52 The History of English

assertion that the nineteenth-century search for Indo-European roots was partly an exercise in the creation of particular national identities. Even Schleicher’s contemporaries felt that the tree model did not adequately reflect certain known facts about the languages pinned on its branches. For example, the model predisposes an assumption that languages diverge suddenly and completely and then continue to develop in isolation from each other. Yet this is extremely unlikely. If we take the new Englishes as an example, even though they are sometimes named as and considered distinct entities (Singaporean English or South African Indian English) following different evolutionary paths in different linguistic environments, they are all also still defined as belonging to an English continuum of varieties (cf. Section 2.1). Modern technology ensures that contact between users of different Englishes can occur, and it is likely that they therefore maintain a high level of mutual intelligibility. It is possible that one day, if circumstances allow, some of these new Englishes could gradually evolve into completely separate and distinct languages (again, as we theorized in Section 2.1), but it certainly would not happen overnight. Similarly in the historical context, Trask (1996: 185) points out that languages like Latin spread across the Roman Empire and became a ‘vast dialect continuum’. Thus, anyone travelling across the Empire in the seventh–eighth centuries would have ‘found the language changing only very gradually in any direction . . . nowhere were there any sharp boundaries separating one emerging new Romance language from another’. It would be a long time before Latin’s daughters would be recognized as distinct, national languages.

Despite the shortcomings of the genetic tree model, it quickly became established as (and has remained) the most popular mode of representation for language families.6 Once it had become accepted, it was only a matter of time before discussion and investigation moved in focus from the ‘language family’ to the ‘people family’:

The model constrained one to frame questions such as when did the Germanic languages separate from the Balto-Slavic? And this was easily translated into the questions: When did the Germanic peoples move off from the Balto-Slavic peoples? When did the Celts separate from the Italic peoples? The Indians from the Iranians? And such historical questions demand a specific type of answer, not far removed from chasing after the offspring of Noah.

(Mallory, 1989: 18)

In the following section, we look briefly at some of the attempts that have been made to discover the PIE Urheimat, or homeland, and its people.

2.3 Meeting the Ancestors I

As indicated at the end of the last section, interest in reconstructing the linguistic affiliations of Europe and Asia spread to reconstructing the patterns of dispersal for their speakers. One of the primary concerns, therefore, was to discover the location of the original PIE homeland from which those paths of migration could be traced, not just through the linguistic record, but perhaps

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through the archaeological as well. After all, historical communities would very likely have left tangible traces of their existence beyond those suggested by language.

In this context, there were several factors to consider. If the hope was to equate the Proto-Indo-Europeans with archaeological evidence, how were scholars to know what to look for, given that the existence of these people was assumed rather than definitively proven? What time periods were to be investigated? And geographically, where was one supposed to look? Had the Urheimat been in somewhere in Asia, or somewhere in Europe?

A major consensus appears to have been to start looking for answers in the proto-lexicon. If terms for flora and fauna could be reconstructed, for example, they could provide an indication of geographical area. Similarly, PIE terms for animals and community life could also be used to build up a picture of their lifestyle, perhaps even providing some clue as to why dispersals would have begun in the first place. This area of research became known as linguistic palaeontology, a term coined by Adolphe Pictet (1859).

A database of reconstructions began to take shape: forms such as *aratrom ‘plough’, *grno- ‘grain’ and *yeug- ‘yoke’ appeared. The Proto-Indo-Europeans appear to have kept *uksen ‘oxen’, cows (*gwou-) and other livestock, such as sheep (*awiewe), swine (*su-) and goats (*ghaido). A PIE *gen ‘family’ (eventually in genetics and kin) may have lived in a *domo ‘house’, furnished with *keromo- ‘pottery’ ( ‘ceramic’) and would have drunk *melg- ‘milk’ from the livestock and eaten dishes made with the *mel ‘meal’ of their *grno-. They may sometimes have had *pisk- ‘fish’, wild *ghans- ‘goose’ and when available, wild *abel- ‘apples’. They wore clothes made of woven ( *webh) *wel- ‘wool’ and possibly *lin- ‘flax’ ( linen), and footwear made of *letrom ‘leather’. Much work would have been done with tools fashioned from *stoino- ‘stone’, as well as wood and bone (all examples from Claiborne, 1990: 29–30).

