PIE - Mirage of structure - 3

Worth a look, this from Andrew Garrett: "Convergence in the formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology", in Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, ed. by Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2006), pp. 139-151

 The technicalities all go soaring way over my head.   We have Mycenaean Greek, in the Linear B texts, from around 1400 BC, and then that culture collapses around 1200 BC and the next Greek works come from around 800 BC.  To quote James Clackson,  (Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction, 2007):

"Garrett draws up a set of features which could be assumed for Proto-Greek on the basis of the later Greek works....for Greek, there is the advantage that the features assumed for Proto-Greek can actually be compared with a language of the second millenium BC, Mycenaean Greek.  We know that Mycenaean cannot be equated with Proto-Greek, since it has undergone some changes shared only with some later Greek dialects, and so it must be later.   Yet all of the distinct morphological features and many of the distinct phonological features, which are assumed to be distinctive for Proto-Greek can be shown not to have take place at the time of Mycenaean.  Wherever later Greek dialects have made innovations in morphology from PIE, Mycenaean Greek appears not to have participated in that innovation.  In other words, the distinctive aspects of the later Greek dialects (which they all share) arose across a number of varieties which already were distinguished one from another.  It is not possible, using the shared morphological innovation criterion, to construct a unified invariant entity such as "Proto-Greek" which is distinguishable from PIE......if we had more evidence for other IE languages other than Anatolian contemporary with Mycenaean, we might not be able to separate out what was 'Greek' about Mycenaean from its neighbours.   The Greek sub-group was only truly formed in the period after the Mycenaean when convergence between the different dialects of Greek took place, in part related to social changes coupled with a strong sense of Greek ethnic identity."

To quote Garrett:

In 
sum, 
especially 
if
 we 
allow 
that
 at
 least 
a
 few
 post‐Proto‐Greek 
changes 
must 
already 
have 
affected
 Mycenaean
 before
 its
 attestation
 (it 
is 
after
 all 
a 
Greek
 dialect),
 detailed
 analysis
 reduces
 the
 dossier
 of
 demonstrable
 and
 uniquely 
Proto‐Greek 
innovations 
in
 phonology 
and
 inflectional
 morphology
 to
 nearly
 zero.
  Proto‐Greek 
retained
 the
 basic 
NIE
 noun
 system, 
verb
 system, 
segment 
inventory, 
syllable
 structure, 
and
 arguably
 phonological 
word
 structure.
 In 
all
 these
 areas
 of 
linguistic
 structure, 
Greek
 was
 not
 yet
 Greek 
early
 in
 the 
second
 millennium.
 But
 if
 so, 
it
 hardly
 makes
 sense
 to
 reconstruct 
Proto-Greek
 as 
such:
 a
 coherent
 IE
 dialect,
 spoken
 by 
some 
IE
 speech
 community, 
ancestral
 to 
all
 the 
later
 Greek 
dialects.  
It 
is 
just
 as 
likely 
that
 Greek
was 
formed
 by
 the
 coalescence of
 dialects 
that
 originally 
formed 
part
 of
 a
 continuum
 with
 other
 NIE
 dialects,
including 
some
 that
 went
 on
to
 participate
 in
 the 
formation
 of 
other 
IE
 branches.


.......

If 
this 
framework 
is 
appropriate
 for 
IE
 branches
 generally,
 we
 cannot
 regard
 IE
 ‘subgroups’
 as
 sub‐groups
 in 
a 
classical 
sense.
 Rather,
 the 
loss 
or 
‘pruning’
 of
 intermediate
 dialects,
 together
 with
 convergence
 in
 situ 
among 
the 
dialects 
that
 were 
to 
become
 Greek,
 Italic,
 Celtic,
 and
 so
 on,
 have
 in
 tandem
 created
 the
 appearance
 of
 a
 tree
 with
 discrete
 branches.
 But
 the
 true
 historical
 filiation
 of
 the
 IE
 family
 is
 unknown,
 and 
it
 may 
be 
unknowable.

We cannot check whether Garrett is right about IE branches in general, because in Greek we have the unique situation of having sufficient texts from two eras.  That is why "it may be unknowable".

This idea that the language around 2000 BC around Greece was indistinguishable from PIE suggests a late date for PIE and weighs against the Paleolithic Continuity Theory. (Garrett's argument with respect to Renfrew's PIE-spread-with-agriculture theory is: "the model requires the unscientific assumption that linguistic change in the period for which we have no direct evidence was radically different from change we can study directly".)   On the other hand, don't forget Clackson's own metaphor, that conveys the idea that the PIE includes in itself reconstructions that belong to very different time periods, so what does it mean to be "indistinguishable from PIE"?

