Re: Existence of PIE

On 2008-01-27 11:14, tgpedersen wrote:

> One could imagine a hypothetical situation, of course, where Tok
> poisin was abundantly, and English and German scantily represented in
> the sources, and with no older stages preserved, in which case Tok
> Pisin would become the main source for material, based on similarity
> in material to the documented material from the 'true' descendants.

True.

> Which reminds me: Are the Germanic languages apart from High German
> and Icelandic not IE then, with their obviously non-IE case systems
> (one/zero cases in the extreme case of spoken Dutch), verb inflections
> (no inflection for person or number in the extreme case of Continental
> Scandinavian) and gender systems (none in the extreme case of English
> and Vestjysk)?

They remain IE, because their continuous development from PGmc. is
demonstrable, and IE is not a typological grouping. Then, they all have
preserved things a true contact language is likely to lose (e.g. a
simple preterite with fancy features like vowel alternations for many
common verbs); their derivational morphology is still complex; there are
no signs of a radical simplification of their phonology (another
hallmark of pidginisation). But for various disambiguation tactics,
scores of English minimal pairs would have fallen together.

Compare Tok Pisin:

sip 'ship'
sipsip 'sheep'

pulap 'full'
pulim 'pull'

Piotr