In terms of environment, linguists were able to reconstruct words for snow *sneigw- and freezing cold *gel- ( congeal), but not for the more tropical palm tree or coconut, or even subtropical olive or vine. The Proto-Indo-Europeans also appear to have been familiar with animals such as the *bher- ‘bear’, *wlkwo- ‘wolf’, *bhibru ‘beaver’, and with the *as- ‘ash’, *elmo- ‘elm’, *bherag ‘birch’ and *bhago ‘beech’ trees (all examples from Claiborne, 1990: 30–1).

On the basis of such reconstructions (as well as an assumption that they were equivalent in meaning to their modern reflexes; a point we shall return to later), a range of possible homelands was suggested, most of which were situated in either Central Asia or Northern Europe. It was also popularly assumed that PIE culture, existing sometime between 4500 and 2500 BC, had been pastoral, rather than agricultural. In 1890, Otto Schrader postulated that the Urheimat had been situated in the South Russian steppe, stretching from Carpathia to Central Asia, where there was evidence of nomad pastoralism having been practised (Renfrew, 1987: 15). This theory would prove influential in twentieth-century debates on the ‘Indo-European problem’, as it came to be known.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, theories such as Schrader’s depended solely on the ‘evidence’ of linguistic reconstructions. However,

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developments in the field of prehistoric archaeology began to be taken into consideration with the publication of Gustav Kossina’s work in 1902 (‘The Indo European question answered archaeologically’). In brief, he identified the Proto- Indo-Europeans with a community which had developed a specific type of pottery – known as Corded Ware – and proposed a north German homeland. Renfrew (1987: 15) states that Kossina was the first to equate prehistoric peoples and their languages with pottery types: a correspondence that still carries weight in some current schools of thought, although others warn that ‘pots do not equal people’ (Mallory, 1989: 164).

Kossina’s integrative approach to archaeological and linguistic data was later famously adopted by V. Gordon Childe (1926) who, like Schrader, placed the Urheimat in South Russia. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas carried on the argument for a homeland situated in the South Russian steppes. Gimbutas equated the original Proto-Indo- Europeans with a culture – the Kurgan – which appeared in this area in the fifth and early fourth millennia BC. In the spirit of linguistic palaeontology, she drew support from linguistic reconstructions (such as those cited above), stating that the environment of the Russian steppes well suited the world described by the proto-lexicon:

in the fifth and fourth millennia the climate was warmer and damper . . . and what is now the steppe zone was more forested . . . including oak, birch, fir, beech, elder, elm, ash, aspen, apple, cherry and willow . . . [and] such forest animals as aurochs elk, boar, wild horse, wolf, fox, beaver, squirrel, badger, hare and roe deer.

(Gimbutas, 1970: 159–60; quoted in Baugh and Cable, 2002: 40)

The archaeological evidence, largely available from the grave goods left in the distinctive burial mounds for which this culture was named, suggests that these early people were nomadic, warlike pastoralists who made use of horses and wheeled vehicles, had a patriarchal society and worshipped a pantheon of sky gods and the sun. Gimbutas argued that the booming population of Kurgans/Proto-Indo-Europeans dispersed from their steppe homeland in three successive waves of aggressive migration (4400–4200 BC, 3400–3200 BC, and 3000–2800 BC), moving eastwards into central Asia, Persia and India, westwards into central Europe and the Balkans and southwards eventually into Anatolia (Kortlandt, 1990: 6; Trask, 1996: 359). These invasions essentially destroyed peaceful, settled, agricultural and possibly matriarchal communities across Europe, where ‘horses and wheeled vehicles [had been] unknown’ and ‘fine ceramics . . . and clay female figurines [had been] produced in thousands’ (Trask, 1996: 359). Once the Kurgan aggressors had vanquished or absorbed those indigenous communities, the archaeological record changed, indicating instead abandoned settlements and the cessation of the production of delicate pottery and female figurines. In their place, fortified locations appeared, as did cruder pottery; and the horse and wheeled vehicles were introduced to everyday life as well as to iconography, as has been evidenced by stelae decorated with suns, horses, chariots and weapons. In addition, burial mounds like those of the Kurgans began to appear across the landscape, and in them, a ‘new physical

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type . . . very different from the earlier European skeletons but identical to those found in the steppes’ (ibid.: 360).

