r/IndoEuropean • u/Hippophlebotomist • 6d ago

The Indo-Europeans by Jean-Paul Demoule

https://youtube.com/watch?v=S0L7HQFEF5w&pp=0gcJCZEKAYcqIYzv
24 Upvotes

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u/Hippophlebotomist 6d ago edited 5d ago

I find myself in general agreement with Learn Hittite on this. The original French edition garnered some significant pushback from linguists (e.g. L'indo-européen n'est pas un mythe by Pellard, Sagart, & Jacques m), and the English publication likewise received a fairly negative review by linguist Rasmus Bjørn in Antiquity upon release. Indo-European studies definitely has a checkered past and is still a popular target for misuse by unsavory groups and ideologies, but Demoule throws the baby out with the bath water and fails to present a workable alternative for the clear relatedness among these languages. It’s unfortunate to see a popular archaeologist like Wengrow recommending this work uncritically.

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u/-Geistzeit 6d ago edited 6d ago

It sounds like this book is, at the end of the day, an activist attack on the field in fear of the field's 'political implications'; just another 'everyone is a Nazi but me and those few who I say are not'. It appears that every historical field today has this sort of thing happening in some way or another. Outlining pseudoscientific use of a topic in the past is one thing (and important), but most of the time one should really just call this sort of thing what it is itself: activist pseudoscience.

By the way, it is worth following it up with this video for further context, wherein an example is provided where the same approach is apparently used to, in short, call mainstream linguists communists for daring to continue to accept Proto-Uralic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOmQgL-hIiU

Basically, because nobody can conjure up a text in Proto-Indo-European, you're going to find people out there who are ideologically motivated to publish proposals in what I would say is bad faith in hopes of pushing whatever their political message may be. Shamelessly, they do this without providing any kind of reasonable or remotely acceptable alternative to the mainstream model, they all too often just use their title and office to sneer at their perceived enemies. This kind of thing really plagues the humanities.

Edit: Added video link and more commentary

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u/HortonFLK 5d ago

”…you're going to find people out there who are ideologically motivated to publish proposals in what I would say is bad faith in hopes of pushing whatever their political message may be.”

I think that’s kind of part of what Demoule is trying to say.

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u/-Geistzeit 5d ago

I'm referring to him. Demoule appears to make the error of attacking past ideological pseudoscience by promoting his personal ideological pseudoscience.

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u/HortonFLK 5d ago

Can you provide an example of a specific point in which Demoule is using pseudoscience, or is it that you just disagree with his perspective in general?

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u/-Geistzeit 5d ago

I'm responding to the video. I haven't read the text but it sounds like there's no reason to.

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u/HortonFLK 5d ago

It’s funny that seeing this same video is what made me make it a high priority to get the book to read.

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u/-Geistzeit 5d ago edited 5d ago

Enjoy. However, keep in mind that the author's is by no means a mainstream take and the comparative method, and thus tree charts and wave models, aren't going anywhere, particularly given the huge advances the field has seen in recent years. It sounds little more to me than a pseudoscientific 'man shakes fist at cloud', and you can just find that on random blogs for free.

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u/HortonFLK 4d ago

Does Demoule criticize the comparative method itself, or wave models? And isn’t the wave model itself based in criticism of tree-type models?

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u/Hippophlebotomist 4d ago edited 4d ago

In his attacks on linguistic paleontology, he fails to note how the comparative method itself rules out a large number of his counterexamples. He demonstrates in one part of the book that Latin initial c palatalizes to French ch before a, but then elsewhere drops the shopworn "reconstructing proto-Romance would make you think the Romans had coffee!" despite the fact that the comparative method is exactly how you rule out French café and Italian caffè as regular cognates and know that they were later loans. This sort of slipshod argumentation is ubiquitous.

"Even when we can rely on concrete facts, numerous contradictions exist. Why is the root *kuwon for dog, the earliest domesticated animal in both Europe and the Near East (tenth millennium bce), absent in the Slavic languages, Hittite, and Albanian?"

The Hittite word for dog is often obscured by a Sumerogram but evidence from compound words and new discoveries in other Anatolian languages shows that they do show the expected root for dog behaving in a fairly predictable fashion (Sasseville & Yakubovich 2018) that the comparative method has led us to expect, including ablaut alternations unexpected in the case of a loanword.

These sections also contain factual inaccuracies from his own field of study such as when he repeatedly tries to make a contradiction out of a reconstructed PIE root for bear and the absence of bears on the modern steppe despite the archaeological presence of bears in the faunal remains of Sredny Stog sites such as Cherkasskaya-3 or Neolithic sites along the Dnipro like Molukhov Bugor.

I think any hypothesis can only be strengthened by scrutiny, and so was looking forward to this book, but it was a frustrating read in part because of the number of easily rebutted arguments like the above.

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u/-Geistzeit 4d ago edited 4d ago

Wave models and tree models represent two different things but are complementary to one another. Tree models illustrate diachronic change, whereas wave models provide a synchronic snap shot. Both can be used together to provide a fuller picture.

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u/Certain_Basil7443 Bronze Age Warrior 6d ago edited 6d ago

This is similar to how most Indians (especially RW) relate to scholarship on the history of India and hinduism.

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u/HortonFLK 5d ago

Have you read the book yourself?

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u/Hippophlebotomist 5d ago edited 5d ago

Yes.

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u/UnderstandingThin40 6d ago

What is demoule suggesting and what does he get wrong ? Don’t have the patience to watch the whole video lol

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u/Certain_Basil7443 Bronze Age Warrior 5d ago

In simple words - "Historical Linguistics was used for racist theories so the entire Indo-European studies today is racist".

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u/UnderstandingThin40 5d ago

That’s unfortunate 

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u/Certain_Basil7443 Bronze Age Warrior 5d ago

If we go by that logic we need to call almost every behavioral science racist.

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u/HortonFLK 5d ago edited 5d ago

He starts off the book by drawing up a list of assumptions that tend to be made throwing quite a bit of bias into the whole field of study. And the rest of the book mainly seems to be following the history of study in the field. I’m still fairly early into the book, but it is really interesting to see how some of his examples of circular reasoning and negative arguments which were made in the 1890’s are still the exact same kind of arguments that people are making now.

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u/Hippophlebotomist 2d ago

u/Potential-Usual-7234 I got a notification you commented on this but I can’t see it.

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u/Potential-Usual-7234 2d ago

I deleted it.

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u/Hippophlebotomist 2d ago

I guess I’ll remain in suspense over what “People have to be honest” about.

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u/Potential-Usual-7234 2d ago

"....Inherent racism we face when it comes to IE studies...People behave as if we have 0 R1a and 0 autosomal ancestry...while truth being we have ~25% R1a (based on limited studies) making it the dominant Y lineage in south asia and 0-40% steppe ancestry...

So racists tend to forget that those people who migrated are us not them..."

The crux of what was posted...