{"id":3500,"date":"2006-11-10T09:36:07","date_gmt":"2006-11-10T09:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2006\/11\/digging-up-prehistoric-language-spread\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:47:05","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:47:05","slug":"digging-up-prehistoric-language-spread","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2006\/11\/digging-up-prehistoric-language-spread\/","title":{"rendered":"Digging up prehistoric language spread"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a perfect cool and sunny Canberra afternoon. Some of the Wednesday Lunch Linguists wanted to avoid spending it on marking. And so we headed off to Peter Bellwood’s seminar at ANU, Early farmers and the spread of languages in South Asia<\/em>. This was partly based on a paper he gave at the Harvard Kyoto Roundtable<\/a> in 2005 [1]. Prehistorians can tell grand stories, and this was grand by their standards – wheat, barley, rice and the linguistic history of the whole of India and Pakistan.<\/p>\n


\nBellwood painted a picture of Indo-Aryans sweeping into northern India from Iran with cattle, domesticated cereals, mother goddess figurines, and copper technology from about 3500 BC. But not as horse-mounted hordes. Dravidians came in about the same time but from slightly further south, with Neolithic technology, cereals (no wheat or barley) and they developed cattle corrals. And about 3000 BC Munda speakers came in from the east, with rice-cultivation techniques and cord-marking pottery that resembles that found in China.
\nThe basic lines of argument are that if we want to explain the distribution of language families, then we have to consider that:
\n2. People move, languages don’t move (much… people need a reason to shift languages), and scatterings of language families means the ancestors of the speakers must have moved to different places.
\n3. People need a reason to move. Conquerors, world religions, colonialism are all irrelevant in these early moves.
\n4. In the material culture record in India there are differences: lots of Neolithic sites in Dravidian heartlands, copper in Indo-Aryan areas, corded pottery in possible Munda areas, and so on. And there are dates for the appearance of different cereals in different areas. Rice came from India, wheat and barley from West Asia.
\n5. So Bellwood links speakers with technologies and farming techniques, and thus the spread of these, and direction of spread, with the spread of the language families. He didn’t spell it out, but I suppose the assumption is that hunter gatherer peoples don’t learn farming techniques unless a whole bunch of farmers moves in, and in that case they might as well learn the farmers’ language as well.
\n6. This results in much earlier dates for Indo-Aryan than linguists usually give (ours are often linked with the hypothesised composition of the Rig-Veda<\/a> ca 1500 BC).
\n7. So in Bellwood’s view, if you have evidence of material culture change, and of language family spread, then you try to link the one with the other. Thus the approach ignores the possibility of spread of languages by hunter-gatherers, because there is little material culture evidence that could be used to prove or disprove such a hypothesised spread.
\nThe upshot for linguists is that Bellwood’s hypothesis makes it important to reconstruct terminology sets for the relevant material culture and farming and pastoralism technologies for the language families. Do the Munda languages share obviously old words for rice? But it also forces us to think about what the reasons could be for language spread in hunter gather societies, such as pre-colonial Australia, and where one would look for evidence for to prove or disprove them.
\n[1] BELLWOOD, PETER. 2006. Early farmers: issues of spread and migration with respect to the Indian subcontinent. Proceedings of the Pre-symposium of RIHN and 7th ESCA Harvard-Kyoto Roundtable<\/em>, ed. by Osada Toshiki and Noriko Hase, 58-72. Kyoto: Research Institute for Humanity and Nature.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a perfect cool and sunny Canberra afternoon. Some of the Wednesday Lunch Linguists wanted to avoid spending it on marking. And so we headed off to Peter Bellwood’s seminar at ANU, Early farmers and the spread of languages in South Asia. This was partly based on a paper he gave at the Harvard … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linguistics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3500"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4398,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3500\/revisions\/4398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}