Gimbutas’ theory, then, assumes that the languages of the Indo-European family resulted from these successive migrations: as each wave of Kurgans moved out into virgin territory, or conquered already extant communities, they took their original PIE with them. In these new environments, and in isolation from the ‘motherland’ and perhaps each other, these dialects of PIE would eventually evolve into distinct daughter languages. Gimbutas’ assertion that there was no other culture than the Kurgan ‘in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods which would correspond with the hypothetical mother culture of the Indo-European as reconstructed with the help of common words’ (quoted in Renfrew, 1987: 17), as well as no other significant expansions which would satisfactorily explain the dispersal of the Indo-European languages, has had widespread linguistic (see Kortlandt, 1990; Mallory, 1989 for example) and archaeological support. Mallory (ibid.: Chapter 6), for example, provides a detailed accumulation of evidence and rationales for the Kurgan homeland theory. Among other things, he argues that since the IE family represents but one strand in the fabric of human speech (there are other prehistoric language families in Europe and Asia, let alone the world), the original Proto-Indo-Europeans must have had neighbours which they either had contact with, or were historically related to. If we can find such neighbours, then we arguably also find a plausible location for the PIE homeland. In this vein, he cites the languages of the non-Indo-European Finno-Ugric, or Uralic family, which have been argued to bear the traces of some kind of early relationship with PIE speakers. There is a general consensus that the proto-Uralic homeland was situated in the ‘forest zone of Eastern Europe–western Siberia’, and that its speakers may therefore have shared a border with those of PIE ‘somewhere in the vicinity of the forest-steppe zone of south Russia’ (ibid.: 149, 151). Mallory cites as evidence of this relationship two groups of lexical borrowing: (1) loanwords borrowed by proto-Uralic from Indo-European daughters; and (2) loanwords borrowed at an earlier date from PIE itself. In terms of the first class, the Uralic languages preserve lexical forms originally borrowed from PIE daughter IndoIranian, arguably the result of Gimbutas’ first migratory wave of PIE speakers. For example, the Finnish and Votyak words for ‘pig’, porsas and pars, respectively, appear to have been derived from proto-Indo-Iranian *parsa- and not the earlier PIE *porcus. On the basis of a substantial number of similar loanwords, Mallory states that it is a safe assumption that:

About 2000BC Indo-Iranians were providing a series of lexical items, pertaining particularly to agriculture (such as pig, goat, grain, grass) and technology (hammer, awl, gold ) to Finno-Ugric peoples situated roughly between the middle Volga and the Ob. This would place the IndoIranians to their immediate south (lower Volga-Ural).

(ibid.: 149)

However, such borrowings into the Finno-Ugric family could be argued to merely indicate that Uralic proto-speakers had had some (minimal) contact with speakers of an IE daughter language. It only offers some weight to the assumption that PIE and proto-Uralic were neighbours if we accept that the former’s Indo-Iranian

56 The History of English

descendants had settled relatively near their ancestral doorstep. As such, loanwords such as those of group (2) would offer more compelling evidence of a close relationship. Mallory (ibid.) gives no examples of these early loans from PIE, but states that there are also striking correspondences between noun and verb inflectional endings in both PIE and proto-Uralic. The presence of such similarities has led, in some circles, to the postulation of a distant genetic affiliation between the two families, linked through a common source, Proto-Indo- Uralic. Others have maintained that the correspondences could equally be evidence of contact between ‘unrelated’ PIE and proto-Uralic speakers. Regardless of the truth of the matter, if we accept that affinities exist between these two language families, either through contact or genetic relatedness, then the physical proximity of the Uralic homeland to the South Russian steppe could make the latter a viable candidate for the Urheimat of PIE speakers.

