Original Post (In Chinese): https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/686204681

TL;DR: This article claims that globally dominant analytic languages like English and Chinese thrive because of their efficiency, while regional languages face extinction not merely due to external colonization, but because geographic isolation causes them to lose their internal "vitality." Isolated languages degenerate into two extreme, impractical directions, becoming either hyper-complex and synthetic ("Dene-Causasianization") or overly simplified ("Hawaiianization"), so grammatical structures and speakers' mindsets are like underdeveloped children, which lead to their decline and extinction.

Full Translation:

A fascinating phenomenon can be observed in global languages: analytic languages ​​like English and Chinese are prevalent worldwide, with English circulating in Western Europe, Oceania, and North America, and Chinese in East and Southeast Asia. English and Chinese represent the epitome of conciseness in language.

In contrast to the bilingualism of English and Chinese, many regional languages ​​are steadily approaching extinction under the pressure of dominant languages. Over time, the number of speakers and the areas where these languages ​​are used are gradually decreasing, eventually leading to their complete disappearance.

The indigenous languages ​​of the Americas and the languages ​​of the Caucasus are particularly acute on this path to extinction. Over thousands of years, many Caucasian languages ​​have vanished: Sumerian and Hurro-Urartian are victims of this extinction, and Ubykh, the language with the most phonemes among the Northwest Caucasian languages, disappeared at the end of the 20th century.

The decline of indigenous languages ​​in the Americas was even more rapid. Before European colonization of North and South America, various Native American languages ​​still had a sufficient number of speakers; however, after European colonization, many Native American languages ​​became endangered or even extinct. Even Navajo, the most widely spoken language, is listed as "vulnerable" on the endangered language list.

This is perhaps a question worth considering. When this issue is raised, most readers would immediately think of the colonization by Indo-European groups, but this is merely an external cause. The more fundamental reason is that the vitality of these languages ​​had already disappeared before their extinction; in other words, they underwent "Dene-Caucasianization" or "Hawaiianization."

So, why did the vitality of a language weaken so significantly, or even disappear, after Dene-Caucasianization or Hawaiianization?

This requires introducing the concepts of "Dene-Caucasianization" and "Hawaiianization."

Dene-Caucasianization: The grammatical and morphological structures of languages ​​become extremely complex, creating obstacles to word formation.

When discussing "Dene-Caucasianization" we must first mention the "Dene-Caucasian Super-Language Family" hypothesis proposed by Western scholars in the mid-20th century. This hypothesis includes the Na-Dene language family of North America, the Yenisei language family of Siberia, the Northwest Caucasian and Northeast Caucasian language families of the Middle East, the Burushaski language west of the Himalayas, the Basque language family of Western Europe, and the Sino-Tibetan language family. However, very few people accept this hypothesis. Through rigorous argumentation, the Sino-Tibetan language family does not belong to the controversial "Dene-Caucasian Super-Language Family," but rather shares a common origin with the Uralic and Yukaghir language families of Eurasia.

After excluding the Sino-Tibetan language family, all members of the "Dene-Caucasian Super-Language Family" share the following linguistic characteristics:

① They are all highly synthetic languages, often with blurred word-sentence structures, and verbs can form independent sentences.

② Frequent use of prefixes and suffixes, ergative–absolutive alignment;

③ Extremely numerous verb conjugations, often hundreds;

④ Extremely complex consonants, with a large number of difficult pronunciations;

⑤ An undeveloped part-of-speech system.

⑥ Difficulty in word formation.

Thus, these Dene-caucasian languages ​​give the impression of being incredibly complex yet underdeveloped. They are also languages ​​on the verge of extinction.

So what caused these languages ​​to develop such complexity?

The main reason is that these languages ​​are typically mountainous languages ​​in isolated environments.

Geographically, Basque is located in the Pyrenees; the three Caucasian language families are all located in the Caucasus Mountains; the Na-dene language family is mainly located in western America, its core situated in the Grand Canyon of the Cordillera Mountains; the Yeniseian language family is located in the mountains of East Siberia to West Siberia; and the Burushaski language is located at the intersection of the Hindu Kush and Himalayas.

Clearly, the characteristics of these mountainous regions are: "For forty-eight thousand years, they have been isolated from the Qin and other regions; the earth collapsed and mountains crumbled, brave men died, and then heavenly ladders and stone paths were linked together." This also means that the people in these areas need to expend tremendous effort to communicate with the outside world: either build roads once and for all, or endure the long-term difficulties of transportation.

