Re: [tied] Re: On Non-Linguistic IE Languages

--- Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

> I said it and I said it deliberately in order to
> emphasise the technical
> difference between a really extinct linguistic
> lineage (like, say, Sumerian
> or Etruscan) and one that has produced extant
> descendants (like Latin or
> PIE). There is an unbroken line of descent leading
> from PIE to Ukrainian,
> Pashto or Norwegian. As Steve has pointed out it is
> precisely the fact that
> PIE "lives on" in the daughter languages that allows
> us to reconstruct
> (fragments of) its structure as it existed several
> thousand years ago. Every
> language family has its unique ancestral language:
> that's where all the
> histories of its individual languages intersect. If
> you ask a biologist,
> there is a perfectly valid technical sense in which
> birds (or, to be more
> precise, all members of the taxon he calls Aves)
> _are_ dinosaurs (by virtue
> of belonging to a larger taxon called Dinosauria,
> derived from a unique
> comon ancestor).
>
> Piotr

*****GK: I'm sorry Piotr. But you're just compounding
and recompounding the disingeniousness of the
argumentation. I think you know perfectly well what
I'm talking about and so I'm at a loss to explain your
attitude. Let's use your own words. "Daddy" died a
long time ago, and the fact that "Daddy" lives on in
descendants does not mean that Daddy is not extinct.
He is. And if you'll check the interplay with Steve
you'll find that he claims "never to have said"
something pretty close to what you said about the
continuance of PIE. BTW isn't PIE supposed to be
"proto" or "pre"? Of course I am speaking as one of
the (all right slightly better educated but
nevertheless still} hoi polloi. Intelligibility means
a lot to me.*****

>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "george knysh" <gknysh@...>
> To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2002 1:13 PM
> Subject: Re: [tied] Re: On Non-Linguistic IE
> Languages
>
>
> To say that it
> > > evolved and is still around today is shall we
> term
> > > it "somewhat
> > > disingenuous"?>>
> > >
> > > (Steve)Oh come on. I never said it did. But,
> hey,
> > when
> > > they promoted Jurassic Park,
> > > they said that the dinosaur lives on in birds.
> So
> > > who complained? What's
> > > the point, anyway?
> >
> > *****GK: "Interpretatio benignior" Steve... I
> didn't
> > say you did. Someone else did, and you should know
> who
> > if you read cybalist posts as carefully as you
> > should.******
>
>
>

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