The Kurgan/Russian steppe homeland theory has not been without its detractors as well. The archaeologist Colin Renfrew has been one of its most vigorous opponents, on a number of fronts. Renfrew finds the notion of aggressive warrior nomads problematic and untenable: pastoral economies have lower yields than agricultural ones, and are therefore less liable to the kinds of population explosions that can lead to significant migrations. In addition, if the Kurgans set out to simply find more land for subsistence, why were three waves of sustained aggression necessary? In his view, it is also unlikely that any prehistoric people had the kind of resources necessary for large-scale invasions and conquests of populated areas. Renfrew (1987) instead postulates a more peaceful linguistic dispersal, which goes hand in hand with a technological advance, namely, the spread of agriculture. He places the original PIE homeland in Anatolia and postulates that members of this community would have crossed over into Greece sometime in the seventh millennium BC. He states that there is sound evidence that the ‘first farmers of Europe were settled in Greece (and Crete) before 6000BC’ (ibid.:147), sowing wheat, peas and vetch, and herding sheep, goats, cattle and pigs. It is assumed that some of the neighbouring hunter–gatherer populations would have acculturated to farming techniques and in turn, would have ‘spread’ those to other similar nomadic communities. As Renfrew (ibid.: 128) states, ‘the new economy of farming allowed the population in each area to rise’, which could result in ‘small, local movements of twenty or thirty kilometres’. Thus, farming communities spread in line with the ‘wave of advance’ model proposed by Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza, which involves ‘slow, continuous expansion with movements usually being over short distances’ (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza, 1984; quoted in Renfrew, 1987: 128). Eventually, this would result in the ‘peopling of the whole of Europe by a farming population, the descendants of the first European farmers’ (1987: 150). As these farming communities spread into new environments, so did the original PIE, which would change, over the course of the centuries, into discrete daughter languages. In areas where earlier hunter–gatherer populations existed, the latter may have, especially if they were sparse in number, assimilated linguistically to the IE farmers. However, where those populations were denser and a sense of community stronger, as is thought to have been the case in

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Brittany and areas of Portugal, the non-IE languages may have impacted on the development of the relevant IE daughters. Renfrew (ibid.: 151) also theorizes that if these stronger communities adopted farming techniques, then they too would have experienced an increase in population, which may have strengthened the chances of survival for their native languages. This, he says, may be the explanation for the survival of non-IE languages such as Etruscan and Basque in the geographical midst of IE tongues.

Renfrew’s stance has attracted significant support. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1990) also place the PIE homeland somewhere in eastern Anatolia and Trask (1996: 361) states that Renfrew’s hypothesis ‘makes considerable sense to some archaeologists’. However, it also offers a few challenges for linguists. Mallory (1989: 179), for example, states that an Anatolian homeland ignores the strong likelihood of contact or genetic affiliation between PIE and the Uralic family. Renfrew’s position instead has PIE emerging from among languages to which it is not related, such as Hattic and Hurrian, which may strike some as odd. The timedepth is also problematic: a seventh-millennium homeland in Anatolia and subsequent dispersal to Greece are incongruent with certain reconstructions in the proto-lexicon. For example, the horse, ‘which is thoroughly embedded in the reconstructed vocabulary as well as in Indo European ritual’ and should therefore figure prominently in Anatolian and Greek cultures between 6500 and 6000 BC if Renfrew is right, is not attested in either until the fourth and third millennia BC respectively. On the basis of such and similar points of departure, Mallory (1989: 179) concludes that Renfrew’s solution is ‘brave’ but not convincing (see Mallory, 1989: Chapter 6 for a detailed critique of Renfrew’s position).

