Piotr wrote
>
> Glen: There you go again. How does one assert this rationally?
> I agree. Splits do take place and may become permanent divisions --
though, mind you, not so unbridgeable as the gaps between distantly
related eukaryotic species in biology. I'm suspicious of
dogmatic "arborealism" as a methodological principle, but accept the
practical usefulness of "family trees" as such.
Here the analogy you earlier drew with intraspecies biology is a
useful one, Piotr. There have been for instance a large number of
phyletellic trees drawn at different times by geneticists researching
human populations, showing how groups that are successful have
increases in number, split and then diverge. But people move from
one groupo to another, and they bring not only their genes, but also
traces of their own language with them. For instance, I have seen
studies of modern coloquial Thai which shows that there are traces of
the Mon substrate (many Mon's speak Mon at home and Thai publicly).
This confusion can go both ways. Some have seen Gallic forms under
the Latin of French. Thus while French is seen as clearly a Romance
language, could one argue that Gallic began with being fairly close
to Latin in any case (Caesar wrote his dispatches in Greek as Celts
could understand them in Latin), was increasingly "Latinised" until
it achieved at a popular level, recognition as a vulgar latin dialect
of the 4th century from which French (and Occitan) was later to
develop. Thus while family trees diverge, we find that they at
specific times and places (as is happening in the Balkans) they can
converge too. I can imagine if the balkanisation were to continue
indefinitely into the future, and only one of the parent languages
were to survive (eg Vlach), one would have a future Balkan tongue
with a "tree" showing its relationship to the Romance languages. Or
perhaps if it was Serb which survivied and the others which
dissappeared, then the future Balkan Urspracht would show Serb as its
parent and it would be placed within the Slavic family of IE.
Such features are not to be played around with. They are in fact
common. Modern Armenian has borrowed heavily from Iranian,
Kartvellian, Turkic and other un-named Caucasian languages. Kurdic
is an Iranian dialect, but the ethno-name goes back to the Guti (at
which time they spoke a very different language). I suspect
something very similar may underly the Etruscan story, with a non-IE
language, becoming progressively more and more Indo-Europeanised with
time, so that by the time we have a body of Etruscan records (post
800 CE, it shows "ancient" features which can be reconstructed as an
early split from the tree of PIE (i.e. Glen's I-T thesis). This is
not to say that Etruscan did not originally diverge from a Paleo-PIE
and then start, later, to begin converging again.
Your analogy of the tangled bush, I think Piotr is the one which we
should pursue even within Nostratic studies (if there is such a
thing), it lends to greater accuracy. I have found such things
within the stud of genealogy. A person has two parents, four
grandparents, eight great grand parents etc. The splitting is such
that it is not long before the number of your ancestors is equal to
the world population of that period. The explanation is usually
given that the same ancestors repeat along many of the lines. I know
in my own family clan MacDonald ca be traced as ancestors back along
a couple of independent lineages. This feature is not something
new. It must have operated across the whole of human history. What
elements of speach did these Gaelic speakers pass on to their largely
Anglophone children?
Drawing trees is a simplification. To do justice to comparitive and
historical linguistics, I think, drawing "tangled bushes" would give
an element of greater reality to our efforts. Doing so on a two
dimensional page is difficult. Linguistics can be two dimensionally
plotted (on latititude and longitude geographically), but needs a
third temporal dimension. Perhaps to represent the tangled bush
Piotr, we all need to be sculptors and start working in three
dimensions ;-)
Regards
John