How old is English?

Spread of agriculture

The advent of agriculture ( 7000-5000 BC) changed little in the relations between people. Agriculture came as a new technology from the East, probably the Middle East and spread slowly over Europe from east to west.

PIE = proto-Indo-European language. This is the supposed ancestor of all European languages, except Basque, Hungarian and Finnish. Other PIE languages are Pharsi (Iran), Pashtun (Afghanistan / Pakistan), Hindi and more, 75 in total. Many etymologists are trying to reconstruct this language, in the supposition that all Indo-European languages evolved directly from this single language. I estimate however that the time span, some 9000 years, is way too short to adhere to this theory. Modern Greek is traceable to ancient Greek, a distance in time of some 3600 years. Coptic (original Egyptian language) was spoken in Egypt between at least 3200 BC (earliest hieroglyphs) and 1800 AD, or some 5000 years. Of course, both languages evolved over time, and considerably, but they didn't change into language so different as Latin and Russian. Their core remained. Champollion was able to decipher hieroglyphs because he had a Coptic-Latin dictionary. How then can one explain that 75 languages evolved and diversified within a few thousand years more? Languages which are as different as Spanish, Danish or Hindi are supposed to diversify between 7000 BC and 2000 BC. More likely is that the PIE language steam rolled over pre-PIE and non-PIE languages and gave birth to the various known languages such as German, English, Italian, etc. In other words : the Indo-European languages are so diverse because their substrate languages, not only in words, but also in sounds, were very different before. PIE sprayed a new transparent layer upon old pictures, giving them all a similar colour. Under this layer we find variations of the ancestor of PIE, probably mixed with non-PIE influences.

Here is the hypothesis:

PIE was initially spoken on the shores of the Black Sea and expanded later over the grey zone on the map.
Essential is to understand the living conditions of these first PIE people.
They were marshland people with an advanced technology. Thanks to the fact that they had boats they were fishermen and so colonized the shores of the Black Sea, which at the time was still a lake, not connected to the Mediterranean Sea. The Black Sea was very much their Mare Nostrum, 'our sea'. Their situation was to a certain extend comparable with the Greeks in the Aegean Sea. The fact that they used 'their sea' as a mean of transport means that their language not only spread on all the shores, but also prevented a too great diversification of it. All Greeks claimed that they could understand each other and portrayed all non-Greek speakers as barbarians, meaning 'brabrabra'-people, whose language no Greek could understand.

The reason of success for populations is not their technology. The main reason is their level of internal organisation and the capacity to impose this organsisation upon other people. The Romans were masters in doing this. The reason why the Europeans colonists in America could so easily overcome the native populations was their capacity to organise themselves. The minutemen are a fine example of that.

Living on the rich shores of a great lake with its numerous large estuaries (such as the Danube delta) meant that the PIE-people could find sufficient food. The Ice Age caused ice-cold winters but they had the luxury to prepare these winters during the mild summers. This allowed the development of an advanced technology in order too sail safely over the lake and to protect them from the cold and hardships of the winter. As they were in constant contact with each other, a strong tribal feeling developed. All that made them more developed than the surrounding hunters-gatherers. So, they slowly expanded their territory, mainly to the mild west and south.
This expansion happened slowly during the Ice Age, but accelerated dramatically at the beginning of the Holocene (end of the Ice Age). The PIE-people took over their neighbours. Around 7000 BC, 1000 years after the warming up, they had colonized most of the Balkan region and northern Greece.
They also penetrated deep into Anatolia (modern Turkey), where they imported a language later known as Hittite. It is there that the PIE-people would take over the agricultural technology and incorporate it into their language.

After this initial expansion, the PIE language zone was no longer uniform. The PIE clans had left the shores of the Black Sea and as the distance grew, communication with their home land became more difficult. Strong variants of PIE developed locally before the advent of agriculture. In the Balkan valleys PIE had become mixed with the remnants of local non-PIE languages. These variations would later give birth to the PIE sub-language groups as we know today, such as German, Occitan, Greek, etc. Each sub-language group would later be influenced for a second time, when farming and language moved into Germany, France, Italy, etc.

8000-7000 BC : the farmers came to Greece and spread over the Greek east coast (in blue on the map). These Greeks already spoke proto-PIE, as did most people in this east European region. Language was not imported from Syria or south Turkey (one of the regions where agriculture was invented) as it already was similar.

7000-5800 BC : spread to the north; most of the Balkan, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia (probably all proto-PIE speakers) have accepted agriculture. The farmers follow the Danube to the west. They bring a proto-German language.

5800-4800 BC : using the Danube/Rhine axis the farmers arrive at the shores of the North Sea. Germany precedes France in adopting agriculture by 1000 years. The east coast of Italy, Spain and the southeast of France discover agriculture at that time. This spread happened probably by boat. Boat-farmers came from the east Adriatic coast where a sort of proto-Albanian was spoken (in orange on the map). Mixed with other languages, this gave birth to the Occitan-Romance languages in the west Mediterranean region.