It seems unlikely at the moment that such areas of debate will be definitively solved. Working back to periods for which there is often little material, linguistic and archaeological, means that it is incredibly difficult to fill such puzzles in neatly. It also means that while some of the methodologies devised to this end are plausible, they are also sometimes flawed. For example, on the surface, linguistic palaeontology makes a great deal of sense – find out how ancestral people labelled their world, and then find the world. Thus, we might assume that because we can find PIE cognates for mead (such as Germanic Met, Greek methu ‘wine’, Russian med, Lithuanian medus ‘honey’, Iranian mid, Sanskrit madhu ‘liquor’), then it is highly likely that PIE speakers also drank a fermented, intoxicating beverage called *medhu-. However, this kind of reasoning ignores the fact that (as we saw in Chapter 1) semantic change occurs frequently and often rapidly; and in this particular case, it is quite common for a word meaning simply ‘drink’ to become specialized in denoting an alcoholic beverage: witness the change in English liquor (Chapter 1), and Slavonic pivo, which now means ‘beer’ instead of its original ‘drink’. Similar issues have arisen with the actual designation of the PIE homeland. On the whole, the flora and fauna reconstructed for the proto-lexicon have a wide geographical distribution, but some are more restricted, thereby holding promises of physical delimitation. One of these reconstructions is that for ‘beech’ (*bhergo-). Many cognates exist across the IE daughters, implying that the word also existed in PIE. The common beech (to which this label was initially thought to apply) has a limited distribution, in that it is confined to central

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Europe, and is not native east of Poland and the Ukraine. Claims were therefore made for a homeland within the ‘beech tree line’, but again a major obstacle lay in the fact that it was unclear whether the PIE word actually designated what modern scholars understood to be a beech tree. Some of the cognates on which the reconstruction was based actually refer to different entities: the Greek means ‘oak’, and those in other languages mean ‘elder’ and ‘elm’ (Baugh and Cable, 2002: 39). A similar situation arose with the reconstruction for ‘salmon’ (*loksos). Salmon is also restricted in distribution to northern Europe, which could place the PIE homeland in that area. However, subsequent re-examination indicated that the word may have labelled the more commonplace ‘salmon trout’.7 As a final case in point, Renfrew (1987: 82) points out that we do not actually know whether the reconstructed words for animals such as the horse and the cow actually refer to domesticated or wild animals – a significant issue when we consider that the presence of these animals has been used to support arguments for the existence of both warrior pastoral and peaceful agricultural economies.

In addition to the potential ambiguities of the proto-lexicon, we should also bear in mind that reconstruction of the latter is by no means complete. There are many words which scholars have been unable to reconstruct, and they are surprising in their ordinariness. For example, it has been possible to reconstruct ‘eye’ and ‘eyebrow’, but not ‘eyelid’ (Mallory, 1989: 161); or ‘butter’, ‘snow’ and ‘feet’, but not ‘milk’, ‘rain’ or ‘hands’ (Renfrew, 1987: 81). If the necessary cognates for such everyday words could disappear, then it is entirely possible that words which did designate, or at the very least delimit, the original homeland have also vanished from the daughter languages as their speakers’ environments changed. The overall lesson seems to be that no matter how plausible the evidence may seem, we cannot blindly impose our perspectives and expectations on people who lived in a world we can only begin to imagine.

Expectations are important to mention here because debates about the PIE homeland have often included charges of subjectivity and selectiveness on the part of their supporters. For example, Trask (1996: 360) points out that many of Gimbutas’ critics claim that her readings of the evidence fit the match she wanted to make: ‘they argue that most of the physical evidence she adduces either has other explanations or is simply contradicted by further evidence which is silently ignored’. Mallory (1989) makes much the same statements about Renfrew’s position. The fact of the matter is, as in any discipline, evidence can be interpreted to fit certain frameworks. In cases such as this, where evidence is drawn from different fields, in each of which uncertainties and gaps in knowledge exist, it is up to the researcher to pull the different strands together into a coherent pattern as best they can. Consequently, we end up with some ragtag theories, but with some decently put together ones as well. Indeed, the very fact that theories such as those of Gimbutas and Renfrew are still around, and are still being debated, is testimony to the fact that they each have a significant level of substance. Thus, we may never find the definitive answer to the question ‘where is the Indo-European homeland?’, but instead, will probably join Mallory in asking ‘where have they put it now?’ (paraphrase of Mallory, 1989: 143).