Talk:Paleolithic continuity paradigm/Archive 1

Pseudo-science or no science
What if the paradigm of a not-so-early common origin of the Indo-European languages is met with serious inconsistencies, some of which are shown, for example, by Colin Renfrew in his book on the puzzle of Indo-European origins? Are we left with the choice of not trying any research at all or of resorting to pseudoscience? The proposal of the PCT that the dialect boundaries of today Europe go back to Mesolithic times at least might eventually turn out to be wrong, but is argued with the linguistic and archeological competence of an expert of European dialects and of an expert of European prehistory. Guparra 20:37, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

This article is self-contradictory. First it says PCT is the theory that Indo-European languages have been in place since Paleolithic. Then to contradict the theory in the last paragraph there is a statement that goes something like since language changes are now known not to be due to migrations, PCT must be pseudoscientific. Balazs 20:14, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
 * you misunderstand. The article is making the point that language spread is not connected to noticeable genetic shifts (i.e. 5% of people may migrate, and cause a change in the language of the other 95%), therefore the argument of the 80% genetic consistency is worthless. They may argue with expert competence on European dialects, but if you ask me, if they apply that competence to the Paleolithic, the outcome is still pseudoscientific. dab (&#5839;) 20:56, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

People have to get used to the new theory. Alinei is not some pseudoscientist to make such elementary faults. PCT is VERY VERY deep theory.

Cheers
 * I wish to point out some facts on the article, that make me believe that the article should be rewritten.

It is based on other, linguistic and archaeological points, which I try to resume. Oddly enough, it is the second instance in which I find criticisms of Alinei's theory motivated with statements that he did not issue. Here genetics being the basis of his theory, the other instance is to be found in the discussion of Etruscan language. Apparently, his theory is too new to be accepted easily. A review in English (his books are in Italian for now) is that og Jonathan Morris in Mothe Tongue. Guparra 20:45, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
 * 1) Alinei's theory is not based on arcaeogenetical studies, much less on those of Brian Sykes, who is not even quoted in the two volumes of "Origini delle lingue d'Europa"
 * From internal evidence from the European languages and dialects that shows inconsistencies in the usually assumed opinion dialects are late, Middle Age, phenomena.
 * From evidence that linguistic chnge is rather due to contact than to an internal mutation clock: for example, the differences between American English or Spanish and their European counterparts are to be asciribed to the languages spoken in the regions where most emigrants came from rather than to later evolution.
 * From the well known fact that geographically and culturally isolated isolated languages are conservative.
 * From these, and many other facts, Alinei formulates a principle whereby languages change only if compelled to do so, because of contacts, but in absence of contacts they tend to be stable.
 * So the distribution of languages can be much older than believed.
 * Internal evidence shows that the common core of Indo-European language shows an Upper Paleolithic culture. Words that belong to later cultural ages are innovations coined out of a common stock, but innovations nevertheless. Therefore, common Indo-European is much older than believed.
 * The borders of Mesolithic cultures are more or less well reproduced by the borders of modern European dialects.
 * Genetics. The results of  Cavalli Sforza and collaborators, of Sokal and others (not of Sykes) show that linguistic borders grossly correspond to "genetic borders". They are of course taken into account, as evidence to be added to the linguistic and archaeological evidence. But the PCT does not relay upon genetics.
 * 1) If a theory about the origins of a linguistic group is deemed to be not scientific if it cannot be tested against records, no theory of the origins of IndoEuropeans, or Uralic peoples, or whatever else, is scientific. We can only maintain that Greek was spoken in Greece about 1200 BC, or German in parts of Germany about 800 AC. If instead we allow for the use of internal linguistic evidence and archaeology, used with the proper techniques of linguistics, Alinei theory is scientific. In addition, it explains facts otherwise unexplained, which is an excellent test. Of course, it might be wrong, in the same way that many other theories of hystorical linguistics and anthroploogy have turned out to be.
 * An amendment. I found Alinei's reference to Sykes' work. It is in the introduction to the Continuity Theory in the website {http://www.continuitas.com], which is linked to in the article. It is the website of the group of linguists and prehistorians who support the PCT.


 * The work of Sykes quoted is printed in 2001, while the two books by Alinei were printed in 1996 and 2000.
 * For sure, Sykes' work is relevant to Alinei because it gives him further arguments to criticize the Neolithic Farmers Wave Immigration, modelled by Ammermann and Cavalli Sforza and used by Renfrew. Renfrew hypothesizes that the IndoEuropeans were Neolithic farmers coming from the Levant who settled in Europe and by demic prevalence absorbed the scarce Mesolithic native population.
 * It seems to me that the introduction to the PCT provided in the website, should make apparent that the theory relies on linguistics and archaeology, genetics being concurrent for some points only. Guparra 16:05, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

well, by all means fix the article then. It is still just a stub hacked together from online sources, so somebody who has actually read the book is sorely needed. dab (&#5839;) 18:22, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
 * what I shall gladly do. I only need some time because I am in the process of learning how to use wikiediting and, most important, I have to go through the books again. Guparra 20:38, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

I understand that language change is not neccessarily connected to genetic shifts (that is 5% genetic shift can change the language of the other 95%). But does it neccesarily contradict (provided that there is other evidence, which seems to be the case)? Alinei's website talks about another better established continuity theory (the Uralic one). There is also the issue of what is meant by pseudo-science vs. science (Feyerabend thought that neither is there a distinction nor would it be advantageous to have one). Balazs 16:31, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
 * I apologize that I shall be incommunicado for a few months. A comment about your comment. In Physics the border between science and pseudo-science can be very thin. Am example is the Superstring theory, which any physicist considers to be Science; nevertheless, we do not know when nor whether it can be actually tested, which would put it in the pseudo-science realm. Guparra 07:41, 22 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Alinei's judgements on Uralic are entirely untrustworthy. There is no established continuity theory for Uralic. Wik's belief in a Uralic substrate, for instance, have been dismissed by most Uralicists. The people whom Alinei generally cites whenever he mentions Uralic languages are a couple of archaeologists without meaningful training in historical linguistics. Alinei is a very deceitful writer and you should follow his footnotes sometimes to see how much he strays from reputable linguistics. CRCulver 19:00, 25 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I would appreciate some references in any language that suggest that Alinei is a quack (which is roughly what you are saying). My limited understand is quite the opposite.  Alinei appears to be a respected scientist with considerable accomplishments and acknowledgement behind him.  Doubtless his continuity theory is contreversial... but I am yet to see any evidence beyond random anonymous english-speaking internet strangers that he is considered a disreputable or intellectually dishonest man by any group of people or scientific organisation.  --70.49.192.75 00:31, 29 March 2006 (UTC)


 * The greeks (judging by the wikipedia page) do not seem to consider the theory quackery either... Paleolithic Continuity Theory, translated from Greek --70.49.192.75 00:41, 29 March 2006 (UTC)


 * And what is that link supposed to indicate? All it shows is what one can already infer from other internet sites, etc.---that there is a portion of the Greek population that is ready to swallow up any jargon that may lend credence to the idea of proto-Greeks being autochthonous to Greece (this is not directly connected to the issue of ancient Greek->Modern Greek continuity, but a very different topic), which is a relatively popular idea among them, I have noticed. Alinei is still very deep in the fringe. He has all kinds of whacked-out ideas, like Etruscan being an early form of Hungarian; that the Slavic invasion never occured; that the ancient Thracians were Slavs (he actually states this). If those Greeks you cite realized that, I think they would think differently of Alinei. Alexander 007 22:51, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
 * The fact that you even resort to making such a pathetically puerile generalization as "the greeks (judging by the wikipedia page) do not seem to consider the theory quackery" indicates that your mental level is at the 12 year old stage, which explains your taking to Alinei in the first place. Alexander 007 23:04, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

I am surprised how easily a scientific theory can be branded as "pseudoscience" only because its results are in contrast with the mainstream. And without even having read the book! Linguistics is not my field of expertise, but I think I can discern science from pseudoscience, and Alineis method is not any more speculative than other linguistic studies, and his reasoning is sound. I would hence like to eliminate the sentence about the pseudoscientific character of Alineis theory, unless there are objections, or a reference can be provided. Pcassitti 12:51, 31 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I would object. PCT is generally not submitted to the same level of peer review as reputable theories, nor is it published in reputable venues. Indeed, much PCT "scholarship" is self-published. CRCulver 23:42, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * The lack of translation into english is indeed a problem, but papers related to the continuity theory have been published in a number of scientific magazines, and presented at international linguistic conferences. I fail to see any element which would objectively put this theory close to the "realm of pseudoscience", as the wikipedia article states, apart from the fact that the results are in contrast with established linguistic theories. But it is the method, not the result which defines science.
 * But apart from that, I think that branding something as "pseudoscience" in an encyclopedia needs at least a reference to substantiate the claim. Pcassitti 21:13, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

PCT - Interdisciplinary Conception
cut from the article: Comparing, Colin Renfrew [specially 1990, 1999] and Mario Alinei [1996, 2000], Xaverio Ballester prefer the second due to agreement with interdisciplinary data:

... the emergent interdisciplinary consensus is playing a very important role in the consolidation of these new postulates. This consensus is represented by archaeologists such as Poghirc [1992], climatologists such as Adams [1999 with Otte], historians such as Häusler [1996, 1998], or prehistorians such as Otte [1997, 1998, 1999 with Adams, 2000]. Given the convergence of their data, we should also add some genetists such as Richards [2000], Semino [2000] and their research teams, as well as Sykes [2001], whose studies support the Palaeolithic origin of the genes of most Europeans. [THE FIRST GERMANIC ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Xaverio Ballester URL: ]

...

Now as on 2007 the number of citation grow rapidly [Google scholar count 3400 and showe the highest dynamics comparatively to other concurent therories.] is larger in English language papers. Perhaps some English-only speaking linguist learned Italian language.

apart from the appalling language and formatting, this is problematic because it is apparently a vanity citation of some paper (incredibly including a self-googling link), harping on an "emergent interdisciplinary consensus" about the "genes of most Europeans". this is completely irrelevant. PCT isn't about "genes". it is completely undisputed that the "genes of most Europeans" have been in situ since the paleolithic, we don't need Alinei for that. The relevant article for this is Genetic history of Europe. The alleged google scholar hitcount is counting completely random occurrences of "continuity" in conjunction with "paleolithic". The actual count is 14. --dab (𒁳) 08:24, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The passage quoted is not about genes, either. It is about an interdisciplinary consensus among archaeologists, historians, climatologists,and genetists, although it doesn't explain what exactly they agree on. I suppose it is the cultural and fisical continuity of european populations from the mesolithic, which is indeed a strong argument in support of Alineis theory, but that would need to be stated in a clear way, possibly by including additional passages from the quoted paper. Pcassitti 12:48, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * the passage mentions the "Palaeolithic origin of the genes of most Europeans", so you can hardly claim it isn't about genes. I think that Alieni's theory is fringy nonsense, and this paragraph is calculated to conjure up the appearance of a consenseus that does not in fact exist in the best tradition of pseudoscholarship. This is best done by wild and erratic mixing of genetics, archaeology, linguistics and anything else that might fit the bill (also known as WP:SYN). The Ballester paper is hosted on continuitas.com, and apparently not peer-reviewed. It quotes Alieni as arguing that the Germanic word for "island" is derived from a PIE word for "height", and hence supports a context of "deglacialisation" for the environment of Proto-Germanic. This is a funny joke, but if presented in seriousness, it's just sad. This is just another confirmation that continuitas.com and consequently PCT itself should be considered as pseudoscholarship not worthy of serious attention. dab (𒁳) 13:16, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Genetics is indeed cited amongst other discplines, but the passage is not about "the genes of most europeans" as you stated. I don't wish to enter a debate about the merits and demerits of PCT, but the consensus about the general continuity in european populations is more than just an appearance. And the contrast between the more recent historical models and classic linguistic theories is also real. It is the method, not the conclusions which define science. I Branding something as "pseudoscience" because it doesn't conform to traditional models is not very scientific itself. Pcassitti 14:55, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Leaving aside the 'pesudoscience' issue, could you say what the 'consensus' is that is shared by "Poghirc [1992], climatologists such as Adams [1999 with Otte], historians such as Häusler [1996, 1998], or prehistorians such as Otte [1997, 1998, 1999 with Adams, 2000]. Given the convergence of their data, we should  also add some genetists such as Richards [2000], Semino [2000] and their research teams, as well as Sykes [2001].." These various individuals form various disciplines are portrayed as agreeing on something, but it's not at all clear what they are a agreeing on. I think we need clarification of that before we can judge the relevance of the claim. Paul B 15:21, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The consensus is about a general continuity in european populations, which for the proponents of the PCT is an argument for a general continuity of their respective languages as well. The quoted section of the paper was poorly chosen, but if additional paragraphs where included I think the meaning would become clear. Pcassitti 19:12, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
 * So essentially the consensus is that most Europeans descend from Paleolithic populations. As far as I know this is not disputed by proponents of the standard model. Paul B 23:26, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, it's not about descendance, but cultural and ethnic continuity, and since language is not a separate entity in PCT this is seen as a strong argument for a linguistic continuity as well. The interdisciplinary aproach now common in historical disciplines means that for the important events and developments in our past a number of concurring evidence is observed, which together adds to a more complete picture. The problem with the traditional linguistic theories, as far as I understand them, is that no other discipline is able to contribute any evidence to substantiate them. It is actually more the contrary. And PCT is trying to bridge this gap. It may have its faults and inconsistencies, like any other theory about such controversial thematics, but I believe it should be taken as a valuable cotribution, instead of bashing it because it doesn't conform to traditional models. Pcassitti 07:50, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

in PCT this is seen as a strong argument for a linguistic continuity &mdash; this is the point: it is not the premise which is disputed, but the conclusion. So what is the point of harping on the completely undisputed premise? The task of PCT proponents is making their conclusion palatable to skeptics, not in harping on what everyone agrees with anyhow. The shortcomings of PCT are not such as those of "any other theory". PCT is a leap of faith concerning linguistic continuity over periods beyond of what any linguist will be prepared to admit as plausible, and no amount of genetic continuity is going to change that. dab (𒁳) 21:11, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Your trying to reduce the PCT to genetics, which it really isn't about, makes it look like you just wish to discredit a theory you don't like, instead of discussing its merits and demerits. You keep quoting single phrases out of context and pretending they define PCT. In the specific case "argument for linguistic continuity" does not mean it is the only or predominant one. It is all right not to know the theoretical and methodological assumptions of a theory, but any critic of that theory will then be difficult to motivate. Pcassitti 06:39, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
 * my likings don't enter into it. If it isn't about genetics, stop discussing genetics. If it has merits, discuss its merits. To the best of my understanding, this is all about linguistic continuity. If I am mistaken, by all means correct me, and remove the reference to Indo-European languages. All I am saying is the arguments regarding linguistics as presented at present is bogus. If that's not really what PCT is, so much the better for PCT. dab (𒁳) 07:50, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

earlier debate
see support of "Dbachmann theory" in W.pedia in support of the "dbachman" revision

Autochthonic theory
The autochthonic theory holds that the proto-Slavs are native to the area of modern Poland, where they are supposed to have lived before the 5th century. The theory was postulated by Wincenty Kadłubek in Cronicae et gesta ducum sive principum Polonorum. Other notable proponents of the theory are Józef Kostrzewski, Witold Hensel, Konrad Jażdżewski, Witold Mańczak, Janusz Andrzej Piontek Robert Dąbrowski, Tadeusz Makiewicz, Tadeusz Malinowski , Henryk Mamzer, Zofia Kurnatowska, Stanisław Kurnatowski, Stanisław Tabaczyński and Lech Leciejewicz, Aleksander Brückner.

Several arguments are used in support of the theory:
 * No remains or traces of Germanic tribes were reported on West Slavic territory, neither enclaves nor medieval historical records. Instead Slavic tribes slowly disappeared from the area. Polabian Slavs, for instance, had become extinct in the 18th century, after having lived in the area for over a thousand years. Upper and Lower Sorbs still live in the area, and have a distinct language and distinct customs and traditions from their non-Slavic neighbours.
 * "Autochtonic historiography" written in the 12th century.

Which scholar uses this as an argument for the autochthonic theory?


 * Medieval authors, who refer to the Vandals from Vandalia as Slowianie.  There are no listed references to when medieval authors identify Vandals from Vandalia as Teutons, before Teutons conquered their lands.

I'm sure that the three works refer to the Vandals as Slowianie. But which scholar uses this as an argument in support of the autochthonic theory? If this is merely a point that might illustrate why the autochthonic theory might not be all that bad, it violates WP:OR. Aecis
 * Some allochtonic(scholars) make complicated combinations to overword the simple fact. If all people call you mr Smith are you mr Smith ? probably even not but to prove that you are not mr Smith lays on the disaproving side. Bear in mind that 'in the case' you call yourself also mr Smith
 * Please answer my question. Which scholars or politicians use these medieval authors as evidence for the autochthonic theory? Aecis


 * The early medieval border between the Frankish/Teutonic empire and Slavic territory matches the border of the Roman conquest. The West Slavic tribes remained on territory that wasn't conquered by the Romans. The Teutonic tradition draws from the Holy Roman Empire.
 * Venedi, Wendish, Vandals. Lugi, Ludzie, Lyngels, Lenkes. 'If' Teutonic medieval 'authors were wrong' "moving names" Venedi to Vends ; then alltochtonic want us to believe that numerous nations for centuries were also wrong especially: Magiars, Lotwian, Litwian, Ukrainian, Russian, Turkish, Armenian who ancient roots of Lugi use till today in names Lahy Lyngel or Lynkes.


 * Genetic marker R1a1 related to Western Europe R1b, most numerous in Sorbs )


 * The suspitius disaperence of 'manuscript sources' edited by Theodor Mommsen, De origine actibusque Getarum in the highht of German imperializm. Almost forgoten book of another Jordan who wrote 100 years earlier De Originibus Slavicis. There is also unnknow reason what for Mommsen edited Goth History since the works was supposedly edited, printed and published by Konrad Peutinger 300 years before.

see the entries in Konrad Peutinger and disscusion i [Getica]


 * Rex 'Sclavorum Gothorum sive Polonorum' title of Polish king. -->


 * Creolization of germanic languages versus gramatical reachnes of slowianic languages close to indoeuropean originators.


 * Microsatellite variance, the distribution of genetic marker R1a1 and Slavic kurgan traditions.
 * Germanic languages are more similar to Slavic languages than to Baltic languages. This would imply that in prehistoric times, Slavic languages developed between Germanic languages and Baltic languages.

Comment * The hydrotomponyms in Poland do not have Germanic languages properties; what has to be observed if ancestors of Poles, (as 'allochtonic' postullte), had to learn from conquered tribes speaking Germanic languages. (ref 15)
 * Hidden comment 1: the same as above
 * Hidden comment 2: You mean Witold Mańczak? I've hidden this point, because grammatical and spelling errors make this barely comprehensible. Please also remember to avoid Original Research: Wikipedia is not the proper place to post arguments that might support a certain theory; Wikipedia is only the proper place to post arguments used in Reliable Sources to support a certain theory. They should be referred to as such. For example: "Witold Mańczak states that ... " - Aecis

The allochtonic theory thesis are now included with newly formed Paleolithic Continuity Theory caled also indigenism. Which not only debuke allochtonic flase ideas but extend Słowian autochtonism in Central Europe to paleolithic.

Allochthonic theory
In scholarly community nobody today hold the allochtonic theory views, new data rejecting it completely. It may be however describe it from historical point to show how data may be manipulated to fulfill political goals of panagermanizm.

The allochthonic theory holded that the Slavic peoples immigrated to the area of modern Poland during or after the 5th century. The theory was first expounded by Theodor Mommsen, with his republishing of Getica.