4800-3800 BC : France, Britain, Spain, Scandinavia eventually follow. In eastern Europe, the Slavonic language starts to spread to the south and to the east. The Germanic-like language in the Balkan disappears. Only proto-Albanian managed to survive. The pre-Bryttonic speakers adopted agriculture from the south of France. They build their own variant of PIE which would become Bryttonic or 'Celtic'.

The spread is surprisingly slow. Archaeologists found foragers who lived in the immediate vicinity of farmers and who resisted farming for some 300 years! A comparative bones study of that period and region revealed that the foragers were in a better condition than the farmers. Apparently, agriculture was not always a gift. The spread itself was due to the practiced method: overcropping. The slash-and–burn method meant that the farmers required constantly new and fresh land. The indigenous population of hunters-gatherers had plenty of time to merge with the new farmers. Local foragers took over the technology and renewed their ancestral pre-PIE language, but many original,local words subsisted in the new language as substrate-words. Typical are words for trees such as oak, birch, etc. This original language was in fact part of the precursor of the PIE languages (pre-PIE), say the older version which was imported much earlier during the Younger Dryas, but mixed with some words of unknown (Basque? Etruscan?) origin. Etymologists estimate that up to a third of all German words are pre-PIE in origin (substrate words).

Even primitive farming can feed at least ten times more people than hunting and gathering. The local hunter-gatherers who had become farmers rapidly overwhelmed in numbers the remaining hunter-gatherers. One can call this a snowball effect. When agriculture reached Middle-Europe, the eastern ‘bloodline’ almost completely disappeared and replaced by the local one. As farmers they moved westwards, steadily absorbing and incorporating the local populations. The original language spoken in ‘Germany’ became gradually Indo-European, with ‘German’ consonants. The same happened in the south and southwest of proto-Gaul. The spreading of farming technology happened along the age-old tribal relationships. The population in the west of Britain adopted the proto-Gaul Indo-European language variant, as they learned how to farm from their relatives in proto-Gaul (most probably : Brittany or Armorica). The population in the east of Britain learned the proto-German Indo-European language variant in a similar way from their proto-German relatives in proto-Belgium.

Some populations on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea had learned how to practice agriculture earlier from farmers who had chosen to emigrate from their homeland by boat. Because these local people were a bit more advanced and their teachers were few, they only took over the technology of farming, not the language. They kept their original non-PIE language. We know of two such languages: Basque and Etruscan (Tuscany, Italy), but the existence in the past of more non-PIE languages is very probable..

The theory that agriculture hardly displaced humans explains why, for instance, there is a proven genetic difference between Englishmen and Welshmen and why Welsh genetic characteristics resembles those of southwest France and northern-Spain. During and after the introduction of agriculture language borders moved, absorbing some remaining minor non-PIE languages. The genetic difference could be an indication that the language difference in Europe (proto-Gauls / proto-Germans) has a very long history.

Europe around 1000 BC. The extent of Occitan is unsure. The Slavonic language expanded in all directions until the early Middle Ages.

Germanic languages would later expand to the east (east-Germany) and to the west (west-Britain). Brythonic would disappear in most of Gaul and be replaced by an northern Occitan-Romance dialect(French).

As I wrote before: forget the idea that the Romans spread their language. At best they made the Occitan language group a bit more uniform. It is hard to tell where Occitan came from and how it spread. The most likely place is the southeast of France (the Rhone valley), from where it expanded east (Italy), west (Aquitaine) and south (east coast of Spain).

Aboriginal populations around the Mediterranean Sea spoke initially a patchwork of PIE-Languages (like Greek) and non-PIE languages like Etruscan, Ligurian, Basque and other extinct and unknown languages. They were the first to come in contact with the earliest agricultural methods because the technology could rapidly be spread by boat.

In northwest Europe, languages had been formed by the previous habit of seasonal migrations which unified the local languages.

Later waves of more advanced Mediterranean 'boat-farmers' searched for suitable 'leftover' land and were forced to look a bit more inland. That is how they stumbled upon the south of France: they sailed north on the Rhone river and colonized its banks. As their methods were more advanced, they were soon able to produce more food and their population grew. Subsequently they overwhelmed their neighbours, like Aquitaine, the Italian Po-valley and the Catalan valley (east Spain with its modern capital: Barcelona) where they chased off the local and retarded Basque speaking farmers upstream along the Rioja river to their modern location.

In (modern) France, agriculture came along the coasts from the southwest and from the east (southern Germany) on. The center of France was probably colonized some time later.

Britain and Ireland were colonized from the west coasts inwards by farmers coming (mainly) from Bretagne (Brittany, Armorica), while at the same time on the southeast coast (Kent) agriculture was introduced by farmers coming from (Flemish) Belgium. Once established in Britain, both farming populations grew towards each other and met somewhere in the middle of the British mainland. Each migrating farming population brought its language and absorbed some local substrate words.

All this is of course a hypothesis. Many questions remain.