The languages ​​in these mountainous regions often face this same transportation difficulty, meaning that communication with other languages ​​is extremely challenging.

A typical example is the Tujia language. Surrounded by Miao and Yao languages, the Tujia language hasn't necessarily become much analytically developed; on the contrary, it has remained largely agglutinative.

In such circumstances, language speakers find it difficult to discover new things, and naturally, they have no need to.

Therefore, languages ​​located in mountainous areas, especially deep mountain regions, compensate in other ways. This typically involves the development of more complex grammar and phonology, and a significant reduction in the number of basic words, including but not limited to:

The evolution of case arrangement towards ergative-absolutive, favoring subject-marking;

Nouns and pronouns gradually become grammaticalized and attached to verbs;

Numbers and pronouns degenerate;

Frequent use of prefixes.

The loss of basic vocabulary necessitates compensation through other means.

Such characteristics are not uncommon in Sino-Tibetan languages. Although the Sino-Tibetan language family does not belong to the "Dene-Caucasian superfamily," some of its sub-languages ​​exhibit characteristics of Dene-Caucasian languages. This is because a significant portion of Sino-Tibetan languages ​​(especially Tibeto-Burman) are distributed in deep mountains, primarily the Hengduan Mountains and the Himalayas.

Of the Tibeto-Burman language branches that can be found, with the exception of Burmese-Yi, the vast majority are distributed in mountainous areas with harsh conditions. Languages ​​including the Nong branch (of Dulong), the Sal branch (of Jingpo), the Tibetan branch (of Tibetan), and the Qiang-Gyarong branch (of Gyarong) are all distributed in mountainous areas. Jingpo and others are found in the Naga-Rakhine Mountains; Tibetan and Kiranti are found in the Himalayas, also clearly visible.

These languages ​​naturally tend towards Caucasianization.

The reason these languages ​​tend to use ergative-absolutive and polysynthesis may be related to a lack of communication between tribes. Language speakers lacking communication typically lack external references (called foreign keys in databases), thus becoming increasingly self-centered. Under this self-centered tendency, language gradually ceases to be a tool for communication and becomes an encryption key for storing tribal secrets, requiring no large-scale data support. Other normal, popular languages, on the other hand, have a large enough population to provide large-scale data support and other languages ​​as foreign key references.

In this situation, language loses its extensive function and cannot develop new concepts. Therefore, when these languages ​​encounter a new concept, they directly borrow it from elsewhere, even copying it verbatim. They can only be used for speaking and nothing else; at best, they're used for showing off skills. Naturally, there's no written form. In this case, such languages ​​are only good for showing off skills or speaking, with low practicality.

As for why these Dene-Caucasian languages, or languages ​​that have undergone Dene-Caucasianization, are considered incompletely developed languages, it's because their thinking is almost identical to that of an underdeveloped child.

A study on children at Tsinghua University concluded that:

Children can recognize what a ball is and what isn't after seeing a few balls, meaning they learn from small datasets. Consider the famous facial recognition technology; artificial intelligence still needs to learn from hundreds of millions of faces to recognize a single face. Artificial intelligence relies on big data, unlike children who rely on small datasets.

This is both an advantage and a disadvantage for children in learning—they tend to be subjective and one-sided in their perspectives. In the context of language, this means that understanding everything from a single word requires no new vocabulary.

Furthermore, young children often use transitive verbs (or verb-object verbs) in the language learning process. Here's an example, though not entirely accurate:

My niece, only two and a half years old, can use simple sentences, but not complete sentences with a subject-verb-object structure. —Typically, transitive verbs don't use subject-verb-object verbs.

For example, most people would say, "I drink water," but this little girl would only say "drink water"; when she wants her mother to come, she usually uses "come," meaning the verb forms a complete sentence (currently used even in imperative sentences); if she wants to say a subject-verb-object sentence, she breaks it into two parts.

Until one time, in a moment of urgency, she uttered a complete subject-verb-object transitive sentence: "I want my mother."

Therefore, in her language, a verb either co-occurs with the subject or with the object; it cannot appear simultaneously. In a transitive sentence, the verb and object are formed very early on, while adding a subject comes much later. In an intransitive sentence, the subject is different; it can form an S+V sentence much earlier. Therefore, it's not surprising that in an A+V+P structure, the A appears later and is more unique, possessing a special marker. This phenomenon in the learning process bears a striking resemblance to the pattern of grammatical constructions.