(other sources are rare or not available)

please provide the a qoute from other, not Moomsen related, edition of 'Getica'. (not secondary reference but biblioggraphical record of the publication containing text of 'Getica')

Other notable proponents of the theory were Gustaf Kossinna, Bolko von Richthofen, Hans Schleiff, Kazimierz Godłowski, Michał Parczewski.


 * Tadeusz Makiewicz writes: Great migrations of the 5th century did not bypass the Polish lands. (...) In effect an almost complete depopulation of the Polish lands took place. This void was quickly to be filled with new arrivals. The depopulation theory

Mr. 24.15, if you insist on reverting to your coatracking formatting and grammar nightmare, I suppose we will just have to semiprotect this article. Please be reasonable. This isn't the place to discuss Slavic and German nationalism. dab (𒁳) 08:57, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

some memory problem in continuity
This article is seriusly harased by cynic data pervert. Most of the empty {factd} sencteces are inserted as you can see here. The cynism is that he laudly demading cleaning "the mess" he.

So dbachenn do you rely pretend that the other yours entries in edits history are invisible or tu tedious to brouse ;| ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.15.123.48 (talk) 18:24, 19 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I trust you are not conscious of the hilarity of this. I do not pretend to even understand your "English", but "seriusly harased by cynic data pervert" might just make it to my hall of fame. --dab (𒁳) 18:49, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

arbitrary break
thanks for your reply, Jonathan (I've only just seen it).
 * This, for me, is a cardinal virtue of PCT, it just says that the first people into a territory tend to dictate its language

for me, that's its cardinal flaw. It's an axiom pulled out of thin air, fuelled by the desire to "reconstruct" paleolithic language no doubt, and once you accept it, of course, everything becomes very simple. Simple, but completely out of touch with reality.
 * why don’t you argue that PIE broke up in the 20th century, since all the daughter languages probably have the same word for ‘computer’, etc.

I am glad you ask -- since the English word is computer and not hamfuther as it would need to be if the term had been inherited. This illustrates that PCT pretends to be a linguistic theory, while being informed by archaeology and genetics but completely devoid of any linguistic argument. Language is just conveniently frozen for 50,000 years. I am sorry, but to my mind this is not so much a theory buyt a simplistic cop-out, discarding 200 years of linguistic scholarship with a shrug. I seriously doubt that PCT will receive the support of a single conscientious Indo-Europeanist.

It will be interesting to further scrutinize genetic evidence for population movements and 'miscegenation' in the European Bronze Age to be sure, and we may be able to learn a lot about the nature of language contact and transmission, but only if we do not throw up our hands and turn to simplistic solutions like PCT. Regarding substrates and miscegenation, I admit the comparison to the New World is flawed. Your 'miscegenated' populations are the result of some 15 generations, corresponding, in the Kurgan model, to Europe in, say, 2500 BC. At that stage, indeed, you would expect to see "Kurgan Y-chromosome lines" and pockets of pre-IE languages. That was full 4 millennia past in AD 1500 when for the first time the linguistic map of Europe becomes reasonably complete. Try to find your "European Y-chromosome lines" in Brazil in AD 6000. We do have amazing pockets of pre-IE with the Basques and perhaps Rhaetic and Etruscan. If only the Romans had taken an interest in field linguistic in the 1st century BC, they could have collected treasures for us that are now lost forever (although that would still have been "Brazil in AD 4500", 1,500 years do make a huge difference (never mind the 50,000 years, which you have to assume were linguistically eventless)).

PCT in my view is intellectually dangerous because of its appeal to the "paleolithic language" enthusiasts. There appears to be a certain willingness to discard method and criticism as the only way to be able to claim "reconstructions" of paleolithic (or even neolithic) speech. That's postmodernism at its worst. Roll your own "Nostratic", never mind if it is "true" or methodologically sound, what is this obsession with so-called "truth" anyway, all scholarship is speculation, so let's go all the way and speculate, never mind plausibility or falsifiability. I think this is the way back to Renaissance obscurantism before the "age of reason" tempered the desire to know into science. Postmodernism has done great damage to that achievement, and Alinei seems much indebted to this unfortunate regress of the later 20th century.
 * dab (𒁳) 12:29, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Just seen your post, dab. Frankly, I’d take major issue with most of it.

1.	On the ‘first into a territory’ point – I find your comment ‘simple, but completely out of touch with reality’ laughable. We don’t have detailed documentation of movements of peoples in the Neolithic, but we do know quite a lot about movements of Germanic peoples across the Rhine since the 2nd C. BC – Despite all the movements, how much ground did Germanic make at the expense of Latin in France/Spain – etc. ?– a few valleys in Switzerland and that’s it. I contend that if a language is dug in, this evidence shows how hard it is to replace. You may raise England as a counterexample, but the more thoughtful commentators are reconsidering the view that England was Germanic free until the end of the Roman Empire – since you don’t have much Celtic evidence in E England, you don’t find the specific Germanic marker genes (but older lines – I’m referring to Peter Forster’s paper in the MacDonald series), etc., etc. And yet the traditionalists claim in the face of this that 3-4 millennia before, PIE swept Europe so completely that it obliterated all traces of a pre-IE substrate - despite the fact that the genetics shows that they were only a minority of the population – The lack of substrate is (IMHO) an insuperable obstacle for this theory in Europe – in complete contrast to India, where the work of such scholars as Southworth and Witzel show a very clear substrate and a relatively undifferentiated presence of IE - i.e. only one family. In pretty much any country you can think of where language replacement takes place – it is never 100% - there is always a substrate. One of the virtues of Alinei’s theory which makes it much more sophisticated than its rivals is that he allows explicitly for social stratification from the Neolithic onwards, with the elite speaking one language and the peasantry another. Celtic disappeared from Central Europe in his view, precisely because it was the language of a temporary elite and not of the peasantry. It is thus similar in kind to French in mediaeval England or Latin in N Africa or Arabic in Spain.

2.	There is a basic confusion in your thinking regarding Alinei & the Nostraticists – Alinei comments on N. only briefly and has never been interested in reconstructing protolanguages, only in demonstrating the early entry of PIE into Europe. For their part, Nostraticists like Bomhard & Dolgopolsky have pretty much diametrically opposed views on time depth & prehistoric distributions of languages to Alinei – this is a completely misinformed assertion.

3.	‘Discarding 200 years of linguistic scholarship’- how on earth can you claim this? There has never been a unitary position, just a few people like Gimbutas and Mallory who picked up a late 19th century nationalist ball and ran with it. Where do these 2 centuries of scholarship put the PIE homeland ?– pretty much anywhere from France to India. Note that by far the most intelligent of the classical linguists, Karl Brugmann, was notoriously reluctant to commit to a specific location.

4.	“I seriously doubt that PCT will receive the support of a single conscientious Indo-Europeanist” – you remind me of Dixon with his absurd claim that no reputable scientist upholds Nostratic (in the Rise and Fall of Languages) – and then defines reputable as meaning tenure at a US/Europe university – not only is this a gross slur on E European linguists, he also excludes himself as an Australian. Of course, if Indo-Europeanists define their ‘reputable’ status by their rejection of Nostratic/upholding of the 6,000 year rule then you are formally correct, but this will change as their views are shown to be increasily untenable by the growing body of genetic/archaeological evidence. I talk to a number of geneticists who are very interested in the language correlations with genetics but are frustrated with the arrogance/stupidity of such reputable linguists. There’s a growing consensus that their days are numbered.

5.	“Try to find your "European Y-chromosome lines" in Brazil in AD 6000” –they will be as clear then as they are now, unless Brazil suffers a massive influx of new population from elsewhere – for the simple reason that the DNA is non-recombinant – you don’t appear to understand the difference, so let me spell it out for you. Let’s imagine you have a European conquistador group who kill the native men and rape/seduce the native women – you get a half-cast population with native mtDNA, but European yDNA. Let’s assume that a few centuries later, the country is ‘democratic’ and the natives or mestizos are no longer actively persecuted/prevented from breeding – most of these have European yDNA. So when this population starts to reproduce itself, it too will be propagating European yDNA even though it is phenotypically native for many characteristics – and since there’s no recombination, the transmission of yDNA becomes an all-or-nothing event. If you have a relatively isolated population, there’s absolutely no reason why the European gene frequencies should fall precisely on account of the non-recombinant nature of the DNA in question.Jonathan Morris2 01:49, 25 September 2007 (UTC) 6. Your computer/hamfuther point doesn't prove anything either - if a word goes through a set of phonological changes, all you can claim is that it was in the ancestral language before the changes took place, but it could still have entered through borrowing. Think of a word like wine (probably a loan word) - does the similarity across IE mean that PIE didn't break up until after the Kurgan brigade had learned how to make wine? - Not necessarily -they could all merely have borrowed it from the same source. Not so fanciful, if you believe in prehistoric tradeJonathan Morris2 02:37, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

well, we can agree to disagree, I hope. just to point out the most glaring fallacies in your post, the hamfuther example was in reply to your question "why don’t you argue that PIE broke up in the 20th century, since all the daughter languages probably have the same word for ‘computer’" -- to which question my reply was the correct one. The presence of "hamfuther" would prove there was something called *komputor in pre-Germanic. The presence of wine or computer (i.e. the absence of an inherited word) doesn't prove the inverse. That's elementary logics, and reliance on such evidence is the harvest of the 200 years of scholarship you so quickly dismiss as "Gimbutas and Mallory". Second, I am perfectly aware of the nature of Y-DNA. I don't expect it to recombine over the next 4,000 years, I expect it to either disappear, or spread over the whole continent, so that it becomes unusable as a marker. --dab (𒁳) 13:30, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Without wishing to get deeply involved in this, or to insult anyone involved, Dbachmann, you don't seem to have answered most of Jonathan's points. I'd be really interested in your doing so, if you can, because I do feel there are problems with Gimbutas' model, some extralinguistic but some linguistic. Not least of these is the question how a small elite managed to compel whole populations to speak its language, in most cases without much discernible substrate, whereas those in historic times either could not or did not unless they emplaced very large numbers of their fellow speakers or killed a great many of the locals (which we have little evidence of, as Jonathan notes). (Contrasting the Normans, who did not compel the local French to speak Norse, nor the local English to speak French with the Spanish, who spread their language fairly comprehensively in central America, seems instructive.) You seem to wish to consider Indo-European in a vacuum, and it seems to me that that is the only way you can stand up hypotheses such as Renfrew's or Gimbutas's. (That's not to say that PCT is correct at all. It seems to me that Alinei has found a bunch of issues with the more commonly accepted hypotheses, and hammered a theory together to answer them, as much as anything else.)

And could you explain why you expect Y-DNA to disappear? You think someone else will invade Brazil before then? I suppose that's possible. And why would it become useless as a marker if it spreads over the whole continent? Maybe you're not clear what it's a marker of? Grace Note 04:57, 15 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Grace Note, Dab refers here to the principles of genetic drift. Your comment on the credibility of a minor elite being so few that they could not be attested, genetically nor by any clear archeological marker, and still could change a complete language, is perfectly valid. Dab refers here to "Kurganization". The only one who thinks kurganization permit us to assume an invisible "elite" is Dab. Any reputable linguist would confirm this is crap, and archeolists still fail to trace a Kurgan elite to western europe. Rokus01 16:06, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Dab, just seen your post. You claim "just to point out the most glaring fallacies in your post"- frankly you haven't pointed out any fallacies in my post, or given any coherent rebuttals to my points: Anyway: -Hamfuther. Firstly, if this word existed, it would show that this word was present in the earliest stages of Germanic, but not necessarily in PIE, since it could still be a loan, and furthermore, you can't nail down your point with phonetic analysis alone - you have to know what the word actually meant in PIE since the whole case for PIE having emerged in the Neolithic is based on the words  actually having 'Neolithic' meanings. This is not an idle point. One of the problems I have with Renfrew is that not only does he refuse to provide any linguistic evidence for his farming theory, but no-one else does. Well actually, Comrie provides one (that's right, one) etymology - melgh (in the green volume) - claiming that milking animals is a neolithic innovation. This is probably true, but it doesn't mean that melgh is a Neolithic root - in fact it's a widely attested root (e.g. proto-world) for suckling, licking. In fact, I find this idea that vocabulary always follows a technological innovation extremely silly. Hunter-gatherers probably knew every edible plant in the landscape (think survival) and probably performed most of the activities which went on in the Neolithic, albeit not in the systematic way which characterises the Neolithic. As such, they would have had vocabulary to describe any neolithic innovations in the Palaeolithic. If you argue that a common word for say 'pot'or 'ceramic' incontrovertibly ties PIE to the 'Neolithic' then it seems to me that you are a priori claiming that the PIE peoples cound't even conceive of any kind of container prior to that, which is preposterous. - Point 2 is that I see many linguists forgetting that PIE is a hypothetical language constructed from daughter languages - hence it is probably closer to them than the real PIE. It's easy to think of counterexamples - e.g. liver in Romance - if you look at the daughter languages you would reconstruct ficatus but not jecor - so it is a possibility that you may reconstruct the very last stage of an ancestral language (although not a given), but it may not correspond to earlier stages. For some reason, you never see any arguments for PIE homelands discussing how long the PIEs spent in the homeland. - Point 3, if you're going to argue for Neolithic or later origins for PIE on the basis of technology words (I wouldn't but the supporters do) then presumably you're vulnerable to the kind of inversion of this argument which ALinei uses to good effect. I.e. if you find that a given concept has different words in all the daughter languages, then presumably that concept/institution arose after the breakup of PIE. Hence, how do you explain the fact that the modern languages by and large have conserved the word for die /morire/smert' etc. but have no common word for burial, which emerges at the end of the Palaeolithic.

As for disrespecting 200 years of scholarship - as I've said, this scholarship still hasn't reached any consensus on where the homeland might have been, or when the PIE speakers were there. I don't think anyone takes Gimbutas seriously because the archeo evidence for her Kurgan claims is non-existent. As for Mallory - judging by his recent book (PIE), he is so vague that it's very hard to know what his theory is. About the only thing you can say is that he disagrees with Alinei and that he believes in linguistic archaeology as a basis for locating PIE in time and space.

"I don't expect it to recombine over the next 4,000 years, I expect it to either disappear, or spread over the whole continent, so that it becomes unusable as a marker" - Not sure what you mean here. If you refer to my point, you'll see that I was referring very specifically to a disproportionate presence of non-European mtDNA lines in 'white' males in NE Brazil. European Y chromosome lines are already 'all over the continent'.

I have a suggestion to make: before you write another logically incoherent post, why don't you go and read Alinei.Jonathan Morris2 20:34, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Bad joke
I don't think it is funny to associate a serious archeologist like Alexander Hausler to the extreme nonsense of this article. Rokus01 21:37, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Alexander Häusler ist listed among the members of the PCT workgroup Pcassitti 11:33, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Ok, then the problem of this article is just the quality. The theory should be presented as is, a new way of thinking rather than a set of proposals to reconstruct a fixed model. The article needs to be rewritten. Rokus01 08:53, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree, the article gives a distorted view of PCT. I have been intending to make some changes for a while now, just couldn't get round to it. 138.232.148.41 16:25, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Chomsky?
Rokus has added the following uncited comments:


 * "Its [sic] draws on the consequences of innate grammaticality as exposed [??] by Chomsky's principles of generative grammar, that defines conservation as the law of language and languages, and change as the cline of grammaticality provoked by major external factors such as language contacts and hybridization, as well as ecological, socio-economic and cultural events."

I am unaware of any specific connection between this theory and Chomsky. Perhaps Rokus can enlighten us. Furthermore, I can barely make any sense of this statement. As far as I am aware there nothing specifically "Chomskian" about the view that language changes because of "factors such as language contacts and hybridization, as well as ecological, socio-economic and cultural events". How is his specifically relevant to PCT as opposed to other models? Paul B 13:38, 4 November 2007 (UTC)


 * In fact, the grammaticality of Chomsky breaks down in very special circumstances ("by major external factors such as language contacts and hybridization, as well as ecological, socio-economic and cultural events"). It is true this - including the change of language provoked by such a "cline" of grammaticality - has been described better by other linguists. If the way I put both phenomena together here is confusing, I could try to improve the phrase. Note, PCT stress convervation of language - defined by the linguistic laws of grammaticality, not change. The theoretic plausability of conservation in language is a prerequisite to assume paleolithic continuity. This does not mean Chomsky's theory, or the current foundation of linguistics, is perfect - I already mentioned the observed cline of grammaticality. Also, linguistic internal productivity would contradict the possibility of a theoretical eternal unchanged language (at least, I wouldn't expect a new IE language in the jungle of South America). As such, PCT is just another model that draws on an assumption that might need some moderation. However, you can't say PCT is wrong without saying as well that the very theoretic foundation of linguistics is wrong.


 * How this is relevant to PCT as opposed to other models? Quite so, since other models assume other evolutionary constraints to the development of languages. The Kurgan hypothesis assumes the sheer impossibility of proto-Indo Europeans before the fifth millennium, and try to fit archeology by insisting on migration patterns that at least would have crossed Kurgan territory once in the past 5000 or 6000 years - no matter how enduring or realistic such contact would have been.


 * By the way, my mistake to assume knowledge of Alinei's introduction paper and not to source some basic linguistics here. This can be done. Rokus01 22:07, 4 November 2007 (UTC)


 * As usual, Rokus, you seem to be stating the bleedin' obvious in mystificatory language in order to cover your ideological tracks. Plus ca change. You have still not said why Chomsky is relevant beyond the almost meaningless assertion that "other models assume other evolutionary constraints to the development of languages". Paul B 00:24, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

You have a pretty insulting attitude for somebody pretending a simple question to start a honest discussion. Why should Chomsky NOT be relevant in ANY discussion on linguistics? Don't you even have the slightest idea what is the importance of Chomsky to the linguistic sciences? Rokus01 23:40, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
 * ...WP:SYN by any other name. Wake us up once Chomsky does in fact tke any sort of position towards PCT. dab (𒁳) 08:45, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Quote: "Since language is innate—as claimed by Chomsky and now demonstrated by natural sciences—and Homo was thus born loquens, the evolution of language—and all world languages, including Indo-European (IE)—must be mapped onto the entire course of human cultural evolution, in the new framework provided by the Palaeolithic Continuity Theory (PCT)."(Darwinism, traditional linguistics and the new Palaeolithic Continuity Theory of language evolution - Mario Alinei, 2006)

Being so very well informed about Chomsky, you'll know that according to Chomsky's "Universal Grammar" the conditions on grammaticality are innate and universal. Alinei: "conservation is the law of language and languages, and change is the exception."

