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The Indo-European Family Tree

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Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#21

Post by muststopmyths »

TFNA wrote: post #15
OutOfHere wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "PIE religion" is the name scholars give to the religious pool that is partially reconstructed from the overlapping evidence (poetry+rituals+myth+gods+vocabulary) of its descendants. Each descendant subregion of PIE of course imposed its own religious beliefs and local gods. There is no surprise there. The key thread of derivative localized polytheism, often rooted in the same nature-based phenomenon, however per…

I am an actual Indo-Europeanist and currently employed in the field. Please stop trying to oversell this. The sibling comment is referring to the aforementioned vague lexemes, too vague for much reconstruction of anything meriting being called a common IE religion. Earlier work by scholars like Dumézil, which are common to pop-sci shit and still hang on here and there on Wikipedia, are generally discussed within the…

would you recommend a more recent book comparable to "Empires of the Word" by Nicholas Ostler on the subject of languages ? I am really enjoying the book, but it's over 20 years old at this point. I wonder how much of the information is out of date now.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#23

Post by talideon »

bonoboTP wrote: post #18
talideon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah, but that's like saying that producing a tree of pomaceous fruit hides the fact that citrus fruits exist. (Yes, I did make an apples and oranges joke.)

The tree appearance just makes it too inviting to imagine PIE as some pristine ur-language, the kind of original language of Babel. I'm not saying that people explicitly think these thoughts, just that it's easy to get this impression, even if it's not conscious. The fascination about the original human tongue in Eden used to be a common intellectual preoccupation. My point here is that PIE is quite a different story…

Is it though? It's not as if it can pull in hypothetical superfamilies like Nostratic. It's not saying it's a family tree of all languages, just I-E. Your assumption is that somebody would look at it and forget that Mandarin exists, or Arabic, or Finnish, &c. I don't buy that. Hence my fruit joke. I'm not sure exactly what you expect them to do to avoid an egregious misreading by somebody spectacularly smoothbrained, because anyone with that mentality isn't going to be paying attention anyway.

[Removed my Anatolian criticism: I just hadn't zoomed in enough!]

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#24

Post by oofabz »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #22

Interesting, northern India and southern Sri Lanka ended up with Indo-European languages. However, southern Indian and northern Sri Lanka ended up speaking a completely different language family. I wonder how that happened.

The Indo-European speakers invaded from the north.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migrations

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#26

Post by bonoboTP »

talideon wrote: post #23
bonoboTP wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tree appearance just makes it too inviting to imagine PIE as some pristine ur-language, the kind of original language of Babel. I'm not saying that people explicitly think these thoughts, just that it's easy to get this impression, even if it's not conscious. The fascination about the original human tongue in Eden used to be a common intellectual preoccupation. My point here is that PIE is quite a different story…

Is it though? It's not as if it can pull in hypothetical superfamilies like Nostratic. It's not saying it's a family tree of all languages, just I-E. Your assumption is that somebody would look at it and forget that Mandarin exists, or Arabic, or Finnish, &c. I don't buy that. Hence my fruit joke. I'm not sure exactly what you expect them to do to avoid an egregious misreading by somebody spectacularly smoothbrained,…

No, I understand that people would know that Chinese existed far away. My point is that locally, PIE had neighbors, had variants, dialects, it had earlier forms, it was like a living language in a normal human context.

Maybe your brain works differently. I had this kind of misconception, imagining languages to be Pangea-like. That there used to be less linguistic diversity, there was a big uniform language (and perhaps a handful of others far away on the Earth) that later on fractured. But reality is more dynamic. PIE was just an ordinary language. And there was likely more linguistic diversity than today, due to less communication and travel opportunities and geographical features being more isolating.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#27

Post by OutOfHere »

muststopmyths wrote: post #21
TFNA wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am an actual Indo-Europeanist and currently employed in the field. Please stop trying to oversell this. The sibling comment is referring to the aforementioned vague lexemes, too vague for much reconstruction of anything meriting being called a common IE religion. Earlier work by scholars like Dumézil, which are common to pop-sci shit and still hang on here and there on Wikipedia, are generally discussed within the…

would you recommend a more recent book comparable to "Empires of the Word" by Nicholas Ostler on the subject of languages ? I am really enjoying the book, but it's over 20 years old at this point. I wonder how much of the information is out of date now.

[flagged]

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#28

Post by cmrdporcupine »

TFNA wrote: post #11
OutOfHere wrote: post #8

PIE was not just a commonality for language, but also for religion across these regions. And then came along the Semitic wave of religions.

Reconstructing a PIE religion (as opposed to a few rather vague lexemes like "sky god") is regarded as less tenable today than in the past. The well-described features of Indo-Iranian religion are largely innovations and not found among speakers of IE branches that split off before. Some of Greek and Roman religion is actually the result of areal contact, not inheritance from earlier IE times. You might want to read…

Maybe tangential (and I agree with you), but “religion” is also a misleading word for many of the practices that Christianity later grouped together as “paganism.”

Where these practices often differed strongly from Christianity was that they were not totalizing, overarching, mandatory systems of belief. They were more about practices embedded in daily and civic life -- sacrifices, festivals, acts of veneration, etc. -- than about belief or internal mental state (“Whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”). They were also generally quite willing to incorporate gods, heroes, and practices from other peoples encountered along the way.

IMHO, exclusive, universal, doctrinally policed religion developed partly through the interaction of monotheistic traditions with imperial states, which had strong reasons to standardize institutions and identities; although neither Rome nor the caliphates ever achieved simple religious homogeneity.

(And yeah, clearly there's a lot of commonality between many of the cultures derived from early Indo-European migration etc but also incredible diversity and very clear adaptations to wherever they ended up and who they ended up co-existing with)

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