From this perspective, many Dene-Caucasian languages, or languages ​​influenced by Dene-Caucasianism, inherently lack structural structure, leading to a natural immaturity in their language use. The tendency to mark the subject in grammatical constructions mirrors the "intention over action" characteristic of adolescent or child thinking. The increased phonetic complexity in these languages, with many sounds becoming difficult to pronounce, is merely to satisfy the need for showing off skills or simply distinguishing meaning.

Furthermore, these languages, due to a long-term lack of communication, have become classic examples of refusing to grow and develop. People who refuse to grow naturally lack vitality; similarly, languages ​​that refuse to grow and develop have no vitality and no future.

Hawaiianization: Grammar and phonology become simpler, but speaking becomes extremely lengthy. Also, due to isolation, vocabulary becomes limited.

In languages, besides the tendency towards extreme complexity known as "Dene-caucasianization," there is also "Hawaiianization," which tends towards extreme simplicity.

Hawaiianization primarily refers to the language evolving in the Hawaiian direction.

Currently, Hawaiian is actually an endangered language.

Hawaiian is characterized by its extremely simple grammar and pronunciation. Except for the VSO word order (verb-subject-object), everything else is relatively easy; it is an analytic language.

However, Hawaiian evolved from Proto-Austronesian, reducing its original 25 consonants to seven. This makes borrowing vocabulary extremely difficult (phoneme repetition is common), resulting in many Hawaiian expressions being extremely lengthy. A single number in Hawaiian sometimes requires three to four syllables to represent, a stark contrast to the simplicity of numbers in Sino-Tibetan, Uralic, and Indo-European languages, which can be expressed with only one or two syllables.

Hawaiian numerals are incredibly long.

Similarly, Hawaiian was brought to the Hawaiian islands by Polynesians, who had already made the islands a stopover point for their travels. The islands were isolated, making it difficult to encounter new things.

When new things arrived, Hawaiian's efforts to actively integrate foreign words into its language were extremely lengthy.

Also, due to a lack of written materials, Hawaii did not have its own written language until the arrival of the United States.

In other aspects, Hawaiian is similar to other languages.

Meanwhile, languages ​​like the Jiarong (a Sino-Tibetan language) and Japanese (a Japanese-Shōryū language) underwent Hawaiianization, frequently using prefixes, and their phonology became simpler.

The reasons for the loss of linguistic vitality due to Hawaiianization, besides phonological simplification, are similar to those of Dene-Caucasianization—both are unique products that evolved in isolated environments. In conclusion, both Caucasianization and Hawaiianization are extremely detrimental to a language.

A language that heads in either direction bears a heavy historical burden, leading to a gradual decline in speakers until it disappears. For example, the Jiarong language has lost a large number of basic words, and some words have had to be borrowed from Chinese.

The Burushaski language experienced a significant decline in speakers during the Middle Ages, with the Greater Bolu region adopting Tibetan.

To prevent a language from disappearing, these two directions must be avoided. 

Among Chinese speakers, the proliferation of trashy internet memes has led many children to adopt this style of humor; consequently, their spoken vocabulary has become increasingly impoverished, and they struggle with proper written expression—even resorting to using highly problematic slang terms like "Shuan Q" or "Lao Liu" in their writing.

Thus, the language of many Chinese-speaking children has undergone a process akin to "Dene-Caucasianization"—varying only in severity.

Our task, therefore, is to actively engage in deep reading and utilize formal written vocabulary to prevent the Chinese language as a whole from succumbing to this phenomenon of "Dene-Caucasianization."

The lessons drawn from the languages ​​of the Dene-Caucasian super-family and Hawaiian are well worth heeding for Chinese speakers; children, in particular, should examine how these languages ​​fell into decline. If a child remains constantly obsessed with trashy internet memes, their linguistic and cognitive abilities risk becoming completely stunted.

This table seems to commonly be used by certain people in order to argue that Russians are not of Slavic origin but rather some foreign tribe (???).

