Roslyn M. Frank 1.0. Introduction In the first chapter of this ... - Dialnet

100 Roslyn M. Frank
Neolithic as in Renfrew’s narrative, but rather to the Mesolithic, while the PC
approach alleges that some linguistic features could date back to the Upper
Paleolithic (Alinei 2004b; Costa 2001). In short, the PC narrative argues for
an essentially in situ development of IE and for linguistic continuity between
these earlier stages and later ones.
By setting up an in situ evolution for IE languages, a curious thing happens
with respect to Western Europe: the Basque language can no longer be
classed as «pre-Indo-European», but rather must be seen as evolving alongside
IE languages. Naturally, it is not possible to date the Basque language
itself. Nonetheless, most geneticists would argue that there is every reason to
assume that there has been genetic continuity within the Pyrenean-Cantabrian
zone, and therefore, that, as Gamble et al. (2005) have proposed, at this juncture
it might be appropriate to put forward the following hypothesis: that the
language(s) spoken in this zone in prehistory might well have been those that
are ancestral to modern Basque.
In Table 1 we can see how the time-scales of the traditional IE narrative and
that of Renfrew relate to Alinei’s model of development, specifically as it applies
to Italy and more indirectly to the development of the Romance languages.
At the same time, this model makes no mention of the possible linguistic influence
of languages spoken in the Pyrenean-Cantabrian refugium zone on the
development of Proto-IE or the Romance languages.
Table 1. Three theories concerning the development of Proto-Indo-European (Alinei 2001: 16).
Although proponents of PC often make reference to the expression
«palaeolithic continuity» in their investigations, their research is far from homogeneous
in terms of the time depth assigned to Indo-European languages,
that is, there are significant variations in the way that the origins of this language