From: Mark Odegard
Message: 3465
Date: 2000-08-29
From: Glen GordonI have trouble believing that any language is so mixed up that there are _equal_ connections between two groups. That scenario is very unlikely.
The historical and geographical situation where such a thing could occur would require linguistically stable islands or mountains. New Guinea is such a place. The Caucasus are sometimes mentioned in this regard, and as I recall, perhaps the paleo-Siberian languages. We are speaking of time scales in the thousands of years.When you have two distinct languages, each from a different language family, living cheek-to-jowl with each other over thousands of years and otherwise maintaining their integrity, with high levels of bilingualism, you first form a sprachbund, then lexical items flow across languages, and finally, even grammatical features. It's rather like lateral genetic transfer in bacteria -- not a tree, not even a bush, but more like the transgenic things with do with plants and animals. We like to cite Lithuanian as the most spectacularly conservative of IE languages; in point of fact, it historically is also one of the most innovative of IE languages, having borrowed grammatical features from Uralic (noun cases).The necessary historical and geographic conditions for two language families to converge into one are very difficult to establish or maintain. Japan, New Guinea, and perhaps the Caucasus would seem to be the only possible, presently-known candidates.Mark.