Quote Dab: Wake us up once Chomsky does in fact tke any sort of position towards PCT. Tell me, what did you hear through the grapevine? And does it really matter what Chomsky (would have) said (according to Dab), once Alinei came to his conclusions? Very funny, it is not the first time Dab accuses scientists of WP:SYC. Rokus01 23:40, 5 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Rokus, Chomsky is mentioned precisely twice in the reference you have given. Both references are to the very general claim that "language is innate", not to any any of the stuff you say here or in your additions to the article. Since Chomsky is not saying "Indo-European is innate" (or even innate to the 'Nordic race') I still fail to see the relevance of this stuff. Paul B 23:16, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Ok, this is better. Language being "innate" is central to PCT. Any university degree linguist would understand an Alinei quote like "conservation is the law of language and languages, and change is the exception" refers to innate grammaticality. Rokus01 23:40, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
 * wtf? how is "language is innate" "central to PCT"? Chomsky's claim is that Language as a faculty is innate, not a certain specific language. This has zilch to do with PCT. I happen to be a "university degree linguist", and I say Alieni's statement has nothing whatsoever to do with UG. Alieni is dismissing glottochronology completely, as he has to do to even begin arguing his theory. Diachronic stability or instability do not follow from UG at all. Rokus01, please stop trying to take other editors for morons. I have serious doubts you have ever sat through an introduction to historical linguistics, and yet you are confident you know what "any university degree linguist" would or wouldn't accept. How about you remember WP:SYN and just go back to reporting on direct reviews of Alieni's stuff. dab (𒁳) 18:03, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
 * And I have a Ph D in linguistics, and I completely fail to see the sense and logic in what Rokus01 is trying to sell here. Chomsky's theory concerns the sudden evolution of a language faculty which would have happened far back in the evolution of man and to ancestors of all mankind! It is completely irrelevant to PCT.--Berig 18:35, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
 * A possible sudden evolution of the faculty would be nothing but the onset of a continuous and native evolution of language, "if any". Rokus01 14:40, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

btw, "since language is innate—as claimed by Chomsky and now demonstrated by natural sciences[?]... the evolution of language—and all world languages, including Indo-European (IE)[??]—must be mapped onto the entire course of human cultural evolution" is hair-raising nonsense and firmly places Alieni in the crank camp. Beginning your sentence with "since language is innate" merely places you as a hardboiled Chomskian disciple. Confirmed by dropping Chomsky's name in the following phrase. The "and now demonstrated by natural sciences" chucked after it already rises crank alarms. I can only assume Alieni has heard about FOXP2 on Discovery Channel and thought it would sound good to mention "natural sciences". "the evolution of language ... must be mapped onto the entire course of human cultural evolution" is again uncontroversial. But now note how the crucial passage is inserted between mdashes, "and all world languages, including Indo-European", and is a complete non-sequitur to the otherwise rather harmless statement. So from the tenet that "language is innate" it follows that "all world langauges" must be "mapped onto the entire course of human cultural evolution". Wow. I am not sure what a "world language" is, but assuming we are talking of any of the world's languages, it would follow, according to Alieni that the evolution of the Romance languages "must be mapped" over this impressive time period. Wow. Paleolithic Italian follows from Chomsky's "language is innate". Well done, Mr. Alieni. I doubt you will convince many linguists. If crank tactics are used in touting your groundbreaking hypothesis, the only people you are likely to convince will be cranks. dab (𒁳) 18:33, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
 * The etnocentric Italian PC is indeed his weaker point. He totally ignores the Beaker cultures, that definitely didn't have their center in Italy and, according to Volkert Heyd, also heavily influenced Romania.Rokus01 14:40, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree that Alieni's argument is total nonsense. It would presuppose that all past, present and future languages (including their vocabulary) were hard-coded, in Chomsky's innate language faculty. Moreover, the linguistic community is still waiting for any evidence that Chomsky's theory on syntactic structure is accurate, which makes it even more spurious to use Chomsky's theory as a "scientific" basis for the PCT.--Berig 18:44, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
 * You are just saying here you have a personal view against the work of Chomsky and for this reason choose to resort to hypercritic arguments that are all but scientific (Chomsky theory has been the subject of many linguistic investigations that include model evaluation, I hope you don't insist on "proving" the model since models, by definition, can only be verified, accepted or rejected within a context of investigation). WP is not for personal views.Rokus01 14:40, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
 * indeed. Chomsky has to be validated in the light of diachrony, not vice versa. Diachrony was notoriously neglected by the GG people. Alieni appears to be blissfully unaware of the fact, of course. This isn't serious people. Any linguist looking into this will debunk it for the nonsense it is, and it is (of course) not our job to perform the debunking here. dab (𒁳) 18:55, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
 * This does not mean Chomsky has to be neglected by diachrony. To the contrary, Alinei is fully aware this should be done. A very ungrateful task, so it appears. Rokus01 14:40, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Chomsky basically equates language with the syntax of the modern English language and modern English syntax is really the only thing that his theory is about. He and his associates have been working for decades now on a theory for modern English syntax without much success. As Dbachmann says, diachronics could only be used to support Chomsky's theory and not the other way round.--Berig 15:34, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

So what is this whole deal about? You should do better than this. Why, based on one quote, diverge on senseless speculations about what an Emeritus Professor might have misunderstood of Chomsky? All PCT needs from Chomsky's "language being innate", is to facilitate native speakers to acquire a perfect knowledge of their language by the process of First Language Acquisition. Indeed, this would be more so in a, well, say "Paleolithic" situation where nothing really happens, and without external stimuli like the ones you could imagine from migrations, invasions or language contact and Second Language Acquisition. Nothing else is insinuated by the statement "conservation as the law of language and languages".

Don't get me wrong, I don't attribute Alinei with the capacity to come up with a clear and comprehensive, or even "convincing" (I mean to say here, to convince a goat would require sheer marketing skills and has nothing to do with being a scientist) summary of his statements, still I am less inclined than you are to take a professor of one of the worlds best rated universities as a "moron". Nobody needs WP:SYNC to compile the information necessary for explaining the views of an emiritus professor. Take notice there is a lot of investigation going on to the rules of change of languages, and most models depart from SLA where "language being innate" does not or hardly apply. I would be very wrong if this approach wouldn't add a few precious "archeologic" millennia to the timedepth for pinpointing the IE origins. Just because it probably takes some more awareness and knowledge to measure linguistic change by the proper speed.

Anyway, it seems the meanings of "innate" that are in current use in linguistics are not all empirically equivalent, and the currently hypothesized mechanisms of language acquisition do not fall under a definite concept. I'll take a look how this can be reflected and balanced in the article. Rokus01 01:08, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Did Indo-European Languages spread before farming?
M. Otte and J. Adams wrote an article together with the above title (date unknown). A link to the article: If some of the other editors think it's worth while, could this be included in the collection of external links? Varoon Arya 22:12, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
 * "In press; Current Anthropology" -- if it does appear in Current Anthropology we should certainly cite it. Although it is beyond me why so many perfectly competent paleoenvironmentalists insist to make fools of themselves by dabbling in historical linguistics. --dab (𒁳) 10:19, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
 * it did appear: the reference is Current Anthropology, Vol. 40, No. 1. (Feb., 1999), pp. 73-77. Their "defeatist note" on  "the fact that one can so readily add and interchange alternative hypotheses" really says it all &mdash; it is always easy to "interchange hypotheses" if one is willing to ignore the good sense and criticism that has gone into the preceding ones. dab (𒁳) 10:21, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
 * the common factor of all these theories is that they are motivated by non-linguistic factors (archaeology, genetics, paleoenvironment), and they only ever take note of linguistics in order to dismiss mainstream tenets as not, after all, set in stone, and propose a completely agnostic attitude to any linguistic component that would affect their scenario. In other words, linguistics is simply not taken seriously as having anything to contribute to the question of Proto-Indo-European. Linguists, otoh, scrupuously take into account non-linguistic findings to establish boundary conditions of their PIE scenarios. In this way, it is actually possible to come to unexpected conclusions (other than with these a priori assumptions that you then set out to prove to the world). dab (𒁳) 18:15, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Old random comment
I have edited this page of all crap wich have bias in decision makings.It is about theory and it is equal with the oponent theories.If someone want to point critics on the theory that must be made in seperate column-like rest of the articles on Wikipedia.I wish to notice that space used for and against theory must be equal. Edited by Admin. from "Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia".

sectionized by Rocksanddirt 22:00, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

an observation
I have an observation, that I don't have time or background knowledge to deal with right now, and that is that this thing reads like an essay argueing a point. From that standpoint, it really needs some editorial intervention. It is also one of those articles that gets the national mysitics involved with some original research and/or fringe studies of why thier ethinic/national group is the cradle of civilization. Please, regular editors of this article, keep those thoughts in mind when working on this article. --Rocksanddirt 17:08, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

status of PCT
thanks for the 'review' link (more properly 'self-promotion' I suppose, since it is hosted on their own site and does not appear to have been published elsewhere (?)). Looking it over, I am now quite convinced that PCT can be dismissed as fringy nonsense. It appears to propose linguistic change with geological slowness :) no matter what your take on glottochronology (error margin of 50% or 200%?), I don't think any self-respecting historical linguist would endorse anything like this: Renfrew's timeframe is already borderline acceptable, but this is completely bat-shit beyond the pale. PCT appears, after all, to be the European answer to "Paleolithic Aryan" nonsense in India. It is at least reassuring to see that crackpottery knows no boundaries :) dab (&#5839;) 09:35, 14 August 2006 (UTC)


 * How do you derive the age of a proto language? How old is spoken language and how is the date arrived at? Is there any reading material available for non-linguist? --UB 10:59, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
 * try (the references at) historical linguistics and glottochronology. The accuracy of such estimates depends decisively on the age of the earliest sources. For PIE in particular, see Proto-Indo-European language and Proto-Indo-Europeans. The error margin is frequently admitted to be as high as 100% (i.e. a factor of 2). For PIE, dates between 8000 BC and 2500 BC are possible (10000-4500 BP, i.e. a factor of 2.2): 8000 BC is extremely early and 2500 is extremely late, most people will agree that a 6000-3000 BC range (factor of 1.6) still has a very high confidence. All we know with dead certainty is that the proto-language must have split up by 2000 BC, since our earliest text fragments date to shortly thereafter. Claiming paleolithic age of PIE simply amounts to rejecting wholesale all efforts at dating language change and taking an agnostic position of "prove that it isn't paleolithic". It would entail that languages stayed essentially unchanged for at least 10,000 years, over vast areas of Eurasia. All known language histories show that a language usually changes beyond comprehensibility (meaning it doesn't just 'change', it becomes a wholly different language) over 1,000 years, in rare cases of stability maybe over 2,000 years. Note that in this case, evidence for dating is not restricted to pure glottochronology. For example, since there is a very good reconstruction of PIE terms for "wheel", it seems evident that (late) PIE must post-date the invention of the wheel in around 4500 BC. The evidence for "metal" (Bronze) is less clear, it is possible that some branches had already separated before Bronze became known (after around 3300 BC): these dates dovetail perfectly with a 5000-3500 range of early to late PIE fully consistent with the (wider) glottochronological estimate. dab (&#5839;) 11:35, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Nice to see some English-language interest and my article cited. If I could add a number of comments, as someone who has had some discussions with Alinei:

-It must be remembered that he is a distinguished academic at the end of his life (he's over 80), so age is a major factor in explaining why he has failed to discuss with certain key areas of IE (like Iberia, Persia, India). It also explains why he finds it difficult to get to grips with the intricacies of mtDNA. - At the same time, I think that the advances so far in mt/YDNA tend to bear him out. If you read Sykes book (good but lamentable for its lack of bibliography), he describes very clearly that Cavalli-Sforza violently opposed mtDNA and then seeing he was defeated, decided to start supporting it and claim the idea as his own. This marks a major change in favour of the PCT, in that if the mesolithic hunter gatherers were a tiny majority overwhelmed by a massive influx of farmers, the idea of IE speakers in Europe prior to the Neolithic would have been hard to believe. The consensus in genetics is now fairly solid that 80% of the population is pre-farming and if you study the models of diffusion advanced e.g. by Zvelebil, then you come to the clear conclusion that it was very much a piecemeal process. Hence, as Alinei points out, Renfrew has a real problem in explaining why there's no substrate in the last areas to be neolithicised e.g. Norway, why there's a long-standing linguistic boundary in N Latvia (i.e. why don't the farmers manage to impose IE on the "Estonians", etc. Furthermore, the theory is actually starting to creep in via the back door - a specific prediction of PCT is the presence of Germanic speakers in Neolithic Britain, and I see that Stephen Oppenheimer has mentioned this in his new book (unfortunately without citation). What you have to remember is that the world is Anglophone, IE studies is a sleepy field, so that anyone writing in a language other than English gets no "air time", with the possible exception of the Russians. There are some Spanish linguists doing excellent work, notably Francisco Vilar who has shown that the oldest toponyms even in Andalusia are IE - but because he doesn't write in English, no-one is even aware of his work. For those people interested in PCT, the figure to watch, and the "heir" to Alinei seems to be Xaverio Ballester. - Secondly, Alinei has a problem in that his method of linguistic archaeology only really works where you have peoples with defined territories, hence you have a paradox of someone proposing conjectures about the languages spoken during the Palaeolithic with a methodology which only really works from the Mesolithic onwards. As a result, when discussing pre-LGM, he tends to rely on other people's ideas and frankly hasn't chosen very wisely, appearing to be bogged down in a tool making equals syntactic structure equation which leads him to view Chinese as a kind of ur-language. This is the old Schlegelian bear-trap of the Monosyllabic/Agglutinative/Inflectional classification which captivated mid-19th century figures such as Haeckel and Schleicher, but had already been dismissed by e.g. Trombetti/Jespersen/Saussure in the early 20th century who realised that Chinese was the result of a long-process of simplifying an inflected language (see Classical Tibetan). Alinei seems to be obsessed by the stability of lithics in E Asia since Homo Erectus and imho is assuming without foundation that the original inhabitants of S China were Sino-Tibetan speakers. People who want to dismiss him seize on this older stuff and his claims that IE had differentiated 100,000 years ago. Indeed, the response to my Mother Tongue article was that most of the readers are interested in deep prehistory and Asia, so they assumed that what is actually a fairly marginal part of Alinei's work was the main part and dismissed all his extremely detailed linguistic archaeology relating to the mesolithic and neolithic.

In other words, I think that Renfrew and Gimbutas theories don't stand up at all, but if you modify PCT to take into account modern advances in genetics, you actually come up with a plausible theory.

Also: - I am not aware of Alinei ever suggesting that the PCT applied to India. I asked him about this and his comment was that he wasn't a Sanskritist and someone else should take up the torch. The PCT is purely about whether or not IE languages had differentiated and spread into Europe by the end of the ice age. - The comment above that the Thracians were Slavs is entirely inaccurate and I refer the person in question to pp. 222-223 of vol. 2 of Origini. What he actually says is that he thinks that Herodotus probably used the term 'Thracians' as a blanket term to refer to Slavs. He actually regards it as a third differentiated branch of a proto-Balto-Slavic family subject to influence from an Altaic elite. (20:39, 16 January 2007 (UTC)) - Jonathan Morris.


 * Hello Jonathan. It is nice to see someone with deeper knowledge of the subject. May i request you to please clear a few doubts about PCT to me.


 * 1) When did PIE separated, is it 20000BCE.
 * 2) What age is attested to Hittite language and Vedic Sanskrit.
 * 3) According to PCT, where did PIE originated. (Is it Africa or PCT doesnt care about that.) nids(&#9794;) 12:06, 17 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Jonathan, I am afraid all you really manage to convince me of is that the theory has indeed no merit at all. All the genetics points are granted, and you present a reasonable outline of a discussion of Meso- and Neolithic migration. This, however, has nothing whatsoever to do with Indo-European. To develop a theory of "Paleolithic PIE" and ignore Sanskrit is ludicrous. (well, Paleolithic PIE is ludicrous in any case, but to confine it do a discussion of European genetics and Stone Age archaeology is simply pointless). Language is a part of culture, and is not passed on genetically. Genetic analysis may serve as a tool for tracing populations that may have been the vehicle of linguistic spread, but the tacit assumption that a population needs to be replaced for the language to be replaced is just silly. What proportion of "Portuguese Genes" will you find in Brazil, or what proportion of "English" genes will you find in the US? And regarding glottochronology, the language changes observed over the past 1,000 years make clear that it must be inexact, but "inexact" here meaning to an error of maybe 200%, not 1000% (50,000 years as opposed to 5,000). And, to cut this discussion short, if PIE had diverged before the neolithic, why can we reconstruct the PIE terms for "wheel" or "metal"? The fact that genetically, "80% is pre-farming" (in India as well as Europe) only goes to show that a Bronze Age expansion is as good as a Neolithic expansion to account for the imposition of a new language, that is, the fact that the Neolithic migration wasn't so massive takes away Renfrew's main argument as to why PIE expansion cannot date to the Bronze Age. The proposition seems to be that the Paleolithic hunters essentially spoke PIE in 40,000 BC and that their language remained frozen until after 10,000 BCE until virtually all of Eurasia spoke pure PIE, before history and language change kick in for some reason in the Early Bronze Age. This doesn't strike me as a reasonable scenario. dab (𒁳) 13:44, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi, everyone, unfortunately I have to go travelling but will sit down with Alinei's books next week and give you some answers. (23:04, 17 January 2007 (UTC)) Dab, you must be a professional linguist to assume a) that Alinei is automatically and comprehensively wrong on everything and b) that I'm a travelling salesman for the gospel of PCT. My motivation for writing the article was just to present an account of what seemed to me to be an interesting and radical theory but which wasn't available in the English-speaking world. Firstly, I'm not part of the PCT work group, and secondly while small, it's already very heterogeneous, including figures who are very highly regarded outside the PCT milieu (like Marcel Otte) and people who, from my conversations with academics in the field, don't appear to be highly regarded at all (e.g. Henry Harpending-and again, he's in there as a member but I'm not aware of him having made any specific pronouncements on the PCT itself). As such, you could say that there are various PCTs - Alinei has his, Marcel Otte has his paper on IE spreading from European glacial refuges - but the common axiom is that some form of IE was present in Europe by the start of the Mesolithic - which is evidently the major difference from Renfrew & the Classical/Gimbutas theories which insist on the notion that Europe was entirely free of IE speakers until at least the Neolithic. Anyway, more next week. (Jonathan Morris 23:29, 17 January 2007 (UTC))

OK, I’m back, sorry for the delay, but I have a business to run.

Nids: As you may be aware, essentially everything Alinei has to say on IE PCT is concentrated in a 2-volume work – the first one came out in 1996 and is more of a theoretical treatise. The second which came out in 2000 is the meaty linguistic archaeology tome (Continuity from the Mesolithic to the Bronze Age).

All in all, Vol. 2 is a solid piece of work which contrasts with a rather vague and fuzzy Vol. 1. Almost all of his views on the Palaeolithic are contained in Vol. 1 and in my view, many points require serious revision to account for the new advances in Genetics since then.

As I mentioned, Alinei devotes a great deal of space to lithics – which you might expect him to do, as you don’t have much else to go on pre-Aurignacian and he allows himself to be convinced of Matthew Dyer’s model which associates different kinds of toolmaking with different kinds of language, hence he argues the apparently enormous stability of E Asian lithics from Homo Erectus to the end of the ice age is correlated with the presence of monosyllabic languages there. In other words, if you buy this, you have to support the multi-regional hypothesis, which you could probably just about have done plausibly in 1996, but I think it’s now dead in the water since the consensus is for Out of Africa.

Now in my view, this doesn’t preclude H. Erectus or the Neanderthals from having language, it just means that if and when these earlier hominids came face to face with H. Sapiens Sapiens, neither would have understood a word of the other’s langauge due to hundreds of thousands of years of separation.

Returning to Alinei, he is aware of the Out of Africa vs. Multi-Regional Debate, so what he says, prudently, is basically, I really like my Schlegelian lithics-language model and that sort of tilts me in favour of the MRH but I’m aware that the Out-of-Africa supporters also have a good case, so I’m going to put forward 2 alternative versions, a long-run PCT and a short-run PCT and let time decide which is right, and in any case, if you’re only interested in the last 50,000 years, it doesn’t really matter which you choose because the end-result is the same.

In terms of dating, even for his short-run PCT, he appears to believe (and I don’t see an explicit statement), that the Nostratic phase was relatively short-lived and that PIE existed as an explicit entity in SW Asia as early as 80-100 kya, with Hittite splitting off at an early date (he explicitly agrees with Gamkrelidze/Ivanov here that the deep split in PIE is between Anatolian and non-Anatolian, and other PIE the remainder forms a Sprachbund which gradually crystallises into different families from then onwards.

