علم الآثار واللغة – لغز الأصول الهندية الأوروبية / ARCHAEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE – The Puzzle Of Indo-European Origins

ARCHAEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE – The Puzzle Of Indo-European Origins:

Language is the most remarkable characteristic of all human creations.

It may be that our species did not become fully human until the abilities of reasoning, as well as speaking, which accompany the use of language fully developed.

Certainly, there are many archaeologists today who would argue that this moment must have been associated with the emergence of fully – modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens.

Yet it is notable that archaeologists of late have, in general, had very little to say about the origins of the languages which are used in the world today, or of the others, now extinct, of which we have written records.

During the early days of archaeology, this was a major topic of interest, and there were many who endeavored to trace the origins of the Celts, the Greeks, or some of the tribes of North America, by examining the archaeological record for indications of their supposed migrations.

Often their conclusions took a very simplistic form, with a particular kind of pottery, or perhaps a specific form of burial, regarded as the clear indicator of a recognizable early tribe whose members were hailed as the original speakers of this or that language.

The prehistoric map of the area in question was soon filled with bold arrows marking the supposed paths of these peoples, often identified there only by the name of the language in question, so that to the casual eye it looked as if the languages themselves had paraded from place to place across the map.

Now it must be admitted – and this is an inescapable limitation of the present book just as much as it is of those whom it seeks to criticize – that we can, by definition, never speak with certainty about a ‘prehistoric’ language.

We have direct experience of living languages, and of those earlier ones which were either set down in writing by their speakers or recorded in some written form by others who came in touch with them. For prehistoric languages, the evidence is generally very much less direct.

But this does not mean that we have absolutely no way of approaching such matters.