The sound of Proto-Indo-European

[Viggen]

Pretty amazing to think that this is how it could have sounded,the mother of all indo-european languages...

 

http://www.archaeology.org/exclusives/articles/1302-proto-indo-european-schleichers-fable

[Onasander]

I think the idea of a purely nomadic indo european language died after Gobekli Tepe was discovered.... you have a cibilization of stagnant hunter and gathers building temples, cultivating the first domesticated crops.... and their architectual scheme spread througout the world, to Malta and Stonehenge.

 

We may be dealing with several linguistic and technological explisions spread over several thousand years as a result.... same way the world went from fuedal to democratic over the last millennium from a variety of imputus and influences. A future archeologist studying our era might hear of D Day, a people known as Americans, and their link to democracy, and assume Americans were Aryan like invaders who invented democracy and spread it, through their leader Napoleon. But how do you explain fragments from ancient surviving texts suggesting earlier eras existed prior to Americas probable origination?

 

I see Gobekli Tepe ruining a PIE theory in a similar light. Looks good, might even represent a wave of Iranians pushing south and west of the Caucasus away from the Ary Darya, but can't be thought as the origination point, but rather a much later wave in a journey that began and continued with periodic sputs 10000 years earlier at the end of the neolithic. The fact there are regional language blocks shows these spurts didn't last long, and didn't long maintain links to their mother hubs until much more recent migrations encouraged more people in mass to migrate and settle. A relatively open concept of acceptance in europe allowed this last group to blend in, in india, they segregated.... likely having learned that lesson from the mesopotamian states.

Edited September 28, 2014 by Onasander