One more interesting thing is that Alinei has, to my reading, a very similar idea of how languages arose.
Mario Alinei, The Problem of Dating in Linguistic, "Quaderni di semantica" 25, 2004, pp. 211-232.

As I have already pointed out, written languages imply, by the very fact that they are expressions of dominant groups, the existence of dialects of subordinate groups, which, though not attested, are nevertheless as real as the invisible face of the moon. Precisely because a written norm represents one of the geovariants or sociovariants promoted to the dominant norm, it reveals, ex silentio, other norms, which remain necessarily excluded from written evidence, with the possible exception of some traces surviving in the chosen koiné (common language).

From the structural point of view, then, the appearance of a written language is also direct testimony of the emergence into 'history' of the elite group which has seized power, and indirect testimony of the loss of power by other groups, in regard to whom the new 'literates' assert themselves as the owners of the surplus product, as ideological leaders and as rulers. Each written language represents, accordingly, a cluster of dialects, still without voice, but in fact rightly present within the framework of the new social relations consecrated by the written language.

We must, therefore, bear in mind that these dialects do exist, although we do not see them, and we must take them into account in our theoretical interpretation. Since, for example, some IE languages appear in the Mediterranean basin in their written form in the 2nd millennium, two conclusions can be inferred from that fact alone:

(a) in the areas where there is definite evidence of written languages we may be sure that the sociolinguistic stratification already reached Gordon Childe's 'urban' level;

(b) in other areas, where the Metal ages cultures appear, we may assume that social stratification was already at a considerably advanced stage.

There is, besides, another factor which should be taken into account. As I have already noted, written norm is usually not equivalent to a 'pure' geovariant, but it is a koiné, implying an admixture of elements from other geovariants (borrowings, morphological variants, and the like).

Mycenean Greek, for example, is regarded, as we have already seen, as a koiné. Even in the modern world we can notice this intermingling in the process of the formation of a new written language - in the case of Basque and Catalan, for example.

The formation of a written koiné implies, in short, three different innovative aspects:

(1) a koiné, precisely because it is a mixture of one dialect with elements of other dialects, represents a novum which did not exist previously; in other words, a written norm, being a 'mixture', is as a rule more recent and less genuine than the norms of the subordinated groups which have remained completely or partly in the dark;

(2) the elements of other dialects accepted by the koiné become levelled with the dominant system and lose some of their traits;

(3) other geovariants do not cease to exist at the moment a koiné is established, but they become, or revert to, 'dialects', with the only difference that from that time on they undergo the levelling influence of the new dominant language.

In the light of these considerations, the earliest written attestations of European languages, either classical or mediaeval, cannot not seen as monolithic expressions of undifferentiated ethnic groups, from which all that comes 'after' must be mechanically derived. Inverting the traditional hierarchy, the first written norms must now be seen as the most fortunate representatives of a dialectal continuum which despite the successive levelling has survived to the present day, and which is the only source of our knowledge of the hidden face of the moon.

Just as in the Middle Ages the earliest attestations of the dialects destined to become national norms are combined with attestations of numerous other dialects, which prove that the modern dialectal continuum actually existed already at that time, and probably also in the preceding centuries (for which geolinguistic evidence is much scarcer), so Scandinavian runes, Irish oghams, Gothic, Norren, old Slavic, and so on, must be interpreted as the mixed and most fortunate geovariants of a dialectal continuum equally rich and articulated as the modern one. They must not be seen as its matrices, nor, obviously, as unique offshoots of reconstructed proto-Germanic, proto-Celtic and proto-Slavic.

In fact, whatever appears after the emergence of the written language did not come after, but was pre-existent to the written language. According to this new view, the current dialects are not derivatives of the ancient written languages, as traditionally thought, but developments, in the course of subsequent millennia, of those earlier geovariants which were parallel with and pre-existent to the written languages. And the new dialectology, according to this view, becomes an integrating part of the renewed historical linguistics, as the study, as it were, of the hidden face of the moon, that is of the speeches of those social groups which became subordinated to the new elites in the Metal ages, but which were obviously pre-existent to the Metal age itself.

In the case of a written language there is, then, only one birth to register in addition to the birth of the written language as such, and that is the birth of the dominant group. The ethnic group, or its part subjugated by the dominant elite, is millennia older than these events. 

Clackson's constellations, Alinei's hidden face of the moon - I love these metaphors, and the way they illuminate the meaning of the PIE reconstruction. 

PS: There is a simple answer to Garrett's argument : "the model requires the unscientific assumption that linguistic change in the period for which we have no direct evidence was radically different from change we can study directly".  Namely, linguistic change before writing follows different rules from linguistic changes after writing.