This was his stance in 1996. I asked him about this a couple of years ago, and he seems to be prepared to bring his dates down but I haven’t seen him in print on this. His main argument is nevertheless that all the IE groups had differentiated from each other by the start of the Mesolithic (e.g there was already a discernable Germanic grouping different from a Celtic grouping) – based, as I cited in my article, on the fact that certain late Palaeolithic cultural innovations like burial have different words in different languages.

I would say that I support his end-point conclusion, i.e. that some form of IE was present in Europe by the Mesolithic, but evidently not his dates for the differentiation of PIE, which are way too high.

Dab, it’s you’re privilege not be convinced, but frankly I find your arguments for dismissing PCT to be seriously flawed.

Firstly, you cite examples like Brazil (actually Jamaica would be a much better example) where you have a genetically African population but they all speak English. Ergo, no link between genetics and language. But this blithely assumes that the social and demographic dynamics of the 17th-18th century can be extrapolated directly to the societies Neolithic – which seems completely ludicrous to me. On the one hand you have a highly hierarchical and sophisticated set of nation states capable of organising an intercontinental slave traffic and on the other a bunch of half-starved stone age farmers about whose models of social organisation (e.g. exogamy), we know virtually nothing. But you (and you’re by no means alone here) blithely equate the two and claim that this constitutes a plausible core assumption merely because it allows you to reject an idea which doesn’t agree with yours. Any half-serious historian would just laugh at you.

Secondly, it’s interesting that you choose Brazil as an example. You may be aware of work by Francisco Salzano who took a sample of men from the Northeast who considered themselves to be “white” [although Brazil has some very dark people who think of themselves as white]. He found that over 90% of them had European Y-chromosome lines, but 60% had African/native Indian mtDNA. I.e. the model of Portuguese men miscegenating with Indian women/slaves really does show up in the genetics. Furthermore, a similar pattern shows up at 1200 years in Iceland, where most of the women are shown to be of Celtic origin.

I suggest that divergent YDNA and mtDNA patterns are a genetic signature for miscegenation, and the bottom line is that there’s no evidence of this divergence in the European gene pool, which combined with the fact that we now know that “old” genetic lines predominate really does stack the deck against a Bronze age elite dominance model à la Gimbutas.

If you’re going to argue from the known past to unknown prehistory, then I suggest that what the last two thousand years shows is that unless an intrusive people settles in sufficient numbers to dominate an area’s economic and social infrastructure, their language tends to disappear without trace. The Romans achieved this by settling ex-legionaries, co-opting the local élite and probably massive displacement of slaves to latifundia, the Germanic tribes who didn’t do this singularly failed to impose their language on a single area which they held in Continental Europe, and in England, note that everyone is surreptitiously starting to follow Alinei and argue for a much older Germanic presence in Eastern England, simply because the genetics won’t support the view that the island was entirely Celtic before the 3rd-4th century. Even where invaders took over the country, this was not enough to ensure the triumph of their language in the long term (e.g. Arabic in Spain or Norman French in England). You could thus argue from this that the only people who managed to impose their language succcessfully were the Romans and this is precisely because they were as good as the English/Spanish/Portuguese in the 17th-18th centuries at shipping people around in the name of a grand economic design. This says to me that it’s actually pretty difficult for an elite to change the language of an indigenous people. However, the Renfrews and Gimbutas simply assume that what recorded history shows was damned difficult to achieve over the last 2,000 years with plenty of examples of plagues and marauding horsemen raping and killing sedentary farmers, was dead easy in the Neolithic/Bronze Age. But they advance no social models to explain this, there is no archaeological evidence for the rape and pillage and Renfrew has produced precisely zero linguistic evidence for his farming model (and while he’s evidently not a linguist, he has a lot of clout in academia and a big cheque book, so if it was such a great theory, he could presumably have persuaded at least one respectable linguist to provide a helping hand – and yet, he has to admit (p. 474 of Examining the farming/language dispersal hypothesis), that not only has he failed to show a connection between the spread of farming and IE, he hasn’t managed it for any language group anywhere in the world.

Because of the above, I suggest, at the risk of repeating myself, that if these models were true, you would have some genetic evidence of miscegenation. And it ain’t there.

This, for me, is a cardinal virtue of PCT, it just says that the first people into a territory tend to dictate its language, that once there, they tend to stay there, and there wasn’t even the possibility of outsiders coming in and kicking them around until the Bronze Age. It has a very simple mechanism for explaining how a given language comes to be spoken in a given area (My own model is slightly different but I’m still working on it) whereas Renfrew & Gimbutas have advanced no mechanism.

Thirdly, your claim that you can have language change without full population change is just a non-sequitur. Both Renfrew and Gimbutas claim that IE speakers intrude into an area previously occupied by non-IE speakers, and somehow, whether by the seductions of farming or force of arms, within a few generations, all traces of the non-IE language have been obliterated. But where is the causal link between your claim that this process of language extermination is possible without ethnic cleansing and the proof that this is actually what happened? You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that proponents of the PCT are saying “we reject Renfrew and Gimbutas because we believe that their models only work with comprehensive ethnic cleansing and we don’t think that this could have happened”. No one is saying anything of the sort. Alinei is actually saying (and I agree with him on this point) that Renfrew and Gimbutas need to prove that there actually was a non-IE substrate for their theories to stand up and they can’t prove it a) because there are linguistic boundaries which are older than their invasions and b) particularly for Renfrew, there are fringe areas of Europe like the Norwegian coast where neolithicisation was very late or never happened, so according to Renfrew, these should be hold outs of the non-IE substrate peoples. The day you find non-IE fishing vocabulary in Norwegian dialect is the day that the PCT collapses, but Alinei’s point is that it’s not there, and furthermore, he’s not the first person to realise this – the absence of non-IE substrates in N Europe was perfectly clear to linguists the late 19th century. Let me further say that just as Europe fails the substrate test, India passes it. You have abundant evidence of substrate languages in the Rg-Veda (Munda, Dravidian, some unknown language) and only one real branch of Indo-European (as opposed to many in Europe). I’m currently talking about some other stuff with the Mother Tongue people which may show this more conclusively, but I want to point out that there are areas like India where the evidence does appear to support the opposite conclusion (note that Alinei has never suggested that PCT-IE applies to India, only to Europe – although he does believe in a PCT for Uralic and Altaic).

You also appear to have overlooked the fact that when you sever the link between language and genetics, you forge a double-edged sword. Hence I can turn your argument on its head and claim that you don’t need the survival of indigenous speakers to keep traces of a substrate alive. Brazil is again case in point. I’ve lived there on and off for 20 years and never met a native Tupi speaker, but Brazilian Portuguese is full of Tupi words for animals, placenames, personal names, etc. Until the Portuguese court cracked down at the start of the 19th century, it was the lingua franca everywhere in Brazil except the coastal cities (as its relative Guarani still is in Paraguay). Look at all colonies settled by Europeans (USA, Australia, Mexico, etc.) and you’ll find the same pattern of survival of indigenous languages, if only in place names, despite massive differences in technology, military force between the original inhabitants and the European intruders. Once again, however, Renfrew and Gimbutas insist on their intrusion theories without providing any evidence of a substrate [one person has tried to reconstruct a proto-nonIE langauge for Europe, Harald Sverdrup, but his work is so shoddy, particularly for his Basque-Etruscan cognates, that it really doesn’t stand up – if anything the one part which looks OK – his showing of links between Etruscan and Rhaetian, actually coincides with Alinei’s Hungarian model]. The PCT’s claim that the absence of a non-IE substrate indicates that IE was the original language family, seems to me to be absolutely logical.

As for glottochronology, the methods of calibration are so full of holes as to make the dates worthless. You can check out my post on Jess Tauber’s Amerind group if you like, but basically, the rate of divergence for modern languages is greatly exaggerated, and there are variants of the method (e.g. Starostin) which give deep dates (even if he rejects his own findings). There’s more to be said here, but it requires a full paper.

Finally, why don’t you argue that PIE broke up in the 20th century, since all the daughter languages probably have the same word for ‘computer’, etc. On what grounds can you claim that a cognate for a piece of technology isn’t a generalised borrowing and must be part of the original PIE vocabulary? Particularly when it’s probably a question of loans between related languages.

- Jonathan Morris.


 * I do not believe the lack of translations into English are a proof of anything (much valueable material is not yet translated into English and much valueable scholarship probably lies unknown to the English speaking audience).
 * But reading some of Alinei's materials on PCT I believe (as a non-professional) his theory is likely an artificial construct trying to answer some questions but raising many others. E.g. one obvious problem to his theory is that the linguistical map one gets for Balkan area in Antiquity doesn't match at all the Middle Ages map or the modern map. From Greek, Celtic, Illyrian, Thracian, Iranian we end up with Greek, Slavic, Hungarian, Eastern Romance, Albanian, Turkic (the lists are approximative). Therefore some additional equations must be built: Hungarian = Etruscan, Slavic = Thracian. And here I observe a laitmotif: the omission.
 * * Some ethno-linguistical realities are ignored - what happened to Celtic language in Balkans, for instance?
 * * An unfair perspective is given within the IE taxonomy - he notes Thracian, Baltic and Slavic are satem languages and based mostly on that he draws them together; but what about Indo-Iranian languages?
 * * The relevant scholarship is also missing (for Thracian language Dečev, Georgiev, Russu, Duridanov, etc.) while his position on Thracian = Slavic I find extremely thin and rather rhetoric than argumentative (from some hundreds of known Thracian words, names, roots he barely touches two on some unpersuading similarities: e.g. Thracian "diza" has much better parallels in other languages like Avestan).
 * * Alternative hypotheses - why the similarities he notices are not caused by common IE origins or neighbourhood?
 * I cannot say this is pseudo-science, but without a serious peer-review and with such shaky arguments, I don't find it trustworthy either. Daizus 13:28, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Daizus and anyone else. You're guilty of misreading Alinei. Admittedly, his treatment of Thracian is cursory, but this is not a reason to misquote him. As you know, a key belief of PCT is that it is only in the Chalcolithic that societies advance to the point of permitting stratification/inter-ethnic dominance. Hence his model is of a Europe consisting of differentiated groups at the end of the Neolithic, with the intrusion of elites speaking other languages from the Chalcolithic/BE onwards. Evidently, if the elite is displaced, its language disappears and the language of the peasantry re-emerges. Outside their home area (W Europe and notably France) he sees the Celts as an elite - so they simply come and go. He also sees an amorphous mass in E Europe which for want of a better word, we'll call Balto-Slavic, which differentiates into an archaic periphery (Thracian and Baltic) and an innovative centre (Slavic). On p. 193, he states that this explains the affinities between Baltic and Thracian toponyms, noted by Trubacev.

On p222-223, it appears that no-one has read the page in full, which concludes as follows:
 * In termini più precisi, dunque, si può ipotizzare che il Tracio fosse una lingua di transizione fra Baltico e Slavo, parlata da un gruppo periferico della Slavia meridionale, e pendant dei gruppi baltici della periferia settentrionale. A differenza dei gruppi baltici, questa geovariante, particolarmente soggetta alle vicissitudini dei gruppi elitari altaici, sarebbe stata riassorbita nel 'mare slavo' e si sarebbe estinta'.

Tr: In more precise terms, therefore, it may be hypothesised that Thracian was a transition language between Baltic and Slavic, spoken by a peripheral group of Southern Slavia, the counterpart of Baltic groups on the Northern periphery. Unlike the Baltic groups, this geovariant, particularly subject to the vicissitudes of elite Altaic groups would have been reabsorbed into the "slav sea" and would have become extinct.

This is not the same as saying the Thracians were Slavs, as my previous comment on Herodotus points out. Alinei does not assert this and merely tries to trace the Thracians to pre-Slavic cultures of the Neolithic. He then says that the Thracians were 'militarised'by their Altaic contacts, and at a later stage, established some transient hegemony over neighbouring Slavic peasantries, hence Slavs were mistaken by the classical historians for Thracians, where in fact they were under the rule of the latter.

Frankly, I find this idea that from the Bronze Age onwards different social classes occupying the same territory spoke different languages is far more sophisticated than the analysis of his critics.

While we're on the subject of the Balkans, I will say that I'm much less convinced by his theory of proto-Romance in the Balkans which could have given rise to Romanian. If this were true, then I think you'd see far more divergence between Romanian and classical Latin than between the latter and say Portuguese, and this is not the case. Indeed, I think that he underestimates just how effectively Trajan and his legions ethnically cleansed Dacia, although this is a very special situation.(Jonathan Morris2 13:18, 26 February 2007 (UTC))

PS His classification of Thracian with Balto-Slavic is not based on the fact that they all just happen to be satem languages, but on archaeological evidence and the similarities between Baltic and Thracian toponyms noted by Trubacev. Furthermore, I see nothing in the above which conflicts with Duridanov's view that "it turned out that the Thracian language is in close genetic links with the Baltic languages". This discussion would be far more productive if people posted on the basis of what Alinei actually said and not what they hope he might have said so that they can disagree with him. (Jonathan Morris2 13:59, 26 February 2007 (UTC))


 * I am not speaking generally of PCT. I understand Alinei is proposing a model, I'm fine with that, yet when I'm trying to apply his model to historical realities I am more familiar with, I can't see it validated by them as it should be. Hence my characterization: "artificial construct". If his model could explain the linguistic maps of Balkans as they evolved from the ancient times until today, I wouldn't have used this characterization.  I haven't read his entire work, just some materials available online. So I'll just stick to what I've read and the view I can get from that. From "Interdisciplinary and linguistic evidence for Palaeolithic continuity of Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic populations in Eurasia, with an excursus on Slavic ethnogenesis" I've focused in my earlier reply on section 7.5.5, particularily on the page 37 where Alinei draws together Thracian and Slavic languages and argues for it.
 * He indeed calles Thracian a "Southern Slavic geo-variational group" but he also advances much more than that: "we could advance the hypothesis that the Thracians were a Slavic group [...] we could then advance the hypothesis that Thracians was the name that Herodotus gave to the Slavs, owing to the fact the Thracians were one of the most powerful and representative elites of Slavic speaking Eastern Europe". He mentions a "Thracians = Slavs" equation, he mentions a Slavic speaking Eastern Europe. This is a radical change in views ignoring the otherwise complex ethno-linguistical maps suggested by other scholars.
 * Therefore for the time being I must plead innocent for my guilt. I'll address the arguments on Thracians vs Balts vs Slavs and scholarship a bit later. Daizus 14:36, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, I hadn't checked the English translation (Alinei's) since I work off the original Italian, but now I can see where the confusion lies - "Southern Slavic group" looks to me as if it means "a group of people who are Slav". The original "un gruppo periferico della Slavia meridionale" isn't the same thing at all. It means a peripheral group inhabiting the Southern Slav area - i.e. it is a geographical location. It is very clear from the original that Alinei doesn't think that the Thracians are just Slavs, since he writes "pendant dei gruppi baltici della periferia settentrionale. A differenza dei gruppi baltici..." - i.e. they are counterparts to the Balts, who are also not Slavs, although he thinks that all three groups, Slavs, Balts and Thracians share common origin (Jonathan Morris2 11:25, 2 March 2007 (UTC))


 * All I have read of Alinei can be found here - both in English and Italian, but only in English I've found a detailed presentation of his theories on Thracian language and Thracians. You're mentioning an Italian original quite different from the material I've consulted, I'm not saying it's not possible, I just want you to note that text is subtitled as "Expanded version of a paper read at the Conference Ancient Settlers in Europe, Kobarid {my note: in Slovenia}, 29-30 May 2003." and is authored "by Mario Alinei". No mention of translation, no mention of a translator (other papers from the same site have the mention "translated from Italian", so here would be an accidental and dubious omission), a paper for a conference held outside Italia - with all that you're saying there was an Italian original to it? Without further access on the paper read at that conference, or if other persons were involved in the creation of this text, I must assume Alinei fully responsible for the text and that the text reflects his views, regardless if the text was initially conceived in Italian or in English.
 * Now, considering also those execerpts from his texts in Italian, Slavic is (also) a linguistical group. A group (even peripherical) from "Slavia", if it's not stressed to be speaking another language, it is speaking Slavic (of course, a version of it - being a separate language or dialect from other members of the same group). I must emphasize again, in the text I invoked, he asserts a "Slavic-speaking Eastern Europe" at the time when Herodotus lived.
 * Let's consider another point of view. He clearly states there was no Slavic invasions (section 7.5 from "Interdisciplinary ...", starting at p. 32), he speaks of post-glacial Slavic area covering also the territories assigned tradionally to Thracians (p. 33), he speaks of Balts to be the northern neighbours of the Slavs (while Thracians are not the southern neighbours as one would have expect in the symmetry you're suggesting) (p.33), he assigns all the ancient archaeological cultures from Balkans (except Illyrian and Greek) to a Southern Slavic area (pp. 33-34), he justifies the Balkanic Sprachbound and the relative homogenity of Southern slavic languages through the presence of Slavs in Balkans from Antiquity exactly in the same territory where otherwise we know Thracian tribes to have lived (pp. 34-35). If the Balkans are from his point of view Slavic, while the Baltic territories apparently not, it's obvious we can't justify his view on Thracians with what he is saying about Balts.
 * Now I'll pick again on the arguments on Thracians from section 7.5.5:
 * Alinei mentions an archaic Turkic influence on Thracian arguing the sica is a typical centr-Asian metallurgy?? - no reference
 * Alinei conjugates Hoddinott's identification of Ottopeni-Wittenberg (Carpathian basin) culture as an early Thracian culture with the latest research (?) which argues this culture is a continuation of Baden and Vučedol cultures (identified by Alinei as 'Slavophone'), the latter being connected with Steppe cultures (he quotes Lichardus & Lichardus affirming a connection with kurgan cultures); from these he concludes (?) the Thracians must have been a southern Slavic group who underwent strong Turkic influences and that's why they extinguished (?).
 * This is all about archaeology. Now linguistics:
 * Alinei stresses Thracian is an IE satem language, like Baltic and Slavic (and I have replied: he ignores completely the Indo-Iranian group which offers interesting parallels with Thracian)
 * Alinei invokes Trubačev for a similarity between Thracian and Baltic toponyms. However Trubačev similarities are not so numerous and contested (Sorin Olteanu, for instance, suggests the closeness between Thracian and Baltic was exaggerated) and as Alinei he ignores parallels with other IE languages. As you have remarked Ivan Duridanov also supports a similarity between Thracian and Baltic toponyms. Yet what we should point out that none of these linguists support directly Alinei's hypothesis. a) there's no strong parallelism drawn between Slavic toponyms and Thracian b) some claims though similar with Alinei are in fact incompatible. For instance, Duridanov claims there are some similarities between Thracian, Dacian, Slavic, Baltic (he also claims Thracian and Dacian to be distinct languages) but they have broke up as distinct languages in 3rd millenium BC, ~3000 years before Alinei's analysis of the Slavic invasion. Duridanov also notes the Thracian had more distant relations with Greek, Italic and Celtic (as we were speaking of Celts in Eastern Europe).
 * Alinei compares Thr. -dizos/-diza ("fortress") with the OSl. ziždo, zydati ("to build"), zydŭ, zidŭ ("wall"), claiming they are closer than the Baltic ones. Yet Alinei seems to ignore completely the Avestan daeza ("wall") or the Persian didā ("fortress") - see Pokorny (but also Duridanov. He also compares the Thracian Strymōn/Strymē (the former is a hydronym) with the Polish strumień ("river"). The Polish term could be related to the Germanic stroum/Strom ("river", "stream"). Duridanov discusses this term, too.
 * Here the linguistic arguments end.
 * Alinei's conclusion is "The most plausible hypothesis would be then that Thracian was a conservative type of Slavic, still preserving Baltic features and spoken by a peripheral group of Southern Slavs, somehow parallel to the Northern peripheral Balts (following the geolinguistic well-known rule, according to which the center innovates, and the periphery preserves).". I disgaree with him, as the aforementioned arguments barely have shown there could(!) be some similarities. The omission of larger perspectives within the IE group are fatal when jumping to conclusions. This is my personal opinion, so you can disregard it. I however demand stronger arguments to claim Thracian (or any other tradionally non-Slavic group) was a type of Slavic. Daizus 13:51, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi Daizus, with all due respect, I don't think that you are adapting your thinking to a PCT framework. For Alinei, the Slavs have been around since the Mesolithic/Neolithic (see Vol2, Ch 5), as have the Balts, hence his long chapter about how there are cultural parallels to the Uralic/Baltic linguistic frontier dating back to the Mesolithic (this is a key point, since if everything up there was undifferentiated pre-IE, you wouldn't expect to find this cultural boundary at such an early stage) - hence when he says that Thracian is related to Slavic, the point at which let's say proto-Thracian and proto-Slavic start to diverge is probably back in the Neolithic. Your comments seem to suggest that you believe that he is saying that Thracian only differentiates from Slavic at a much later stage and this really isn't what he's saying at all. Please note, I am merely trying with all my comments to clarify what Alinei is actually saying, not whether or not he's right.