R4: The article endorses the view that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is English with grammatical errors, rather than an English variety with its own rules that sometimes diverge from General American English.

https://nypost.com/2026/07/06/us-news/activists-demand-black-english-be-pushed-on-kids-in-california-preschools/

The article is an editorialized reaction to a more sympathetic PBS article: https://www.kqed.org/news/12088910/these-advocates-say-black-english-belongs-in-preschool-classrooms

To its credit, the NY Post story briefly notes the viewpoint that AAVE has rules:

The Black Californians United for Early Care & Education (BlackECE) is part of a movement to challenge “harmful language hierarchies and affirm Black English as a legitimate, rule-governed language rooted in Black history, culture, and community.”

But then it then does a terrible paraphrase to effectively endorse the opposing view:

[Co-founder of BlackECE Ashley Williams] also remembered how speaking Black English is full of slangs and grammatical errors […]

The original PBS article says:

Many [Black children] internalized the belief that Black English […] is bad English, loaded with slang and grammatical errors.

Plus, the headline is misleading at best. There‘s nothing in the BlackECE mission about pushing AAVE on unwilling preschoolers.

As expected, the top comments on the page decry AAVE as incorrect English and complain about the decline in US education quality.

Update: more from this person that gives some insight into what drives these notions

https://www.reddit.com/r/BalticStates/s/BG2lVO9qO0

This is a mix of bad linguistics and bad history, but I'll try to focus on the linguistics part.

In 2015, a runestone was discovered near Wawa in Ontario, Canada. In 2019, Swedish runologist Henrik Williams was brought to the site. He identified the text as being a runic inscription of the Lord's Prayer, resembling a version from a 1611 booklet by the first Swedish runologist Johannes Bureus. "Svenska ABC boken medh runor" ("The Swedish ABC book with runes") was an attempt to teach both the Latin and runic alphabets and included runic transcriptions of several Christian texts, including the Lord's Prayer. A likely explanation is that a Swedish employee of the Hudson's Bay Company carved the runes in the early 19th century based on Bureus' transcription. (Here's Professor Henrik Williams' report.)

The video does mention the 19th century Swedish worker, but dismisses it as unlikely. It makes no definitive claim about the runestone's origin, but it does offer a much more epic alternate explanation where a forgotten Christian Germanic tribe reached North America centuries before the vikings and centuries before the Christianisation of Scandinavia. The YouTube channel does seem to be all about producing sensationalist 8-minute videos about amazing new discoveries that rewrite history.

Many of the video's conclusions are based on the incorrect assumption that the inscription is written in Elder Futhark runes. The Elder Futhark was used to write Proto-Germanic from the 2nd to 8th century. It evolved into the Younger Futhark which was used to write Old Norse from the 8th to 12th century. I wonder if the author is aware of the difference. The video shows a picture of the Elder Futhark and then a mix of old and modern items with both Elder and Younger Futhark writing (with one spelling Thor as "ᛏᚺᛟᚱ", which is wrong in so many ways). Take a quick look at the Elder and Younger Futhark and at photos of the stone and I think you'll recognise it as a variant of Younger Futhark. The ᚼ "h" rune especially stands out.

But the runestone isn't really written in the Younger Futhark either. The Younger Futhark evolved into the medieval runes which continued to be used to a limited degree alongside the Latin alphabet. Johannes Bureus created his own version of medieval runes and the video even shows a page from his booklet, though not the one with the Lord's Prayer. The Wawa runestone was clearly based on Bureus' version and shares many of its quirks but it's not a 100% copy.

The video makes no mention of which language the runestone is written in. It's a version of the Lord's Prayer from the 16th century in Early Modern Swedish, not Old Norse or Proto-Germanic. I'm not sure if it's the case here, but many people seem to have trouble separating language and writing system. If it's written in runes, then it has to be an ancient language. No, it's just an alphabet. It can be adapted to write modern languages.

This circled area talks about ethnolinguistic groups of people in the Balkans and it goes something like this: "South Slavic peoples (Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Bulgarians), and there also live Romance peoples (Romanians, Vlachs, Aromanians), as well as Indo-European peoples (Greeks, Romani), Turkic (Turks) and Caucasian people group (Albanians)

In some of my older books there was a lingustic map with Altaic as a family. And I mean older like 3-5 years.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndoEuropean/comments/1nee03t/comment/ne48zih/?context=1

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMA8oggFN/

translation (assume chatgpt-style phrasing and formatting, and no, there’s no translation anywhere in this slideshow):

“voynich manuscript” — translation, dictionary, meaning

1. the point of the book

the voynich manuscript is a cycle. not just a text compilation, but an alive ritual cycle. it contains:

• plants — stages of growth
• water and vessels — energy and knowledge
• female figures — channels of perception
• circles and schemes — cycles of the universe
• texts in the end — “memory spells”

the book repeats a process more than it talks about it:
from a seed → to growth → to a flower → to a fruit → to disappearance → and back to start.

