Re[2]: [tied] Re: beyond langauges

At 4:51:58 PM on Tuesday, April 29, 2008, Patrick Ryan wrote:

> From: "Rick McCallister" <gabaroo6958@...>

>> --- Patrick Ryan <proto-language@...> wrote:

>>> From: "Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@...>

>>>> Those who lump together Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda
>>>> languages under the label "Indic languages" are usually
>>>> Hindu nationalists and/or crackpot scholars who aim at
>>>> disintegrating the recognized language families of
>>>> South Asia in the name of a misunderstood "Linguistic
>>>> Area" concept -- see Shubash Kak at

>>>> http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/indic.pdf :

>>>> "We argue that based on genetic classification, both
>>>> the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages have had common
>>>> parents and these languages share many typological
>>>> categories."

>>>> (Kalyanaraman also adds Munda languages to the mix.)

>>> I fail to see anything objectionable in Kak's assertion.

>>> Bomhard has convincingly demonstrated that, if Dravidian
>>> is not necessarily Nostratic, it certainly can be
>>> related to Nostratic.

No one has yet *convincingly* demonstrated the existence of
a well-defined Nostratic family.

>>> Munda is a different matter, of course.

>> Either he's trying to dismiss IE by innuendo and replace
>> it with Prakrit (IE + Dravidian + Munda) or he's
>> completely lost. His rambling is incoherent. Sure,
>> Nostratic posits a very distant relationship between IE
>> and Dravidian c. 15,000 years ago but Kak-adoodle is off
>> his chain.

> Strange. I though he was saying just what he wrote:
> "Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages have had common
> parents".

Which they clearly did not, since the parent of IA is PIE,
which is not the parent of the Dravidian languages. A more
distant common ancestor is of course conceivable, but then
the proper statement is that the IE and Dravidian languages
share a common ancestor.

But in fact one has only to read the paper to realize that
he is saying something very different. Just for starters,
his notion of 'parent language' is not the one used by
historical linguists and does not imply a genetic
relationship as the term is used by historical linguists.
It's also clear that he really is relating IA and Dravidian,
not IE and Dravidian:

The structural relationships amongst the Indo-European
family of languages are well known. Not equally well known
are the structural connections between the Indo-Aryan, the
Dravidian and the Munda languages. These languages may be
said to belong to the Prakrit family of languages. We use
the label "Prakrit" since it has been traditionally used
to describe all Indian languages.

In other words we argue that in general one might speak of
membership of a language to more than one family. We
believe such a usage is more accurate than the term
"linguistic area" used earlier by Emeneau.

The whole thing is pathetic exhibition of crackpottery. He
doesn't understand the genetic classification of languages,
he doesn't understand biological evolution, he doesn't
understand the comparative method, and as Francesco already
noted, he doesn't understand the concept of a linguistic
area.

Brian