As for the 2 etymologies - frankly they're common IE words. -dizos could well be an Iranian loan, but who is claiming that there isn't any borrowing from Iranian into Slavic. If anything, the presence of Iranian speakers in S Russia would lead you to expect extensive borrowing.

I'm not sure you can draw many conclusions about strymon, except that it's very unlikely to be a borrowing from Iranian/Gk, since, there is a basic re-/ra- root which seems to mean 'flow', which is present in these 2 groups, but the st- prefix is Slavo-Germanic. (Jonathan Morris2 13:06, 17 March 2007 (UTC))


 * I have linked the paper I've read, I have browsed it and commented it in my earlier reply. If my understanding is wrong, please follow the same material as I did and show me where I was wrong.
 * The 2 etymologies are given as arguments by Alinei. I'm expecting for the one using them in such a way to show a) that Thracians indeed borrowed them from Slavs (and not from someone else) b) that these two examples are indeed meaningful for the relation between Thracian and Slavic languages (e.g. English has a lot of borrowed words from French). Daizus 14:03, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

I think this source provides a plausible scenario for the process of the continuality theory.*The Paleolithic Indo-Europeans --J intela 06:50, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

he justifies the Balkanic Sprachbound and the relative homogenity of Southern slavic languages through the presence of Slavs in Balkans from Antiquity exactly in the same territory where otherwise we know Thracian tribes to have lived (pp. 34-35) Yeah. Even this sole thing is pretty absurd. Old Church Slavonic, exactly in the same territory, doesn't have any Balkan Sprachbund features. These appear much later, and any proper linguist should know that. Neolithic origin?! --91.148.159.4 14:43, 1 June 2007 (UTC)


 * There is no contraddiction. We have to discern between written language, which is the expression of an élite, and the commonly spoken one. And Old Church Slavonic is clearly a theoretical, reconstructed language, a slavic koiné. Pcassitti 19:32, 15 July 2007 (UTC)


 * The original OCS was based on the colloquial form, because there was no other form at the time - there was no elite, written form of Slavic before that. It is not theoretical, it is not reconstructed, and it is most certainly not a koine. It's a Balkan Slavic language. See the relevant article. --91.148.159.4 (talk) 23:34, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Scope, Format, References and NPOV
Over at the Fringe Noticeboard I recently offered to help out with this article. I consider myself entirely neutral on its subject matter, and have no vested interest in anything other than seeing it improve in an atmosphere of cooperation. I hope the other editors will work with me in improving it. With that said, here is my first suggestion:

As it says on the Article Development page, the first thing any editor should do when composing (or in this case: performing a major edit on) an article is consider the scope, format, references and how to present the information from a NPOV. I invite other editors (particularly Rokus01) to detail their thoughts regarding these four points in relation to the article at hand. Of course, other editors will and should comment on these, and make suggestions along the way. The goal is to find an acceptable framework from which future edits can be made.

Also, as there doesn't seem to be any active discussion on this talkpage (at least nothing which would seem to require its remaining active), I suggest that it be archived and that Rokus01 or someone else begin the new talkpage with their response to the points I raised above. Thanks. Aryaman (☼) 20:46, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I think maybe one of the archive bots would be a better choice, as most of the discussion on this page is either from Oct 07 or very new. I think that would be better as there is a lot of discussion in the history also that appears to be deleted?  unless there is an archive somewhere I'm not seeing.  --Rocksanddirt 22:02, 15 November 2007 (UTC) I set up the Misza bot to archive the page for threads older than 30 days.  --Rocksanddirt 22:09, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Good deal, considering that half of it goes back 1-2 years... =) Aryaman (☼) 22:14, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
 * and a fair bit of arguementation around the topic as well. --Rocksanddirt 22:15, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

I subscribe to the proposal of Varoon Arya to find an acceptable framework. Actually, I was just busy on this and already submitted a proposal in the next section. I dropped in here only recently and most discussions don't reflect a balanced view on PCT anyway. I'm not sure if someone is still brooding on saying something on Chomsky, so I agree on all before this to be archived. Rokus01 22:54, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Split discussion
Indeed we have to observe a difference between paleolinguistics and the continuist archeologists that plead for a "broader homeland" and seek linguistic support among alternative linguist concepts. I would like to recompile this article in a way that confines PCT as a particular interpretation of a wider tendency that seek to stress continuity. However, those general modern continuity views would not be justified by the PCT label, just for being coined basically by one scholar that seeks to promote some contested views of himself. Still, we can't dismiss the movement that ties together linguistics, archeology, anthropology and genetics. Outstanding scholars gave their support to their "continuist" collegues of other disciplies, and this points to the existence of a real movement rather than the support to specific interpretations of each member. We don't have to accept Alineis specific claims, but still we have to accept the existence of a movement that draws on continuists interpretations of linguistics, archeology, anthropology and genetics. As such, I think an article like "Internal and external forces in language change" of Charles D. Yang would define the continuist creed better, as much as well quoted and referred to archeologists like Marcel Otte would give more substantial "mainstream" credibility to describe this movement.

If we could agree on a change of focus of this article, from PCT to the "continuist movement", and promise ourselves not to exceed basic concepts and established facts and avoid the claims that are not supported by academic publications, the next thing to do would be to attribute this movement with a proper name. For this, we could confine the area of specific linguistic, archeologiscal, anthropological and genetic interest, that would be the "broader homeland" of the Indo Europeans, I quote from Mallory: "Alternatively [to the Pontic-Caspian homeland] we might wish to opt for a broader homeland between the Rhine and Volga during the Paleolithic or Mesolithic which resolves the archeological issues by fiat but appears to be linguistically implausible" (1989, p.257). Here, Mallory refers to the European homeland according to Lothar Kilian. Marcel Otte underpins an even "broader homeland" by stating :"An initial early Holocene 'sparse wave' spread of the Indo-European languages may have been followed by a period of relatively long-distance cultural and linguistic exchange (with possible spreading of innovations in the language, continually 'updating' aspects of the general substratum of Indo-European languages; sensu Sherratt 1996) by relatively mobile hunter-gatherer groups, and later farming and warrior groups."

Would anybody object to merge this general continuist concepts within one article, and consequently change the name of this article by dropping the very comprising "Paleolithic" word? In other words, to change name and focus of this article to "Continuity Theory"? Rokus01 22:43, 15 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Rokus01, do you think an article such as the one you propose would stand up in light of WP:NOR? Is there such a thing as "Continuity Theory" being discussed in academic literature? Or is it that you see a common thread running through some strains of research which could perhaps best be described as indicative of a "Continuity Theory"? Give some explicit sourcing which could justify such an article in light of WP:NOR and others can entertain your proposal (though much would still remain open as to what kind of content should be included in such an article and what should be merged or split, etc.). Aryaman (☼) 23:07, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

The key issue is: what exactly binds the scholars to PCT. On the Continuitas website it says: "The scholars of this workgroup, independently working within its framework, or supporting its general lines, welcome contributions to the ongoing debate." So first of all, what comprise this framework exactly and what are those general lines? And second, how relate the framework to "the main lines of the PCT historical reconstruction"? About the second, I have the very strong impression this so called "PCT historical reconstruction" is the "independent work" of Alinei within the framework of PCT.

I conclude we should dismiss this PCT historical reconstruction as not essential to the general lines of PCT. If some Wikipedia administrators chose to consider PCT a fringe theory that lacks scholarly support, they still should reconsider the tremendous scholarly support to the general lines and framework of PCT and aim their arrows exclusively to what probably could be considered a particular historical reconstruction by one member of the workgroup. I don't see any reason to assume why the support of for instance Marcel Otte would necessarily exceed the general lines, at least this is not what I taste from the publication mentioned in this article.

Extra note: the assessment of mainstream views on archeological continuity would be far away of the Alinei reconstruction: the "broad homeland" alternative that were first presented by Hausler and Lothar Kilian is the only relevant theory entitled to such a mainstream assessment. Mallory considered this "broad homeland" theory to be the only possible alternative to the Kurgan hypothesis. Actually, I really don't understand how this theory never made it to Wikipedia, although I can imagine the well known same Kurganizing POV-pushers as always could have something to do with this. As far as I can verify the ideas concerning such a "broader homeland" are still alive and - with increasing linguistic support - even more viable than ever. I already gave a start by compiling the information you can read in section "Archeological continuity" of this article.

To this article all this would mean:
 * 1) The name PCT does not have to be changed, indeed
 * 2) No reference to Alineis "historical reconstruction" in the lead or in the section to be dedicated to the general lines and framework
 * 3) No wikipedia "fringe status" of PCT as a framework, since it does not depend on the academic status of the historical reconstruction predominantly linked to the name of Alinei
 * 4) Special attention to a rewrite of the Lead for explaining just the framework and an introduction to explain just the general lines
 * 5) An assessment of mainstream continuity views and developments of each discipline involved: I would say, separate sections dedicated to Linguistic continuity, Archeological continuity, genetics and paleoanthropology. Rokus01 13:32, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Rokus, whatever of this stuff does have mainstream placet can just be discussed at paleolithic, without reference to "PCT" or continuitas.com. Of course the PCT people repeat a lot of generally accepted positions, but that cannot, by definition, be part of the "theory" they actually propose, just its background. There are many interesting points to be made about the paleolithic and genetic or archaeological continuity, but this should be done without reference to Indo-Europeans or continuitas.com. Instead, refer to mainstream literature. If you are trying to spin this into "PCT" just being about mainstream notions on continuity in paleolithic times, we might as well redirect this to paleolithic and strike all mention of Alinei or continuitas.com. dab (𒁳) 14:14, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Ok, I am glad at least you recognize some generally accepted principles on continuity here. Still, I have difficulties accepting the scholars of the workgroup seek anything more than this. Note, there is a twofold interpretation of this continuitas workgroup:


 * 1) if the scholars DO subscribe to a PCT that includes the Alinei historical reconstruction, it becomes untenable to deem this reconstruction a fringetheory. Just because a hardline group of Wikipedian Kurgan-POV pushers think so? I don't think this is acceptable or the right way.


 * 1) if the scholars DON'T necessarily subscribe to anything more than a general PCT framework of generally accepted principles (this is my evaluation), the paleolithic and linguistic wikipedian articles should be rewritten as far they still did not accommodate such general continuity concepts (since they can count on ample support, disputed or not) AND the article should focus on those general concept.

You can't have it both ways: it is contradictio in terminis to link reputed scholars to a fringe theory. The scholars involved imply to say the least competing importance to continuity principles in paleolitic and linguistic articles. So, if you want to cut short the discussion on PCT and demand to have this separated from reputable scholars like Hausler, I wouldn't mind to focus on the "broad homeland" theory elsewhere without reference to the lines set by PCT, and give it a place together with the Kurgan theory, just like Mallory did. Still, even after harbouring most "continuity items" elsewhere, a linguistic assessment of PCT on continuity will remain necessary. Rokus01 (talk) 23:21, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Rokus01, in spite of your last few posts, it remains unclear what your intentions are in regards to this article. Seeing as there are several unresolved issues, would you object to someone undertaking an edit which boils the article down to the undisputed information? Aryaman (☼) 18:20, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I understand your impatience. Most of my observations on archeology and genetics indeed follow a different course and relate more closely to the Broad Homeland hypothesis of Lothar Kilian and Häusler. To this I dedicated a separate article, since I have to recognize PCT is an independent development. As you can see, I removed this latest edits and restructured what is left a little in order to have a framework that reflects PCT better. Especially the historical reconstruction should be improved considerably. Don't hesitate to perform your edits. Rokus01 (talk) 20:50, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Article Prune + Strict Adherence to Policy
In my opinion, this article is in need of a major prune, i.e. 'cutting back' to the edition which seemed to enjoy a good deal of consensus during the first year of its existence. I would suggest something like this:

_

The Paleolithic Continuity Theory (PCT) is a controversial hypothesis regarding cultural and linguistic developments in prehistoric Europe. In opposition to mainstream views on European prehistory, proponents of PCT claim that the appearance of Indo-Europeans coincides with the first regional settlement of Homo Sapiens Sapiens in the Middle/Upper Paleolithic.

Adherents of the theory argue that an apparent lack of archaeological evidence for an Indo-European invasion in the Bronze Age combined with the absence of significant genetic change since Paleolithic times lends credence to the notion of continuity. Furthermore, those advocating such continuity believe it to be a more conservative approach to developments in Indo-European prehistory.

Proponents include the Italian linguists Mario Alinei, Gabriele Costa and Cicero Poghirc as well as the prehistorians Alexander Hausler and Marcel Otte.

_

Since last year, this article has become bloated with NPOV and SYN violations of alarming proportions. I know this would be a drastic reduction, but it seems necessary.

As for future additions (which may or may not include content in the present article not included above), I think policy needs to be stricktly enforced and adhered to. Comments are welcome. Aryaman (☼) 19:53, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Aryaman, I think your version is much to basic, since it does not even give an outline of what PCT is. The current version could be an excellent base (except for the Historical reconstruction, that could reflect the theory a lot better) Rokus01 (talk) 20:58, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

_________

OK, Rokus01. I see that you have undertaken a major edit, which I welcome. Now we need to work through the article to find out what belongs where, which claims can be sourced and which cannot, etc. First: The outline needs to be addressed.

From the looks of it, we have something like the following (ignoring the lead for the time being):


 * 1) An Outline of the PCT Theory/General Assumptions
 * 2) Arguments from / Implications regarding Archeology
 * 3) Arguments from / Implications regarding Linguistics
 * 4) Implications regarding Historical Reconstruction
 * 5) Criticism

Re 1: It is unclear from the current title what is intended here. Are these the assumptions from which proponents of PCT start? Or are they seen as the results of their work? The content also needs some commentary. We will need some citation on these four points, preferably with commentary provided by actual proponents.

Re 2, 3: It is unclear whether these paragraphs refer to arguments or implications. Please clarify. Citation will be needed for the information presented in both. Also, tell us who actually says these things and where instead of stating them either as arguments or as facts.

Re 4: Here, citations are also needed. BTW, citing Gimbutas is useless in the present context. What we need is a proponent of PCT discussing his take on Gimbutas.

Re 5: This section needs to be dealt with after sections 1-4 have been properly organized and fleshed out to establish compliance with WP:NPOV and WP:DUE. But citations are also required on several points here as well.

Re 1-5: It would be most helpful if you could give your ideas concerning the outline of the article. What is the purpose behind each section? How do the sections go together to make up a whole? If we have a solid outline with good cohesion between the parts, it makes fleshing out the article with facts and citations much easier. Thanks. Aryaman (☼) 21:17, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Ok, I'll work on it, some has to be rewritten. Most of the basic stuff can be derived from the introduction paper of Alinei, and more ideas can be extracted from the Etruscian articles, including about Gimbutas

Rokus01 (talk) 23:04, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
 * 1) Outline: here I propose to explain the purpose of the PCT Workgroup regarding the general lines and framework of PCT.
 * 2) The historical reconstruction: Here I propose to give an overview of the proposals of Alinei.
 * 3) Archeology: Here I propose to include some third party archeological context.
 * 4) Linguistics: Here I propose to include some third party linguistic context.
 * 5) Criticism: the meaning should be clear.

not good. See Criticism-section. Criticism isn't to be ushered to section 5. The article needs to state that this is a fringy out-of-mainstream idea from the beginning. Rokus, you are really going out of your way to write this article from a "sympathetic point of view". This is in line with Wikinfo policy, but in violation of Wikipedia's WP:NPOV. You may want to consider offering your article on the topic to Wikinfo. If you want to continue editing the Wikipedia article, you'll finally need to live up to non-negotiable Wikipedia core policy, no matter how much you are personally infatuated with this idea of paleolithic Indo-Europeans. dab (𒁳) 13:12, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
 * dab, what's your take on my suggestion above regarding pruning back the article? Aryaman (☼) 13:58, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
 * now that Rokus' lengthy additions have found a home at Broad Homeland hypothesis, this article looks better than it used to. There is still some cleanup to be done, such as referencing the creepy "four main assumptions", the real question is, what are we going to do with the "Broad Homeland hypothesis"? It's essentially a content fork of this one, focussing on a pre-Alieni incarnation of the idea. Ostensibly so, since "BHH" proponent Häusler  has since joined continuitas.com. If we're going to prune this stuff, merge first and prune the result. dab (𒁳) 14:14, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Dab, could you please discuss your point of view concerning BHH here:Talk:Broad Homeland hypothesis ? I have to remind you that Mallory took the ideas of Lothar Kilian quite seriously. The original criticism of Mallory that there is not any archeological phenomenon available to support it has been contradicted by recent investigation. The recent view that common ideas and archeological phenomena indeed tied Europe together in a shared development solves Mallory's "anachronism" of common words for new developments. I'm not sure how Häusler relates to the BHH of Kilian, Mallory names the two in one breath. If it is true Häusler joined PCT, I think it is justified to have the article changed for this and make the separation between the two views complete, since to me Häusler is the only (historical) connection. Rokus01 (talk) 22:14, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

By the way, a strange preposition to deem a "sympathetic point of view" as violating WP:NPOV more. Sometimes I have to suppress a smile, since I know humor is not one of your qualities and for sure you are not joking. You consistently confuse a point of view with a personal point of view. How come, you can't be serious. Worse, a good neutral Wikipedia article should balance multiple points of views! How you think to be able to criticize without any point of view? Still I would prefer you criticize without any personal point of view, and adhere to sourced references to scholarly points of views for criticizing and complying to WP:SYN.Rokus01 (talk) 23:11, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Integralism
The (unreferenced) "main assumptions" of "PCT" are Integralism (Integral Traditionalism) by any other name. Thus, it is clearly disingenious to qualify a link to these articles as "vandalism". I do not allege Alinei is a neo-fascist or occultist at all. The fact remains that his theories are both informed by and exerting influence on "Integralist" discourse: the connection is evident. Again, Alinei may be completely innocent or naive ideologically, but this doesn't change the fact that his ideas strike a chord with occultist or esotericist neo-fascists: Just like Schlegel's ideas strike a chord with contemporary Hindu nationalists. Evidence? The Nouvelle Droite and associated schools of ethnocentrism or national mysticism since the 1990s have begun to sanitize their vocabulary by replacing "Nordic" with "Indo-European". The ideology remains the same. "PCT" is of direct relevance to Stephen McNallen's interest in the Kennewick man, because "Paleolithic Continuity" would mean that paleolithic Europeans would qualify as members of the Celtic/Germanic "Peoples of the North". This emphasis on "perennial" (paleolithic) "Indo-European tradition" appears to be particularly popular in Belgian/Flemish national mysticism (TeKoS, Koenraad Logghe, GRECE). We'll need to research this and present a summary of the ideological neighbourhood of this "theory". An example? from some white supremacist website,
 * For 20,000 years during this closing ice age - called the Upper Paleolithic period - a term referring only to the type of culture that existed amongst these early Homo Sapiens - our ancestors, the White race's ancestors, lived as hunter gatherers in Europe. Their physical remains and artifacts from this time are plentiful - and what is really amazing is how far spread out they were. This first race of people with whom we can claim a genetic affinity, were what is called the proto Nordic racial type - tall, light hair and eyes. In certain isolated areas in Europe you can still find perfect living examples of this racial type, and they differ only slightly in height from modern day Nordics. This great proto Nordic race lived in a broad band spanning from Spain right across Europe all the way to central Asia and even to the Pacific rim, where skeletal remains have been found as well.

