Chronology, lexical change, and the dynamics of language dispersal in Indo-European

Monday, 28 February 2011, Colloquium

Andrew Garrett, University of California, Berkeley.

Abstract

Over the last decade, computational work by Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson (Gray and Atkinson 2003, Atkinson et al. 2005, Atkinson and Gray 2006) has revived from a new perspective Colin Renfrew’s (1987, 2001) claim that Proto-Indo-European was spoken c. 7,000 BCE and that Indo-European languages spread across Europe with the dispersal of agriculture. Most Indo-Europeanists assume a far later chronology, but the actual arguments made by Gray and Atkinson are not so readily dismissed. In this talk, I explore the linguistic consequences of taking their findings seriously without abandoning the later chronology supported by so much research over the past century.