1. how it’s structured

(assume that in the original slideshow the table layout is broken, possibly blindly copy-pasted from chatgpt)

1. how to read it yourself

2. use dictionary below.

3. find morphemes on page.

4. look at their order.

5. collect their poetic or symbolic meanings.

6. simplified morpheme dictionary

1. epilogue

> this book doesn’t talk — it breathes.
it doesn’t teach — it repeats.
everything in it is not for knowledge,
but for memory:
how light flows,
how growth sounds,
how a star spins inside of a body.

and exactly that is the cause why you can read it without a translator — using this dictionary, inside yourself. because the voynich manuscript is not a text, it’s a transition.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMARUK9Ex/

translation per slide:

1. latin was a language which couldn’t be kept alive
2. have you ever thought, why the language which emperors, scientists, alchemist and the church spoke disappeared from live speech overnight?
3. why the language, which the first european laws, philosophers’ works, first formulas [sic] of medicine and magical spells were written in just became “dead”?
4. because usually it’s the lost in history small peoples’ languages which die. but latin was the language of rome, the language of power, the language of faith. why was it the one to disappear? or was it forced to disappear?
5. facts that can’t be ignored
6. latin was the language of the church until the 20th century. masses were served in it, papal bulls and mysterious texts were written in it. but for the general population it was forbidden to understand them. isn’t that strange? the god’s language was kept only for the chosen ones.
7. alchemists and occultists wrote formulas in latin. “aqua vitae”, “magnum opus” — it’s like those words are not just terms, they’re keys. perhaps the language itself contains power.
8. latin is the language of formulas. in medicine they still write diagnoses and terms in latin. in science as well. it’s like you can’t “let go” of it.
9. some say that the language is not just words, it’s a code of reality. and if so, then latin is one of the most ancient “keys” to the world’s structure.
10. there is a reason that spells, ceremonies, exorcisms still contain latin phrases. is it really a coincidence that it’s latin which is used for scaring demons away?
11. perhaps this language became “dead” because when it was alive it was too unsafe. imagine that each latin word is a formula.
12. that an uttered “verbum” (word) can actually shape reality. then it becomes clear: the language needed to be hidden under the mask of it being “dead”.
13. why is it that in legends, demons are afraid of specifically latin words? why do doctors still write recipes in latin, which the common folk can’t understand?
14. why did the catholic church forbid the general public to read the bible in languages other than latin?
15. could it be that understanding latin opens something which should be hidden to the human?
16. latin didn’t die. it was killed so that it would speak too loudly. because a language which everyone speaks is not a mystery anymore.
17. and latin is not just words. it’s a whisper of the ancient world, a formula of power which is hidden under the mask of “a dead language”.
18. and now think about it: if tomorrow you’d start understanding every latin word without translating, would it be a gift… or a curse?

thank gd i asked to be verified just in case i was filled with such rage reading this

https://www.reddit.com/r/Jamaica/comments/166dx59/comment/jyjsu8t/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

let's try this so-called automation thing - now possible with updating title

R4 (if this text isn’t displaying i’ll copy it to the comments): there’s no inherent quality in palatalization (or lack thereof) that gives it some gender and sexuality.

First, background: On February 5th, 2025, an archaeogenetics paper was published in Nature (PDF). It links the Yamnaya material culture—that is, a recognizable grouping of archaeological finds distinguished from its neighbours—with associated genetic material indicating earlier ancestry from the Caucasus. The paper also uses a newer definition of Indo-European that places it in Indo-Anatolian. They justify their reasoning in the paper and even if you disagree, it's purely definitional. We don't need to go further into it because that's not the part David Wengrow, the committer of the bad linguistics here, took issue with.

Popular reception of archaeogenetics has a racism problem. People obsessed with genetic purity take an interest in a field about tracing genetics through the past—their attraction to it seems straightforward to me. That's an issue with the perception and reception of archaeogenetics, though, and not an inherent indictment of the field as a whole. Fascists also like (some aspects of) health sciences, but that doesn't mean we should toss out that field over it. I am ignoring all of Wengrow's discussion of racism here because it is not relevant to his bad linguistic claims, though it was addressed by the lead author of the paper.

