Language change to IA

Tue Jan 5 15:29:10 UTC 1999

Read the following on the process of language change to IE.
Written by an Archaeologist. Is the process same when
Sanskrit entered India from the West and spread?
Any References? Many thanks.

Regards,
N. Ganesan

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 Antiquity, Sept 1995 v69 n264 p554(12)
 Horse, wagon & chariot: Indo-European
 languages and archaeology. David W. Anthony.

  The dynamics of Indo-European expansion

  The expansion of the Indo-European languages must have
  involved many episodes of language shift over a long
  period of time. There is no single explanation for
  these many episodes; they occurred in different
  places, at different times, for many different
  reasons. Even the initial expansion seems to have been
  facilitated by different processes to the east and to
  the west of the PIE core area.

  Language shift has been modelled by archaeologists in
  two ways: demographic expansion and elite dominance.
  In the first, a group with a more intensive economy
  and a denser population replaces or absorbs a group
  with a less intensive economy, and language shift
  occurs as an epiphenomenon of a wave-like demographic
  expansion (Renfrew 1994; Bellwood 1989). In the
  second, a powerful elite imposes its language on a
  client or subject population. While both processes can
  be important, language shift is more complex than
  these models imply. Language shift can be understood
  best as a social strategy through which individuals
  and groups compete for positions of prestige, power,
  and domestic security (Anthony in press). What is
  important, then, is not just dominance, but vertical
  social mobility and a linkage between language and
  access to positions of prestige and power (Mallory 1992).
  The expansion of the Indo-European languages eastward
  into the steppes was linked to innovations in
  transport. The resultant development of deep-steppe
  pastoralism combined with river-valley agriculture
  made it possible for a substantial population
  predictably and productively to exploit the grasslands
  that occupy the center of the Eurasian landmass. The
  conquest of the grasslands permanently changed the
  dynamics of historical development across the Eurasian
  continent by establishing a bridge, however tenuous,
  between the previously isolated societies of China,
  Iran, the Near East and Europe. In a sense, the
  eastward expansion of the pastoral-agricultural
  economy might be analogous to the 'demographic wave'
  that Renfrew and others have applied to the
  Indo-European expansion in Europe. However, the
  cultural-archaeological context shows that the steppes
  were already populated; the process by which this
  resident population became IE-speakers was cultural,
  not just demographic.

  A relatively small immigrant elite population can
  encourage widespread language shift among numerically
  dominant indigenes in a non-state or pre-state context
  if the elite employs a specific combination of
  encouragements and punishments. Ethnohistorical cases
  in Africa (Kopytoff 1987; Atkinson 1989) and the
  Philippines (Bentley 1981) demonstrate that small
  elite groups have successfully imposed their languages
  in non-state situations where they:

  * imported a powerful and attractive new religion or
  ideology (as the Sintashta-Petrovka culture seems to
  have done);

  * controlled sufficient wealth to offer gifts and
  loans on a lavish scale (documented in the
  metallurgical wealth of Sintashta-Petrovka);

  * controlled sufficient military muscle to punish
  those who resisted (chariotry might have increased the
  power of the Sintashta-Petrovka people);

  * occupied strategic positions on critical trade
  routes (Sintashta controls access to the Orenburg
  gateway between Europe and the steppes);

  * and actively pursued marriages and alliances with
  the more powerful members of indigenous groups,
  offering them enhanced prestige and vertical social
  mobility in the new order.

  Simply defeating and dominating the indigenes is
  insufficient, as the Norman conquest of England and
  the Celtic conquest of Galatia demonstrate. Language
  shift occurs when it confers strategic advantages on
  those who learn the new language. An elite must be not
  just dominant, but open to assimilation and alliance,
  and its language must be a key to integration within
  an attractive socio-political system, as it was for
  the Roman state at one end of the political spectrum
  and for Baluchi nomads (Barth 1981) at the other.
  The diffusion of the IE languages eastward into the
  steppes should be understood as a social process, not
  as an epiphenomenon of a demographic shift. The
  diffusion westward into Europe was fundamentally
  different in ecological, cultural and economic terms.
  It also probably began much earlier. Intrusive kurgan
  cemeteries in the lower Danube valley (Panaiotov 1989)
  and eastern Hungary (Ecsedy 1979; Sherratt 1983)
  probably testify to a sustained Yamna incursion at
  about 2900-2700 BC (Anthony 1990). Yet the small-group
  social dynamics responsible for language shift might
  have been very similar in Europe and the steppes. In a
  European context in which wagons and animal traction
  were becoming increasingly important in the domestic
  economy (Bogucki 1993), the pastorally-oriented
  societies of the western steppes might have been seen
  not as culturally backward 'Huns', but rather as
  enviably rich and worthy of emulation. Wheeled
  vehicles may have significantly altered the
  organization of agricultural labour in eastern Europe,
  since one person with a wagon and oxen could transport
  crops from field to farm that would earlier have
  required the co-operative labour of a group (Bankoff &
  Greenfield 1984: 17; Bogucki 1993). Wagons made
  systematic manuring possible, opening areas with less
  productive soils to agricultural exploitation. Wagons
  required draft oxen, enhancing the overall importance
  of cattle-raising, while horseback riding made cattle
  stealing easier, encouraging inter-community raiding
  and warfare. Wagons may have encouraged the evolution
  of increasingly dispersed and individualizing social
  communities (as automobiles have done in this
  century). Shifts in values may have been encouraged by
  changes in eastern European community organization and
  economy that were themselves caused partially by the
  adoption of wheeled vehicles and horseback riding. All
  of these changes might have set the stage for the
  adoption of new languages just at the time that the
  Yamna incursion into the grassy plains of the lower
  Danube valley and eastern Hungary began.

  At the root of both expansions lie the speakers of
  PIE, whose kinship systems, religious concepts, and
  social organization can be understood through their
  own reconstructed vocabulary - an unprecedented
  opportunity for anthropological archaeologists, if we
  can agree on how it should be exploited.
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