Re: Existence of PIE

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>
>
> > > However, are there not some genuinely doubtful members of the
> > > family? (You may fairly regard this as nit-picking.) Are Tok
> > > Pisin and Sranan Germanic languages?

> > > I presume Afrikaans is a pukka Germanic language.

> What do you mean by that?

I mean that there are no objections to counting Afrikaans as a
Germanic language.

> 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)?

FWIW they satisfy Trubetskoy's six criteria.

Richard.