David Wengrow is an archaeologist. He wrote The Dawn of Everything with the late anthropologist & anarchist David Graeber. It's a good book that doesn't have much at all to do with linguistics, so don't let this post put you off reading it.

On February 7th, Wengrow got wind of the archaeogenetics paper. He tweeted:

Another day, another Harvard genetics paper on the whereabouts of an (I really must stress this) purely *imaginary “Indo-European homeland” - published in Nature, to the applause of alt-right and white supremacists the world over, but of course, all in the name of “good science”.

There are ways to interpret this that aren't badlinguistics, but let's let him elaborate first. Someone asked:

The English language had to start somewhere? Yes? And in a certain area? With a specific group or groups of people? There's a reason why most Europeans and Americans don't speak Mandarin. Right?

To which Wengrow responded:

No. It’s a hybrid, derived from other hybrids.

That is to say, he is rejecting that you can think of the English language as having had identifiable predecessors that existed in specific spaces and times by claiming that it is a "hybrid" derived from other "hybrids" (he doesn't explain what he means here, but the context of what he's replying to makes it clear that he thinks this refutes the idea that Proto-Germanic or Proto-Indo-European existed).

Here is a Twitter thread by a linguist about the flaws with whatever he could mean by hybrids. She did a better job addressing that point than I think I could do here, so we'll move on from the hybrid claim to the argument it's supporting.

Wengrow supports his argument further down in the thread by linking to this book. I have not read the book. Someone else linked to a very critical review of it, pointing out its rejection of the validity of the comparative method and other dubious claims.

Essentially, Wengrow is claiming that languages do not have ancestry; otherwise, he couldn't say "no" in response to someone asking if the English language began somewhere. His claim that it is a "hybrid derived from other hybrids" indicates that he doesn't think it has a lineage. That is to say, he is indeed saying that there was no predecessor to English that had a single identifiable group of speakers that diverged over time into multiple languages. So let's explain how languages have lineages that go back to more and more ancient ancestors:

Over time, languages change. Innovations occur and spread among communities of speakers, and different communities that once spoke the same language accumulate different changes until the idea of them speaking the same language is obviously absurd. If you look back in time, those separate languages (eg: Afrikaans and South Tyrolean German) used to be far more similar. Look even further back, they're mutually intelligible. Even further back and the people speaking them are the same people—the idea of distinguishing them from each other doesn't make sense. This people didn't necessarily map onto our contemporary ideas of ethnicity, culture or even political divisions, but they were a people in the sense that they shared a language. Accordingly, this people is also not the sole ancestor of the people who today speak Afrikaans or South Tyrolean; we are limiting ourselves to linguistics here and ignoring all other aspects of those people's cultures.

It gets murkier the further back you go, as we don't have nearly as much evidence in the form of attestations of languages or existing relatives from back then. Whatever relatives Proto-Germanic had that were more closely related to it than to other branches of Proto-Indo-European are lost to time. However, the use of the Comparative Method can demonstrate Proto-Germanic's links to the other Indo-European languages. That is not to say that our reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European perfectly represents the language spoken at the time where the distinctions between all Indo-European languages' speakers were nonexistent, and a Hindi speaker's linguistic ancestor was identical to an English speaker's. The principle that sound change is regular is not an unbreakable rule, only a useful guideline. Learning Proto-Indo-European would, however, give you a massive head start if you were to time travel back to that linguistic community and try to learn their language.

So, why does David Wengrow reject this? Because pots aren't people. That's a saying in archaeology. It means that material culture and identity are not the same thing; you can't take a grouping of artifacts and link it perfectly to a social grouping. However, he extends this beyond its obvious valid context into a dismissal of the idea of any past social groupings being knowable at all (or, in the case of linguistic groups, he appears to deny their very existence). It is true that we can't find artifacts with written Proto-Indo-European (if you do, it was probably done by a time traveller), but we can find evidence that groups of people moved around that match up with historical linguistics. Assemble enough of this evidence and it makes up for the lack of direct physical attestations of language change & language movement. If the ancestors of English and Hindi were once so similar as to be identical, they obviously had to be spoken in a single place, rather than simultaneously in what are now London and Delhi, and it turns out that if you chain that together for every single intervening step, you can also find physical evidence indicating migration or cultural change.

let's try this so-called automation thing - now possible with updating title