Certainly "cumulative creolisation" exists as a barrier to overcome but this
barrier isn't the ultimate end. There's no doubt that, like with every other
area of human knowledge, this puzzle will be slowly disentangled as we learn
more. If we were to have fretted about cumulative creolisation when
reconstructing IE, we would not have this list to discuss the "hopeless"
task. Again, the limits that you and Ed give to human knowledge are
completely arbitrary and without logical foundation. Without knowing more
about Nostratic, there can be no one to say conclusively that Nostratic is
not worth reconstructing, is there?!
- gLeN
Piotr had said:
One of the things that may happen in convergence areas is "cumulative
creolisation", where diffusion taking place over the millennia simply drowns
the detectable genetic signal in the long run, so that secondary (areal)
affinities replace family features. This is what Dixon argues for
Pama-Nyungan and for the Australian languages in general, if you need a
present-day example. This is not "a wild possibility" but something that
happens every now and then. I'm pretty sure, for example, that the alleged
close relation between Germanic and Balto-Slavic which makes some linguists
propose a Germano-Balto-Slavic genetic unit or claim that Germanic is a
secondarily "desatemised" language, is in fact a purely areal phenomenon. As
a matter of fact, we don't see neat family trees very often -- the model
works best in cases like Polynesia, where there is a natural barrier between
any pair of languages. Just consider Germanic, Slavic or Romance, and the
way divergence and convergence have operated in those microfamilies. What
does the abstract entity we call Modern German derive from? Which
"continental" element (Anglian, Saxon, Jutish?) predominates in English?
Handbook classifications favour binary or tripartite divisions, so that we
get taxonomic figments like West Germanic, East Germanic, or South Slavic. I
completely agree with Ed that excessive concentration on genetic taxonomies
gives us a false picture of linguistic evolution.
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