Pure "PCT" / "Broad Homeland" as pushed by Rokus. I am not alleging Rokus adheres to any sort of extremist ideology, but if he doesn't, he needs to recognize that he is pushing the ideologists' agenda for them, and should be doubly careful to avoid spin and original synthesis. In the light of his emphasis on the Nordic Race and the Cradle of Civilization, I am afraid I must conclude that the contributions of a fully brainwashed Werkgroep Traditie member wouldn't look all that different. My conclusion is that this isn't just a scholarly hypothesis gone terribly wrong. Hypotheses that are simply flawed don't get pushed, they are just forgotten. This one is being pushed online in spite of its shortcomings because of its ideological appeal, which makes it a classical WP:FRINGE problem article for Wikipedia. dab (𒁳) 13:34, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I could as easily make a contribution stating the incredible spread and importance of the Sub-Saharan people, in Prehistoric Europe, the Neolithic and the Middle East; or what about the incredible advance of the yellow race, that according to some recent insights has its tiny cradle in the Himalaya. I don't even have the time to be as quick in sourcing arguments as critics are in inventing objections, sometimes soem good faith is just indispensable. What would be the merit of racism anyway? Humans evolved in waves, and the people that spread by the most recent waves excel in climatically distorted physical proportions: so what about the skinny long limbs of most Nordics, that so clearly demonstrate they did not originate in a cold climate? I'm not here to teach people an ideological lesson: if, and only if, people are informed fully of the merits and discrepancies of any approach, the facts should speak by itself. Extremism can only thrive in splendid isolation from facts and fresh ideas. People that truly seek truth are bound to get sick by the kind of voluntary intelectual captivity this kind of extremists indulge themselves in. I am happy Darwin survived Nazi Germany, with effort Nietzsche survived also. Other subjects of abuse suffer more difficulties in already being discussed in a more balanced way. Sure, I recognize one big problem in PCT, that it has all the ingredients for inviting diehard proponents to entrench themselves in blunt negationism towards any external influence. If anybody could convince me Alinei or Hausler belong themselves to this group of people, giving preponderance to any kind of (crypto-)ideology above an open mind that by definition rejects any limits or constraints, I would stop to waist time on this topic inmediately. I don't believe this, I would rather classify PCT as an overreaction against the entrenched and distorted views of diehard proponents of the Kurgan theory. And what if it would still convey some interesting fresh ideas? You can take it or leave it, not any real scientist will ever ask people to actually "believe" any theory. Just stick to the facts, verify and if necessary, reject, but don't involve free minds in the craziness and vices of millions of other people, they'll always be there, whatever people choose to put forward. Rokus01 (talk) 21:37, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
 * sure -- the Kurgan hypothesis may hold ideological appeal to Ukrainian blood-and-soil ideologists just like the PCT may hold ideological appeal to Italian, French or Belgian blood-and-soil ideologists. The notable difference being that we don't see the Kurgan hypothesis touted by Ukrainian crackpots: that's not necessary, because it is advocated by perfectly solid, non-Ukrainian scholars. PCT otoh rests on the ideas of an Italian archaeologist writing essays titled "Etruscan: An Archaic Form of Hungarian". Enough said. Can we just tag the entire mess as pseudoscholarship and be done? I am really bored to death by the topic by now. "Etruscan: An Archaic Form of Hungarian" is just the icing on the cake. dab (𒁳) 11:07, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

I give more credit to the opinion of scholars than to your distorted explanations. I don't consider the issue displayed or addressed in a neutral way by your interaction. Rokus01 (talk) 23:22, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
 * good. then stop parroting a fringe website and start reporting on mainstream scholarly consensus. If you do that, "PCT" immediately shrinks to a minor topic of pseudoarchaeology. Nothing to see here. If you are interested in arguing against scholarly mainstream, Wikipedia isn't for you. Write an article and submit it to some journal. dab (𒁳) 10:55, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

How come, a "fringe website", if this website is written and supported by respected scholars? I rather call the hypothesis "tentative". And why should I suit your personal point of view by not giving an overview of sourced issues concerning PCT? I don't have any clue how you think to reconcile the removal of sourced information with tolerance against unsourced nonsense that still seek to severely discredit this particular view. In case you missed the sourcing, I could source sentence by sentence if you think the reader is interested in repeating the same references. By the way, what make you think I am arguing here against "mainstream" scholarly views? You make a lot of assumptions that do not suit me, nor does this suit WP:NPOV. Rokus01 (talk) 16:12, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

"the Kurgan hypothesis may hold ideological appeal to Ukrainian blood-and-soil ideologists just like the PCT may hold ideological appeal to Italian, French or Belgian blood-and-soil ideologists. The notable difference being that we don't see the Kurgan hypothesis touted by Ukrainian crackpots" Those Ukrainian crackpots are not even able to sustain continuity with the Scythians, so why should they bother in the first place to let their bottle of Wodka and interfere with the spree of drunks that even go much further and attribute the PIE homeland exclusively to their soil? As always, something is amiss in your reasoning. Rokus01 (talk) 10:44, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
 * how now, I am sure that if I had made a disparaging remark on Ukrainians involving vodka, the Hindutvavadi-cum-Afrocentrist-cum-Armenian nationalist front would clamour for my head at AN/I :o) I take it you have not come accross Ukrainian nationalists? They exist, you know, and their case for "Indo-European continuity" is rather stronger than that of the Werkgroep Traditie. Not that you even bothered to take the point I was in fact making. I said that endorsement by crackpots doesn't necessarily invalidate a scenario: it just means that it becomes more difficult to identify bona fide literature among the cranky white noise. The PCT, though, appears to be mostly noise with very little signal. "paleolithic continuity" is a truism in genetics, and a real non-starter for any linguistic hypotheses. "PC" in a nutshell: archaeogenetics- absolutely; archaeology- yes, with qualifications; linguistics- complete non sequitur (c.f. Mallory's Kulturkugel). dab (𒁳) 11:03, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I take this to mean that your entire "pro-PCT" campaign was in fact just you humorously pulling our leg. I am relieved. So let's call it a day and turn this back into a serious article (we can keep your version at WP:BJAODN). dab (𒁳) 14:42, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

I prefer a critical article that does not compromise the true representation of any subject, no matter how silly. I am very serious in this principle.Rokus01 (talk) 23:39, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Dab, what a shabby disinformation merchant you are trying to tar Alinei with a Nazi brush (presumably because all of your other attempts to pass off your irrational dislike of his ideas as rational discussion have failed). By your argument, we should presumably remove Darwin from any discussion of evolutionary theory because nasty people use natural selection to justify their own nefarious ends. Suffice it to say that like most of your other comments, this is complete garbage, since anyone who is even remotely familiar with Alinei's work (as you evidently are not) would know that it is purely a linguistic theory. In fact, I am not aware of any references to race in it. Furthermore, it is not just a theory of continuity of Germanic/Celtic speakers, but of 'non-Aryan' IE groups - Italic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Baltic, etc. as well as of Uralic speakers (and having seen how contributors to Stormfront wind themselves up over the issue of whether the Saami are Aryans or not, I can only conclude that white supremacists will find Alinei a terrible disappointment). On this latter point, Alinei correctly points out that there is a consensus among archaeologists that the Uralic peoples have been around in NE Europe/N Russia at least since the Ice Age, and it is in this context that he links Etruscan to Hungarian given the archaeological record which shows the spread of Bronze Age innovations from the Carpathian Basin to Italy. While there are still gaps in his theory (like numerals), it's a perfectly coherent theory, even if it is possible to disagree with some of the details.

More generally, I think that the editor should take on board the following:

I think that Alinei's dates for the emergence of PIE are way too high but there is a minimum consensus PCT position which is that by the Mesolithic, IE was already present in Europe and had already begun to differentiate into its subfamilies. Hence there are no grounds for assuming that the entire population of Palaeolithic Europe was non-IE (even if non-IE groups such as the ancestors of the Basques were evidently present) and hence that IE speakers only entered Europe either during or after the Neolithic, since there is no archaeological or genetic evidence for a radical population shift during or after the Neolithic and there is little or no evidence for a non-IE substrate at least in the IE languages of Northern Europe (I know that a few linguists like Vennemann would argue otherwise, but quite frankly his work doesn't stand up to serious scrutiny, as has been shown by several scholars such as Lakarra and Kitson).Jonathan Morris2 20:31, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Dbachmann, by the way, "The (unreferenced) "main assumptions" of "PCT" are Integralism (Integral Traditionalism) by any other name" : This is WP:OR by any other name, as usual with you. The link between PCT and something called "Integral Traditionalism" is not referenced and obviously of your own and personal device. Rokus01 (talk) 14:06, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

genetic continuity does not imply linguistic continuity. true / FALSE
genetic continuity does not imply linguistic continuity.

there is no implication - but there is high corelation. Who put requirment of implication in the sentese. What is the logic behind that wording ?

FALSE - logic falacy.


 * On the contrary, there is not a high correlation, otherwise the population of Ireland would not speak English (or even Gaelic). Paul B (talk) 08:39, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
 * The correlation exists, but it doesn't work that way. The fact that the irish as a popoulation speak english does not mean that everyone speaking english is irish. Pcassitti (talk) 10:01, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Err, yes, obviously. So what is your point? Paul B (talk) 11:29, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
 * My point is that, although genetically related people often speak the same or related languages, as is the case with the irish, who all speak english, people who speak related languages are not necessarily genetically related. Thus the example with the irish and the english is not a valid argument against a hypothetical correlation between genes and language. Pcassitti (talk) 12:02, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Frankly, I can't make head nor tail of this comment, though I've read it three times. How does the second sentence follow from the first? Paul B (talk) 15:51, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

I think this section is rather representative of the general level and logical soundness of the PCT idea. dab (𒁳) 12:06, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
 * In this case though the fallacy was made by the critics of the theory, since continuity theory does not imply that which has been criticized. Pcassitti (talk) 12:05, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
 * you may be talking about something else entirely, but in the present context, your comments simply make no sense. --dab (𒁳) 19:20, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

This entire section of the discussion is worthless: Wikipedia is not the place to argue personal opinions. The fact that genetic continuity implies or not correlation or causation is irrelevant for the section "Criticism" of the article. Under criticism, only referenced third party criticism should find place, not the personal idea of the contributors, whether right or wrong, interesting or not, reasonable or not. See my section on POV CONCERNS below.--XPTN (talk) 23:19, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

PCV in PCT
it is now : ''..though so far the PCV does not accept the slight evidence this Balkan languages spread so far to the north."

an error? 71.201.241.2 (talk) 18:35, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Asian IE languages
This page is noticeably missing a PCT explanation for the placement of the Indo-Iranian and Tocharian languages. Does the "continuity" logic apply to them too, or are they explained away as a result of more recent migrations away from Europe? --86.135.181.234 (talk) 00:14, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

No, Alinei is silent on this point and when I asked him about it, he just said that he didn't have time to deal with everything.

Evidently, I think that this is a serious sin of omission (as is his failure to deal with Iberia, Greece, Iran and only cursory treatment of Turkey).

My own view, FWIW (and NOT Alinei's) - is that while I tend to support his premise about IE being present in Europe by the Mesolithic, there is no a priori reason for assuming that the same holds for India. This, however, is a logical consequence of his theory, since evidently, one of his key arguments is the absence of convincing evidence for a pre-IE substrate in Scandinavia. It must thus logically follow that if you find a substrate then PCT doesn't apply, and there's been some very good work done by Frank Southworth & Michael Witzel to demonstrate Munda and Dravidian substrates in the Rg Veda. In any case, you have an instant clue to suggest that an IE PCT in India is unlikely, simply because there's only one big IE family, Indo-Aryan - if IE had a palaeolithic time-depth, you would expect to find several.Jonathan Morris2 (talk) 03:31, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

POV concerns in Criticism
The section on criticism is very poorly made and raises obvious objections of POV. Wikipedia is a encyclopedia. As such, one should not report individual judgments, no matter how reasonable, not original contributions, but only third party opinions. Here is an example:

"The mainstream position of historical linguistics is that genetic continuity does not imply linguistic continuity[citation needed] and that theories of a literal "military conquest"

In the above, the contributor is taking his own understanding of the accepted IE vulgata and using it to disqualify the PCT. He might be right or wrong, that's not the point: it is not in line with Wikipedia guidelines. He should instead say "the prominent IE scholar Dr. X, in his paper Y, criticizes the correlation between genetic continuity and linguistic continuity in these terms "...".

Similarly in the following:

"The time frame proposed by PCT is far beyond mainstream estimates, by a factor of at least 500%, and the hypothesis is not taken seriously in Indo-European studies."

Again, the contributor is expressing his personal understanding of the IE theory and using it against PCT. The contributor might be absolutely right in his speculations, but Wikipedia is not the place for original contribution: only assessed and referenced third party opinions should be reported.

Finally the statement "It's not taken seriously by the IE scholars" is very strong, unreferenced, in conflict with other passages of the article. I am taking it out.

The following is an example of how positive (or negative) criticism should be correctly reported.

"On the other hand, Alinei's book was reviewed favourably by Jonathan Morris in Mother Tongue, a journal dedicated to the reconstruction of Paleolithic language, judging Alinei's theory as being

"both simpler than its rivals and more powerful in terms of the insights it provides into language in the Meso- and Palaeolithic. While his book contains some flaws I believe that it deserves to be regarded as one of the seminal texts on linguistic archaeology, although given its lamentable lack of citation in English-language circles, it appears that recognition will have to wait until a translation of the original Italian appears."

--XPTN (talk) 23:14, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

it transpires more and more that this is a topic of pseudo-scholarship. It is almost impossible to discuss it "properly", as a bona fide school of thought. I was prepared to assume that this is a scholarly minority view, particularly in light of the "Mother Tongue" review, but I do not now think the topic has any notability, and the article shows signs of the fringe theory mis-represented as scholarly found so often on Wikipedia. I have serious doubts that "PCT" has any scholarly merit, and I should consider a merge into Mario Alinei. --dab (𒁳) 08:01, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Dab, appalling how you dodge straight observations concerning your unsourced individual judgements on "fringe" and "mainstream" that are utterly ridiculous, unsustainable personal lies and violate WP policy of neutral representation. Your (kurgan) fanatism and cheap retorics only achieve to discredit WP and turn Wikipedia into a source of tainted amateur views rather than verifiable information. Incredible people like you are still allowed to edit here.Rokus01 (talk) 14:45, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
 * So you have no real arguments other than calling another editor a liar? What do you think any newcomer seeing your post as one of their first pages on Wikipedia would think is acceptable behavior on a talk page? Hopefully they'd take XPTN's comments as more representative. Doug Weller (talk) 16:03, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
 * indeed. I duly qualified my personal judgement ("it transpires more and more", "I do not now think", "I have serious doubts"). None of this is "lying" unless you want to claim that I do not have serious doubts even though I assure you I do. The above is necessarily my own judgement, but it is an informed judgement, based on the content and history of this article, and the exploits of the likes of Rokus01 elsewhere. As always, the burden of establishing notability is with those who want to assert notability. At present, the case for this article inherits the notability of Mario Alinei, and the notability of the continuitas.com website. There doesn't appear to be anything else. For good reason, because the linguistic parts are absolutely crazy and will only ever appeal to the superfamily "Paleolithic Linguists". Anyone else will shake their heads and move on. Any claim to the contrary will have to present excellent evidence (major headlines of "omg! major breakthrough in historical linguistics, would-be experts grovel in humiliation, deep prehistory proponents radiantly vindicated!", since "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." dab (𒁳) 11:18, 20 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Having seen some discussion of this elsewhere, I'm inclined to agree that the 'theory' is identified with Alinei and that is virtually the only source of its notability. A funny comment on Alinei I found: "Alinei is the first one who seems to have "rebutted" his own "continuity theory" by talking about "Turcic Etruria" and an alleged "close relation" between Hungarian and Etruscan languages. I was unpleasantly surprised seing that Alinei compared a few words of Etruscan to Hungarian in a way more appropriate to some cranky "etymologist" than a serious scientist."
 * Peter Daniels suggested that the author(s) of this article "could do with a reading of Johanna Nichols's *Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time*." Doug Weller (talk) 13:25, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Etrusco: una forma arcaica di ungherese . This is actually sad. If nothing else, Alinei is a healthy reminder of the sad state of academic linguistics. I really do hope that "after postmodernism", linguistics will rise once again to the brilliant heights of its golden past. I blame Chomsky for any critic who with sad justification thinks the field of linguistics is so much muddle-headed blather. dab (𒁳) 10:31, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Yawn, dab is at it again, spewing his blind, ignorant prejudice and disinformation - in the meantime, Alinei's Etruscan work has a favourable review by Jean-Leo Leonard in 'Etudes Finno-Ougriennes'- reproduced on the Continuitas website. Just read the book, people, - it's self-explanatory, and entertainingJonathan Morris2 (talk) 03:16, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

- To be taken seriously and before giving an opinion, first an editor should do its utmost to give a true representation on the subject. I don't think any reader searching for information would be interested at all to the personal views of - by definition -utterly anonimous and irrelevant editors that pretend to be taller than the simple favour they (are supposed to) do in gathering and publishing sourced information. Yes, some editors are prone to lying in order to make their point and falsify/misrepresent information by purpose. The history of this article gives an horrific example. Editors that feel obliged to impose their personal opinion (both to sneer or praise views using rhetorics) had better quit abusing the talk page (in accordance with WP policy) and leave WP at all. 217.68.49.65 (talk) 09:17, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

...said the "utterly anonimous and irrelevant" 217.68.49.65 of The Hague. Wikipedia is built to ensure neutral presentation regardless of editors' opinions. If it was possible to establish the notability of this thing, it wouldn't matter what anyone on Wikipedia thinks. But you will understand, I hope, that the burden of establishing the merit of any topic lies on those wishing to tout it; there is no burden on the skeptics to establish that the topic has no merit. dab (𒁳) 10:19, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
 * btw, funny how this is always about the "Ethnolinguistic Origins of Europe". It would seem that this "theory" collapses as soon as somebody dares to point out that there are Indo-European languages found east of Europe (in exotic locations such as Iran, Pamir and India). But perhaps there was a Paleolithic Pan-Eurasian civilization, who knows, eminent archaeologists might discover their fiberglass data cables any day. dab (𒁳) 10:26, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Its not so much 'theories' but 'paradigmas' we are talking about. Neutral representation is the one thing that 'utterly anonimous and irrelevant' like us are supposed to be able to. Notability is another thing, and should not be challenged by personal opinions that indeed remain 'utterly anonimous and irrelevant'. To me, the notability of the paleolinguistic approach is the balance it brings to entrenched invasionist paradigmas. Sneering this is equal to imposing your own paradigma: if you want to believe in yours, fine, I suppose nothing can stop you. Others would prefer the tale of Noah. Just remember timedepth issues are always confined to upper boundaries only: there is not any linguistic law that prevent a community to remain within the same Sprachbund or continuous communicating area for thousands of years. A linguistic unity by free travel and trade would yield a complete different timedepth-picture than simplistic family trees that only obey the laws of linguistic formation by separate invasions. Just try to follow the scholarly discussion and arguments, its worthwile to represent this in a proper way. 217.68.49.65 (talk) 14:21, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
 * well, ok, but I have to point out that "neutral coverage" on Wikipedia (WP:NPOV) isn't the same as "sympathetic coverage" of the sort endorsed by Wikinfo. That simplistic invasionism isn't an accurate picture of reality is really, really old news (about 160 years old now), and pretty much granted from the outset, without the need for any paleolithic arguments. Representing rejection of PCT as "simplistic invasionism" is disingenious to say the least. You are free to embrace PCT, or Noaic, or Mahayuga timelines as your personal belief, and peace to you. What we are discussing here is the academic credibility of these theories. That of PCT appears to be rather close to zero. But of course you are free to present evidence to the contrary. dab (𒁳) 09:16, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Your agressivity seems proportional to your lack of arguments: being a scholar involved in academic research about IE languages, I have to say that Alinei's PCT IS an important subject of debate, whatever you may think of it. Maybe he's wrong, I don't know and nobody knows. The Corded-Ware theory has been ruled out by Gimbutas, Gimbutas' Kurgan's theory has been ruled out by Renfrew, and Renfrew's Neolithic Dipersal Theory has been ruled out by Mallory, who now goes back to the Corded Ware. There is not very much arguments against the PCT so far, most of them being something like "it's wrong because it's against the mainstream theory". Thus, it looks like we still don't have the answer about the genesis of the IE languages. Therefore it's always interesting to hear about new propositions, and that doesn't happen so often : the PCT has been the most important IE theory since Renfrew's NDT in the 80's; it deserves its article in the Wikipedia. I did not see any trace of argument in your long messages on this page; contempt is not a very constructive way to debate, as you may know - or not know. If you try, you'll see that providing arguments against the PCT is not as easy as you may believe. But there ARE counter-arguments. Kentel —Preceding undated comment added 16:30, 23 April 2009 (UTC).

