvalynsk drove a wedge of R1b into former R1a territory on the Ukrainian coast, and onward along the Danube. So we'd have R1a in the north and R1b in the south including the western extension. But I don't really know. Genetics is a difficult and fast-moving science, where laypeople like me often have to rely on secondary presentations and summaries, which are often already out of date when they appear in print or on the Web. Maybe those haplogroups are overrated anyway; it seems as if the paleogeneticists are moving away from such classifications towards more holistic models.

Darren wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 10:41 pmI've been looking at some articles about the accuracy of oral history, and it looks like historians consider it to be equally as useful as written history, or even more so due to greater time depth. (…) Also, historians probably generally ignore the inaccurate aspects of oral histories when espousing the accurate examples

Not so much "ignore" as much as divide oral tradition into "oral history" versus "mythology", which is quite often not a distinction that the culture itself makes.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Mon Jan 13, 2020 9:42 amI never meant that the Bell Beaker people were "whiter and blonder than the Nordics". They were as white and blond as the present-day Western Europeans, who are after all their descendants. The idea was that they called themselves the "Whites" because they were less pigmented than the previous population. Some geneticists, including the distinguished Johannes Krause, from whose book Die Reise unserer Gene (a popular science book, but written by an authority in ancient DNA research) I have this notion, say that there is genetic evidence that the pre-Yamnaya people of Europe were of darker complexion than the Yamnaya people.

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 think you're not talking about the extreme Nordic phenotype specifically, but the same considerations seem to apply also to more general lighter skin. So in the Neolithic we should expect both agricultural Europe and nomadic steppe populations to tend towards lighter skin tones basically on a North–South gradient. If there were substantially darker-skinned populations persisting in western Europe, this only seems likely if they continued to rely strongly enough on marine food sources. (I cannot give any back-of-the-envelope approximation on what would count as "strongly enough", though.) And if there were substantially lighter-skinned people moving in, we should first have some explanation for why they were so in the first place? Otherwise it seems that we should default to selection. Selection also takes time. Depending on the exact area, western Europe has known agriculture for 5000 to 7000 years. The Bell Beaker culture dates to 4500-ish years ago, much closer to the beginning of this period than to the modern day. It seems that most of the skin-tone selection process in Europe would have taken place after the rise of BB, not before.

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2020 10:08 pm -- the Iranians remembered a bunch of stuff about eastern Iran, but forgot about the Achaemenids

This 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?