From: ehlsmith
Message: 22902
Date: 2003-06-09
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Gerry" <waluk@...> wrote:
....
> About
> Basque, how can a language that is supposedly isolated have so many
> new speakers?
Gerry-
Language isolate does not mean that the speakers of the language are
necessarily physically isolated from speakers of other languages. For
example, at one time most linguists considered Japanese a language
isolate, even though there are over 100 million speakers of the
language, freely participating in the world economy with speakers of
many other languages. Japanese was being influenced by many of those,
and in turn influencing them (think sushi, tsumami, kamikaze, etc.)
Although perhaps not quite as many linguists now consider Japanese an
isolate, it has nothing to do with any of this mixing. It is merely
that further research has lead some to believe they can detect
ancient connections between Japanese and other language groups.
Regarding your earlier comments about language isolates: being a
language isolate does not mean that a language is ultimately
unrelated to any other, it merely means that scholars to not have
enough evidence to show how it is related, and to which particular
languages it is most closely related. Nothing about the existence of
language isolates implies a contradiction of the monogenesis of
language.
As an analogy, consider an orphan, said to have no relatives in this
world. When people say that they don't literally mean he is
completely unrelated to the rest of humanity; if you could go back
through the preceding generationns with perfect genealogical
knowledge, eventually you would find some distant cousins. So, when
they say that the orphan is without relatives, they really mean that
he is without relatives close enough to be known. Similarly, when
they say a language is an isolate, they only mean there is not enough
evidence to say how it relates to other languages, not that it is
ultimately unrelated.
Ned Smith