Jonathan Morris in Mother Tongue
Based on source of 2000 y
 * 2000 Lamentable lack of citation
 * 2008 on the first sight it looks like Alineli has now even more citation than Moris

Is this 'lamentation' still walid ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.201.241.2 (talk) 01:19, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
 * feel free to cite a more recent review. --dab (𒁳) 08:58, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

76.16.176.177
He asked to use talk but his talk is dumbed to only "view source"


 * 19:12, 1 September 2008 Dbachmann (...) (19,445 bytes) (rv - use the talkpage. Your book is mentioned in the References section.) (undo)

There are two books but I have one question. Is your Dbachmann false sttatement regrettable omission or intentional lie?
 * I suggest you use your browser's "find" function and look for "Lingue". I was incidentially talking about this talkpage, not mine. Mr. Anon, your contributions are so erratic and in such bad grammar that I feel compelled to ask you whether you couldn't consider contributing to another project. --dab (𒁳) 10:12, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Notability
This stuff is so far out on the lunatic fringe, I seriously wonder if its notability can be defended. Its only claim to fame seems to be the favourable Mother Tongue review (1996), itself a rather eccentric publication. Apart from that, this stuff would be sufficiently covered in a brief paragraph on "dissenting minority views" at Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses. There is literally nothing of any value here, and we are effectively providing a free mirror for continuitas.com. In purest crank fashion, this article goes on and on about perfectly undisputed facts (majority of genome contribution dates to the Paleolithic, etc.), and then suddenly jumps to the most far out conclusions with the implication that the undisputed material somehow supports the assertions. This topic is a textbook illustration of what is covered at WP:FRINGE. --dab (𒁳) 10:17, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Still this is only the personal interpretation of some resident kurganist roaming wikipedia. You can not wash away the parsimonious current, supported by many scholars, that counters and contradicts the wild (circular) speculation of the Kurgan religion. Rokus01 (talk) 10:29, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
 * hello Rokus.
 * for more than a year you have consistently failed to document your perennial claim that the Kurgan framework has ceased to be the mainstream hypothesis.
 * before embarking on any further circular talkpage games, how about you help out this article in establishing that this stuff is more than Alinei's personal hobby horse. Perhaps a second review of Alinei's book, or anyone citing Alinei over the past 12 years, just something conjuring up the impression that "PCT" is part of actual academic debate. The only "religion" I smell here is the irrational wish to be a member of a race apart, descended from the Neanderthals. Which, what is more, is completely unrelated to any linguistic question. The perpetual naive mixup of genetics and linguistics is the core fallacy you fall victim to every time you touch a linguistic topic. --dab (𒁳) 10:32, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

You really disappoint me now, while I started to think you are intelligent enough to admit the mainstream word has never been used by anybody but you: The Kurgan theory is cited to be "attractive" (for what, by who, people that love killing sprees?) and "popular" (I suppose including to a whole bunch of idiots), nothing more. Also, you should have noticed that ALL influential scholars at their wits AGREE that NONE of the current theories is without problems: the parsimonious approach is the most popular and focus on diffusion and local continuity until the opposite has been proven. So far, not any pattern has been recognized or confirmed by archeology alone (Mallory could not even make sense of the Indo-Iranian/Indian finds, the cultures most in need of Kurgan invaders). The scholarly writers that seek to make a fool out of themselves by opening a tin of horseriding invaders from the steppes to solve their problems are getting ever more rare. Indeed, rather than making themselves ridiculous with new theories, serious post-nineties archeologists tend to ignore the Kurgan framework, unless you could supply me a list of writers that conclude their published articles by a delirious Kortlandt-like "just like Gimbutas said!" Rokus01 (talk) 11:21, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
 * please, I just ask you to forgo the circular talkpage games (bringing up "steppe invaders", equating the Kurgan framework with 'just like Gimbutas said' (yawn), equating "diffusion" and "local continuity" (hilarious move, congratulations for that)). Can you just cut to the chase and react to my actual posting? As in, dig up references discussing Alinei's stuff? I already know much more about your personal ideologies that I e :)ver cared to, so there is no need to reiterate that. --dab (𒁳) 11:24, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

t he stupid have to force enforce. 76.16.176.177 (talk) 12:48, 2 September 2008 (UTC) Mainstream this mainstream that mainstream stupid :)
 * this Wikipedia. Wikipedia discuss mainstream. You think Wikipedia stupid, you why not write personal homepage. This Wikipedia also written in English. --dab (𒁳) 12:54, 2 September 2008 (UTC)


 * i afraid there is limited space on harder drive —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.16.176.177 (talk) 13:17, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
 * this is poetry man. You are wasting your brilliance here :) dab (𒁳) 19:09, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

The Paleolithic Continuity Theory is a new theory and it is still not very well known, especially in the USA, maybe because Alinei's main books have not been published in English, especially his "Origini delle Lingue d'Europa" (two volumes, 1996 and 2000). There's a blog where you can find a lot of information about historical linguistics and applications of the PCT: Language Continuity. Take a look and if you think it's interesting you can include a link to this blog in this Wikipedia article. 11:26 (CET), 1st December 2008.


 * As we have seen, the CT explains the linguistic situation of Switzerland in a completely new way. Germanic and Italic dialects were already spoken here in the Mesolithic, i.e. from around 8,000 BC, with a geographical distribution which is quite similar to the one we have today, 10,000 years later.
 * this is so wrong, wrong to the point of shamelessness. Switzerland is a prime example against PCT. Switzerland shows a lot of linguistic conservativism, what with the isolated Alpine valleys. And yet no language in Switzerland is older than 2000 years. The Romance languages (yes, unambiguously Romance, not generically "Italic") are a result of linguistic assimilation to the Roman Empire, and the Alemmannic dialects a result of the Alemannic immigration less than 1500 years ago. All of this happened in the full light of history. The only linguistic traces dating to prehistory are a few Gaulish toponyms (which show unambiguously that the Romance and German dialects are imposed over a prehistoric substrate) and a couple of archaic "Old European" words such as the famous loba. "Germanic and Italic dialects around 8,000 BC" is a joke. --dab (𒁳) 10:51, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm afraid, Dbachmann, that you're talking from a traditional perspective without taking into account other alternative ways to approach historical linguistics, like the PCT. Obviously, many of the details of this theory need further development and refinement, but if you look carefully into it you will realize that its proposals, especially the ones about Indo-European chronology, are more reasonable than they seem at the beginning. Swtitzerland, Scandinavia and other areas, for example islands, are good places to test the PCT. When I first heard about this theory I was also surprised. Then, I saw it all made a lot of sense. Much more sense than the traditional theories, which, by the way, have remained basically unaltered for about 150 years. Yes, it's time for a change in historical linguistics. 14:00. 1st December 2008.

They are good places to test the PCT. It fails the test utterly. It's one thing to propose an innovation, it's quite another to stick to your innovation after it has plainly been shown it doesn't work. Innovation for the sake of innovation is just as bad as tradition for the sake of tradition. This stuff "makes sense" only as a dogma, not as a falsifiable hypothesis. --dab (𒁳) 11:49, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Mr Dbachmann, I see you have a very clear and strong opinion about this issue. I suppose you prefer the traditional types of explanation for Indo-European, for example this: sometime between the 4th or 3rd millennium BC a group of people from somewhere in Eurasia (probably Ukraine, or other nearby areas) started a transcontinental journey, or odissey, bringing with them their language (Indo-European) to areas which were thousands of kilometers away from their 'homeland', causing a widespread and quite catastrophic effect of language substitution, whereby the people living in India, Central Asia and most of Europe abandoned their languages and adopted Indo-European. Do you adhere to this ridiculous theory? Do you really think it makes any sense? Is this absurd theory going to survive another 150 years? Please, take a serious look at the PCT. It offers a much more reasonable account of the origins and chronology of Indo-European. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Semproni (talk • contribs) 15:35
 * Yes, that it is exactly how it happened. Compare it to the e.g. the spread of Latin - 7/8th century BCE it was a local speech of the tiny Latium area, and 7 centuries later it completely erased a few dosen major languages (not just on the Apenine peninsula, and not just Italic and IE) becoming a language of almost entire civilised Europe. Exactly the same pattern occurred with the spread of Old Indo-Aryan and Proto-Slavic (5th-8th CE). The "traditional" approach is supported by a mountain of self-supportive interdisciplinary evidence, and the PCT is solely based on the most naive possible premise that the spread of a language = spread of a DNA = spread of a culture. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 04:36, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Dear Ivan Stambuk and Dbachman: you're repeating once and again the same old axioms of traditional historical linguistics. Do you exist now, or are you writing from the 19th century? Stambuk's description of the expansion of Latin is simplistic, and his/her understanding of the PCT is simply wrong. Who said that the PCT is based on DNA? This is a COMPLETELY WRONG assumprion. Population genetics is just one of the elements taken into account in the PCT, but there are many other. Maybe these wrong assumptions come from an imperfect knowdledge of this theory, which might be caused, at least partially, by how Wikipedia articles are written. I wonder if the people who have written or edited the PCT article in Wikipedia know much about the PCT. Have they read the 2000-page-long "Origini delle Lingue d'Europa" by Mario Alinei? This is the point: I'm afraid you're talking about something that you don't know much about. Have you read other sources, like the Language Continuity blog? Have you read many articles written by Ballester, Benozzo, Costa, Cavazza, etc.? It seems you haven't. User:Semproni 9:04 (CET), 3rd December 2008.
 * My description may be simplistic, but it's nevertheless true. Latin has managed in 7-8 centuries to expand from a small local speech (0 dialectal diversity) to a large area previously covered by languages which where provably (thousands of preserved monuments) originally populated by much more numerous speakers of Etruscan, Osco-Umbrian, Venetian, Lepontic etc. Not to mention the later expansion within the Roman Empire.
 * Population genetics is the main argument of PCT AFAICS. The point is, that that argument actually disproves nothing (and proves even less). For example, the Slavic expansion from Ukrainian Urheimat was nothing sort of a "large migration", as it used to be described in the 19the century and afterwards, but is today generally held to be just the spread of prestigious Slavic speech, suppressing Illyrian, Baltic, Romance etc. languages, all of which have left mountain of evidence in onomastics and borrowings and upon which numerous Proto-Slavic sound laws can be observed. The only thing that proponents of PCT put forth as a counter-evidence that should support the insane scenario of Slavs being "native to Balkans" are naive and arbitrary hypotheses that explain exactly nothing. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 08:54, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Ivan, I think it's ok if you criticise some particular aspects of the application of the PCT, why not? The linguistic history of the Slavs is quite complex and there is no 'absolute truth about it. The PCT makes some proposals but they're not necessairly the ultimate truth. But, AGAIN, I think you have misunderstood completely what the PCT is. You only have a superficial knowledge of it, based on some wrong or simplistic assumptions. The importance of the PCT lies primarily in the fact that it is a new framework for the study of historical linguistics. Some of the details and proposals can be refined but, on the whole, it is a real step forward in this field of study. User:Semproni 10:58 (CET), 3rd December 2008.

I think we need to remember WP:FORUM at this point. We can continue this discussion at Jesus's blog. I was really hoping postmodernism was dying. But what Semproni is presenting here is unadulterated postmodernism. "Anything goes", it's not a question of rationality, you can prefer any "narrative" you like, never mind facts or plausibility. The PCT solves problems by the fascinating approach of refusing to acknowledge them at all. Why discuss historical linguistics if you can avoid it all by saying "the default assumption (aka "new framework") is that it has all been like this forever, since the Paleolithic. The burden is on you to prove that it hasn't. What, you say you don't have any hypothesis for the distribution of dialects in the Paleolithic? hah, see how superior my approach is". I can only roll my eyes at this nonsense. And, of course, any theory is "ridiculous" if it has been around for 150 years, the "same old axioms", how uncool, you must abandon it for some new fad as a matter of principle. Semproni, do you endorse the Maxwell equations? Good god, how 1860s, how could any self-respecting physicist repeat the same tired old axioms today? The importance of the PCT lies primarily in the fact that it is a new  framework for the study of historical linguistics (emphasis mine) indeed: it has no merit except for being new. Is it too much to hope that we can just wait until it ceases to be all that new, and it will just go away on its own? Because, it has literally nothing to support it except its being "new". If you take that as a recommendation, I have a few other articles that you may be interested in. --dab (𒁳) 10:07, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

POV of Entire article
This article is written with an extreme bias toward PCT. Genetic evidence suggests that pre-Kurgan groups make up a larger percentage of the population only in what is called "the Atlantic fringe"- the British Isles, coast of France, and Basque territory, denoted by Y-DNA haplogroup R1b, but Haplogroup R1a, associated with indo-european invaders (and, incidentally, strongest near the Kurgan region and also the nearby West Slavic region), is found in nearly all Indo-European speaking areas today, but is rare outside them. Seriously people, baby Jesus cries everytime his children are stupid.

References: Wikidepia, of course. —Preceding unsigned comment added by SquadalaMan (talk • contribs) 02:25, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
 * well, I guess this should just become the article about Alinei's book, for better or worse. --dab (𒁳) 06:55, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
 * This sounds like a good solution to me. TimidGuy (talk) 15:37, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I meant R1a is Kurgan and R1b is Atlantic fringe, got them messed upSquadalaMan (talk) 06:08, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * You speak of pre-Kurgan groups, but the fact is that the Kurgan-hypothesis is dismissed by most modern archaeologists. So alternative models are necessary to account for the observed spread of the Haplogroup R1a. I have looked at the wikipedia article about that specific Haplogroup, and it appears to me that a number of interpretations is influenced by a priori assumptions about the Kurgan invasion. Clearly some better cooperation between archaeologists and genetists would be in order. The article also mentions alternative theories, so it appears that the spread of the R1a Haplogroup from eastern Europe is not such a self-obvious fact. Just dismissing the PCT as nonsense simply because it does not conform to mainstream theories (although it does conform to quite a number of archaeological models)does not do it justice.  Pcassitti (talk) 13:06, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

you say "the Kurgan-hypothesis is dismissed by most modern archaeologists". This is what I keep hearing from PCT supporters, and only from PCT supporters. Now would be a good time to back up the claim with credible (non-Alinei) sources. Also, the argument that flaws in the Kurgan hypothesis render a Paleolithic origin of IE more likely is about as sound as the argument that flaws in the Kurgan hypothesis render a Polynesian origin of IE more likely. The observation that "most people say put in situ, most of the time" is not "PCT", it's just common sense. This observation alone accounts for genetic continuity. But to explain language spread, we need to look at the minority of people who do not stay put. The genetic traces of their movements may be minimal, but their linguistic impact isn't. I am used to constantly remind beginners to not confuse genetics and linguistics, and everyone still keeps doing it. The PCT seems to be little else than a particularly stubborn insistence on that fallacy. --dab (𒁳) 13:10, 10 November 2008 (UTC)


 * 1 Some sane amnesia? when you (User:Dbachmann) delete thesis from article do you dare to browse history (this article) to read what you deleted? C. Renferew rather is not M. Alinei.
 * 2 We support Pcassitti observation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.201.243.21 (talk) 13:08, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry, that's not even English. It isn't possible to have a meaningful discussion in these terms. --dab (𒁳) 20:32, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Let assume that the problems with English comprehension prompted someone 3 times to cut sourced thesis from this article.    —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.16.182.127 (talk) 11:35, 13 February 2009 (UTC)
 * He SELF PROCALMED 200 years of human genetic research![ What.a falacy. [[Population genetics]] paradigm is about 25 y old. We have growing but still very limited data on aDNA to track ancient populations movements . Dbachman do 10 times exaggeration, if it is unclear what kind of agenda pushing this fallacy other-time he may sounds quite intelligent.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.16.182.127 (talk) 13:09, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Lets look if and who push POV. The section, deleted by the above 'English sorry' admin contains factual data. Data instantly verifiable. Dab blanking push POV to the article. How its came Dbachmann: that you deleted them, do they do not answer to your objection why Bengali people speak the language of the family? Do you have to like them to let them they thesis to be put in the article? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.16.182.127 (talk)
 * To the details on POV

None of this does even parse. I can grasp you are unhappy about the article and about my role, but beyond that you are not making any sense whatsoever. I would ask you to read WP:NOT, adhere to WP:TALK and stay out of my user namespace. Wikipedia is not usenet. Thanks. --dab (𒁳) 16:37, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

PCT workgroup
Interest in, and acceptance of, the Paleolithic Continuity Theory are attributed to following alphabetical list of members of The PCT workgroup url: < /ref > scholars:


 * Linguist Mario Alinei - University of Utrecht.
 * Linguist Xaverio Ballester - Universidad de Valencia.
 * Philologist Francesco Benozzo - Universit di Bologna.
 * Linguist Franco Cavazza - Università di Bologna.
 * Linguist Michel Contini - Università Stendhal de Grenoble.
 * Linguist Gabriele Costa - Università del Molise.
 * Linguist Philippe Dalbera - Università de Nice.
 * Historian Paolo Galloni - Edizioni Viella, Roma.
 * Anthropologist Henry Harpending - University of Utah - Salt Lake C.
 * Prehistorian Alexander Hausler - Universitat Halle/Saale.
 * Linguist Alfio Lanaia - Università di Catania.
 * Linguist Jean Le Dû - Università de Brest.
 * Anthropologist Matteo Meschiari - Università di Palermo.
 * Prehistorian Marcel Otte - Università de Liàge. —Preceding unsigned comment added by User: (talk • contribs)

continuitas.com isn't a quotable source. Cite academic literature. Also, please start using an account and signing your posts. Thanks. --dab (𒁳) 16:37, 13 February 2009 (UTC)


 * So you do you want to put that the websitecontinuitas.com where those scholars listed themselves is not a respectable source ? What kind of antisemantism torture that thought, do you relay think that those listed are staged by someone against they will ? Do you dare hypothetic: the links and emails and portraits as fake play ? We all hope you say NO! =  So Why did you deleted it ?  I think it is quite  possible that you cover an agenda by 'your respectables'. Will you say "yes its true" if described exactly ?


 * Please. Do not think as you arguing with someone (I hope you don't need my signature to concentrate on response:). Think in neutral way about what is reality versus what is not. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.201.246.104 (talk) 11:36, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

"What kind of antisemantism torture that thought", lol, I'll have to keep and frame that one.

look, continuitas.com is simply a website. It has no academic credibility. I don't doubt the people listed there are listed with their consent, but what we want is peer reviewed publications, including the peer reviews.

I don't dispute that this "theory" exists. Hey, it has a Wikipedia article, and I am not trying to delete it. I dispute that it is taken at all seriously in historical linguistics. This is a classic case of a somewhat notable fringe theory. --dab (𒁳) 10:37, 16 February 2009 (UTC)
 * OK, You are disputing - thats very fine. Could you show up where you disputing it and how, dab ? Did you realy deleted the above list of scholar including one listed NAS member. Did the deletion have something to do with your 'fringe dispute'. 71.201.243.39 (talk) 08:52, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

we have three names of people associating with this stuff for which some notability could be established it is fair enough to mention these. The others are just random names which add nothing unless we can cite to actual peer-reviewed publications by these people. It is important to note that among the three names above, there is no linguist (besides Alinei himself). That's rather remarkable considering that we are discussing a linguistic theory. If you have any linguists defending this stuff based on actual linguistic arguments, published in peer-reviewed journals of historical linguistics, let me know. --dab (𒁳) 12:47, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) Mario Alinei, original inventor
 * 2) Anthropologist Henry Harpending
 * 3) Prehistorian Marcel Otte


 * dab :we have three names...
 * It is not true, (as of now) we don't have those three names. Last time you deleted them on 2 September 2008. Since you deleted them - you blocked the article.

Otte has been listed all along. If you think support from Utah is crucial, we can list Harpending too, no problem. --dab (𒁳) 10:09, 21 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Add but tight your fringe strings and boot off.

gimbutas
I think in section historical reconstruction it would be practical to add link to surname of Gimbutas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbutas and also to her book old europe it this article egzists in wikipedia —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ceckauskas Dominykas (talk • contribs) 04:24, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Historical non-Attestations of Slavic
Slavic expansion isn't securely attested, in history, until the 6th century. There are isolated words, including suggested Slavic loanwords in other languages (one in Gothic) in the 4th and 5th centuries. So the timeline there could be even later. Marja Erwin (talk) 02:26, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Merger with Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses
This article is very problematic, in Academia the theory is not taken seriously by anyone outside the small clique of proponents and their pupils. Their work is so lacking in merit that the real experts in this field don't even pay attention to it. And therein lies the problem, we don't have much material to criticise it with that is not original research, as nobody with qualifications even bothers about the theory. I have to say that a merge with Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses, and a reduction to about a fifth of the current length is in order.

Boynamedsue (talk) 16:56, 5 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Sounds good to me. Dougweller (talk) 17:45, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Removal of original research
"Moreover, the continuity theory is much more parsimonious in comparison with classical approaches to the IE developments.[citation needed]

A certain pan-European development is supported by archeological evidence, featuring a process of regional depopulation followed by re-population in a "sparse wave" scenario.[citation needed] Hunter-gatherers may have rapidly migrated out of a refugial area to account for a disproportionate contribution to the genetic and linguistic legacy of the region. Most likely, this would have happened at the end of the coldest part of the Younger Dryas (around 10,800-9,400 BC) or later, following the cold event at 6,200 BC.[8]"

I have removed the preceeding as it is pov, original research, and conflicts with the sources it quotes. The article cited actually posits a Levantine, Anatolian or Ukranian Steppe origin for IE speakers, who expanded in a sparse wave to swallow up the non-IE groups already settled in Europe. To take this argument and adapt it to support the continuity theory is original research.

Boynamedsue (talk) 17:16, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

I've removed the whole "linguistic evidence" essay as it doesn't actually present any cited evidence, simply corelates related information and debates the topic in view of it. It's original research.

Boynamedsue (talk) 18:16, 5 March 2011 (UTC)


 * You removed about 6 references to scholarly papers and blanked the thesis those scholars propose. It may seem stupid(hard to read in deletion diff) but do you criticize researchers to conduct "original research". By the way to who or why the paleo stuff is so important to block ? 99.90.197.87 (talk) 01:06, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

example of removed sources. and so on
 * http://www.continuitas.com/geolinguistic.pdf


 * What's that? The link doesn't work for me. Dougweller (talk) 11:26, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

The parts I delated were original research based on quite an eclectic range of sources, which were often misused (as in the example I posted above). If you wish to add information on the theory itself, it is better to cite the originators than people whose work you feel supports them. It also needs to be clearer, shorter and more succint than the version I cut.

Boynamedsue (talk) 22:28, 16 October 2011 (UTC)


 * You are ignorant on the subject like someone who claim to falsify scholarly thesis because the book lay upside down on another shelf. If you did try in fact research the sources you should know the continuitas domain moved from .com to .org; so for the "missing" publications re-search there. 99.90.197.87 (talk) 08:41, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
 * What subject? Boynamedsue did the right thing. It was a badly written section reeking of ignorance (e.g. the Kortlandt reference was named "Kortart"!) and original research. To be sure Kortlandt's paper is about PIE expansion, so that's criticism of PCT if anything. Kortlandt supports "the rate of linguistic change from those of the 'traditional' theories" when he writes about the Slavic dialectal differentiation (p. 3). Daizus (talk) 09:03, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
 * re:|Kortlandt reference was named "Kortart"| <this is straw argument. Kortland name was spell properly and even wikilinked. You can argue all time why someone put foo whilst other use bar. The change was made in 2008 line45 and you pop it now to overload dissusion by non-essence.
 * Moreover (IMO) this sentence referenced by Kortland paper was removed correctly. Kortland did not criticize (as someone put in the article) PCT. But Daizus repeat semantic fallacy "so that's criticism of PCT if anything". Get a minute (or few hours:) to think: how Kortland can in 1989 criticize thesis Alinei will publish around 1998? Did Kortland historian somehow foreseen 10 years in to the future? - nonsense.
 * But beside above straw argument, half or more of article was sucked off & stated in sake to succinct (what is content destruction). The other editors referenced work was removed and three disputants did not put bit of reasonability over ignorance. More serious talk about the article content is needed. 99.90.197.87 (talk) 11:54, 17 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Kortlandt's paper goes against the core tenets of PCT (the assumptions #1 and #2 from the first section): relatively fast dialectal differentiation, PIE speakers migrating in 4-3000 BC and so on. Since you have used this paper only to argue against the "search for archaeological evidence beyond what can be motivated from historical linguistics ", it is a case of original research, because that's not Kortlandt's actual point. It is also original research to further use this claim about archaeology and linguistics to support PCT. As for spelling, your "Kortland name was spell properly and even wikilinked" proves my point. When others find your mistakes before you do, don't accuse them of ignorance. Daizus (talk) 12:12, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

7 of 9, it would be better if you logged on if you are seriously interested in editing this article. It's disconcerting to debate with a number, and given the protection on this article, you won't be allowed to edit it until you do. The section on linguistic evidence said next to nothing, and used a lot of words to do so. If you want to write another linguistic evidence paragraph, feel free. But base it on the actual statements of proponents of this theory, rather than a selective synthesis of writing by authors who believe in a European substrata. The stuff on Chomsky and Australopithecines is irrelevant BTW as it does not directly relate to Europe, nor does it preclude a substrata if correct.

So basically, if you want the paragraph in, you need a summary of the linguistic evidence for PCT relating only to Europe and the arrival of IE. And it needs to be based in the published work of a declared proponent of this theory rather than a synthesis of other materials.

Having said that, I'd also advise you to be careful with your tone, especially when criticising other editors because YOU have posted a broken link. I can't speak for DougWeller but I am very familiar with continuitas's work, and a shoddier, more unsubstantiated collection of pseudo-science would be difficult to find. Like I said, keep what you write to citation of published material by the recognised scholars within that group, or it will be cut.

Boynamedsue (talk) 12:01, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

7 of 9: Kortlandt's paper directly contradicts Alinei's theory. He specifically argues for IE absorption and replacement of paleolithic populations. It has no place in this article, unless it is to contradict PCT.

Boynamedsue (talk) 12:05, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Johanna Nichols etc.
Seems to pretty much contradict all of her results in Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time etc.; should be discussed... AnonMoos (talk) 04:15, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

Nothing on this page has any merit. It is essentially about a website, continuas.org. We have merely been forced to keep the article around because Alinei has academic credentials. If it wasn't for the continuas.org website, the entire thing would just be merged into Alinei's biography article. But Alinei or no Alinei, or website or no website, this thing cannot and should not be taken seriously as a hypothesis in historical linguistics. It's just an example of how anything that can conceivably be suggested is going to be suggested in the "publish or perish" rat race. --dab (𒁳) 08:51, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Ambiguous wording
"Renzi (1997) sharply criticized Alinei's book, refuting in particular the claim of the presence of Latin and of its different territorial forms in Italy in the 2nd millennium BC. " "Refute" gets used to mean both "disprove" and "dispute". Which is meant here? It makes quite a difference to the meaning of the sentance. Wardog (talk) 17:06, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

what is meant here is that this is a WP:FRINGE topic which should not even get a Wikipedia article, as indicated by the giant warning templates at the top of the page. The case has basically been closed for more than a year. The page just exists because there were some very enthusiastic editors with very limited understanding of (or interest in) Wikipedia project guidelines. The upshot is that there is no right way to phrase things, as the mistake lies in even trying to come up with an "encyclopedic" phrasing. If we say "this is crap", it will be spot on, but unencyclopedic in tone. If we put it any other way, it may sound more encyclopedic, but we are being euphemistic about it. It's really much like the Out of India theory, which has zero value as well, but which has at least some amount of notability as a red herring thrown around in Indian politics by hardcore nationalists. This European version does not even enjoy such notability, mostly because the ultra right wing nationalists in Europe aren't really into pseudoarchaeological crackpottery that much. --dab (𒁳) 15:03, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

17 feb 2013  It's not even a theory. It stands in defiance of historical linguistics. It's a joke. There's a lot of difference of opinion within history, archeology, etc., but this ain't part of that. This is beyond wishful thinking. Why is this in here? Is there at least a stronger warning banner that can be put at the top, and preferably plastered right across the middle, then put at the bottom also? I shudder to think of the ignorance that the dozen people per year who read this might contract and spread if they think it's a legitimate wikipedia article about an acceptable theory. This "theory" is not even an acceptable theory. How about this: "If PCT is true, then all of historical linguistics is wrong.  It's either this ignored theory, or all the rest of Historical Linguistics." Porkupine73 (talk) 05:04, 18 February 2013 (UTC) Kevin W.


 * The PCT is just the logical consequence of the pervasive fallacy in and outside academia of treating genes, pots and languages and their relationships as largely congruent or even perfectly matching each other. Since genes and archaeological data in Europe display continuity and no sharp breaks, basically, from the Palaeolithic up to now, obviously no migrations and language shifts have ever occurred anywhere: the French have always been there in France, the English always been there in England, etc., spoken modern French, English, etc., even if ancient and medieval records seem to indicate something different. Never let the facts get in the way of a good "theory" (read: speculation).
 * The truth is, of course, that the archaeological and genetic continuity is highly misleading. Renfrew still doesn't get this, thus paving the way for notions such as Alinei's. Funny enough whenever people inspired by this mindset such as Bob Quinn accuse the establishment of racist and nationalist motivations. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 11:37, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

The genetic and archaeological record can very well be put to use in dating linguistic change. All that is needed is some basic common sense. The fallacy is to expect a sharp break, and to collapse into a volley of eccentric theories once no such break is found. The reality is that slight admixture is sufficient for language change, and such admixture is perfectly visible in the record if one is willing to look. In the historical period, Roman Gaul, one language was replaced by another (Gaulish with Vulgar Latin) without the shadow of any doubt. If no sharp break is visible for that, there is no reason whatsoever to expect any sharp break anywhere else, or to adduce the lack thereof as evidence for such nonsensical radical theories.

I agree this theory is pure undadulterated rot, and yet I would keep the article, based on WP:POKEMON, yet I would insist that it should make absolutely clear that it is without merit. We have an article on the Elders of Zion (and so on), so there is no reason to get rid of this one. --dab (𒁳) 12:44, 10 August 2013 (UTC)


 * This part especially is pure comedy gold:
 * Scandinavia was colonized by Germanic groups "only" after deglaciation, and was better able to preserve its original character in isolation. Germany, in contrast, suffered fragmentation as a result of the Neolithic appearance of the Linear Pottery culture, and developed a wealth of dialects.
 * Not only does it seem to imply that Proto-Norse (a language attested in the 1st millennium AD, even relatively amply) dates to the Mesolithic (approx. 10,000 BC), it also essentially dates Old High German (which did not display "a wealth of dialects" yet, but only very limited diversity), or at least its immediate predecessor (prior to the Second Sound Shift, which was the first major change that created diversity within Continental West Germanic), attested in a few runic inscriptions, to 5500 BC. So the Second Sound Shift happened in the 6th millennium BC. (When did the Anglo-Saxons and Old English arise and migrate to Britain in this scenario?) This trend of contradicting even known (or at least generally accepted) facts is telling.
 * Given that the quoted passage implies that the PCT considers even Early Germanic to be millennia older than generally accepted, the claim that PCT assumes "[t]he rate of change accelerated when (Neolithic) social stratification and colonial wars began" does not appear to be generally true, as the period from the 6th millennium BC on, in which the differentiation of West Germanic supposedly happened, is well after the onset of these developments.
 * In light of this, I have to wonder if the PCT supporters are saying that pre-Classical (Archaic/Old) Latin dates to the Mesolithic too, even though it is an attested language. (If the Second Sound Shift dates to the 6th millennium BC, Classical Latin should already have been present at the time, and Christianity too, presumably.) I begin to suspect that they are critical of the conventional datings (one word: creationism) and really believe that some vaguely defined (at best) sort of "Pre-French" was already spoken in ancient Gaul, and that Classical Latin is simply a somehow retained (or reconstructed after the fact) archaic register from the Neolithic that was never actually spoken in antiquity as a first language. I conclude: PCT is pseudoscience (if barely even that, it seems more like a goofy parody/spoof of attitudes that are unfortunately common and even promoted, paradoxically, to somehow "balance" or "counteract" privilege, by the PC establishment when it comes to indigenous ethnic minorities, about whose past is much less known, partly even in Europe as with the Celtic Atlantic Bronze Age nonsense, and thus very much relevant) of the most ridiculous (worthy of the Flat Earth Society) and dangerous (radical nationalists everywhere rejoice) sort. Anglo-Saxon cavemen indeed. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 13:21, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

4 assumptions, article bias
From the article: "The framework of PCT is laid out by Alinei in four main assumptions: 1. Continuity is the basic pattern of European prehistory and the basic working hypothesis on the origins of IE languages. 2. Stability and antiquity are general features of languages. 3. The lexicon of natural languages, due to its antiquity, may be "periodized" along the entire course of human evolution. 4. Archaeological frontiers coincide with linguistic frontiers."

I was just browsing through, and when I read the 4 main/basic assumptions, I couldn't help but wonder on what bases those assumptions were made. Do archaeological frontiers really coincide with....anything? Why may the lexicon of "natural" languages (what are those? what's an unnatural language? esperanto?) be periodized along human evolution? I highly doubt there's any evidence for such periodization (how much biological evolution has science actually witnessed compared to linguistic evolution?), but since I didn't read the reference, I shouldn't say too much.

On my way down to add this comment, I noticed another section questioning the bias of this article. I think I'd probably agree with that commenter if I had the time to read more, but I'm going to continue browsing. Thanks for reading. 99.162.156.99 (talk) 06:57, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

My personal favourite is "stability and antiquity are general features of languages", which can only be true if we add the caveat "except in those places where we have any kind of historical record", there are towns in Iraq that have changed languages at least 7 times (4 separate language families) in recorded history! Anyway "not a forum" etc... I'll shut up.

Boynamedsue (talk) 01:48, 6 March 2011 (UTC)


 * An excellent historically attested European example would be Hungarian, a non-IE language imposed by a small non-native elite on a local population whose genetics are indistibguishable from that of their IE speaking neighbours.1812ahill (talk) 13:42, 15 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Natural language means not like Esperanto, COBOL, Fortran, etc. Zyxwv99 (talk) 18:24, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

I read these comments and had to pitch in my two cents: yes, the theory, as I've read it here just now, seems to make wide, broad, bold statements. But, to say that languages are stable is, depending on the timeframe, a given: a language must be understood and learned and taught by more than one generation (maybe three at once in a family/social group) in order to be an advantage as regards survival, and so it must remain stable enough to be consistently understood. whether this changes often in the big picture depends on how much one wants to zoom out their scope and definition of a segment of human experience. also, archaeological frontiers, as I have interpreted the phrase, coincide with technological and geographical movements/developments in human progress, which would only be logical (new things/experiences/understandings of the world, not to mention interactions with other human cultures, would of course lead to a change in a language. physical developments on hominids would obviously lead them to the ability/be instigated by the success of an ability for language i.e. larger brains, more expressive faces/bodies, more manipulatable mouths/tongues/vocal chords, etc.) thoughts? I must admit, I've only read the article, not any of the things it references, so I am just an ignorant guy musing online. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Stoneturningape (talk • contribs) 09:30, 6 September 2013 (UTC)


 * The problem, as pointed out above, is that the PCT flies in the face of all historical experience. Yes, a degree of stability is of course present, but some languages (such as contemporary Danish) change appreciably even from one generation to the next (not as much as to become unintelligible, of course, but still notably). It beggars belief to assume stability as required by the PCT, stability over many millennia. Everything we know about ancient Eurasia and North Africa 2000 years ago tells us that the languages spoken there and their regional distribution have changed strongly, even radically, since then, everywhere, and there is no reason to assume things were that much different, and languages so much more stable structurally and geographically, millennia earlier. See Neolithic Europe and the referenced essay by Don Ringe in which he explains the Uniformitarian Principle as applied to language. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 15:50, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Ragdeenorc is a sockpuppet
See Sockpuppet investigations/Tirgil34. Dougweller (talk) 14:29, 17 July 2014 (UTC)


 * We are all shocked and astounded by this news. Paul B (talk) 16:43, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * -see:Drama Queen-. What is that supposed to mean Dougweller? that investigation has nothing to do with this artcile, why do you mentioned in here? what is your purpose?Yagmurlukorfez (talk) 02:22, 18 July 2014 (UTC)


 * For the relevance see the section above. And why are you responding to this? Do you perhaps have some conection to Ragdeenorc? Paul B (talk) 09:38, 18 July 2014 (UTC)


 * It's extremely relevant and sock puppet editing is not allowed and such edits should be reverted - and were reverted according to policy. Please don't restore it again. Dougweller (talk) 10:03, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
 * This is simply trying to driving out another editor. We must be talking about on addition, not an editor. If his addition is problematic, then we must first discuss it and after that remove it. This is not the "policy" cruft. You just fitting reason.Yagmurlukorfez (talk) 10:53, 18 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Which editor is being driven out? And policy is policy. We don't have to discuss first and then remove it, we can remove on site. With 352 edits I hardly think you can try to tell Paul or myself about what is policy. You also need to read WP:AGF. Dougweller (talk) 12:28, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes sir! who am I right? you and "Paul" are ruler of these lands and I'am just a god damn peasant! I'am wasting my time with you. Yes good faith, you right.Yagmurlukorfez (talk) 12:36, 18 July 2014 (UTC)