--- In cybalist@..., george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:> --- Piotr
Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:> I am not being evasive. Any
specialist can tell> > you how to derive the Sanskrit or Greek
phonological> > system, inflectional endings, etc. from a common
> > prototype.> > *****GK: I would think that the "etc." is
significant> with respect to the issue broached ("which of the
> known language families /or individual languages
> therein/ is clser/closest to PIE")if it involves ALL
> aspects of a given language, including those
> components (lexical or other)which aren't or may not
> be IE.******...> ****GK: I see no reason why a methodology could
not be> evolved to answer the question which prompted this
> discussion.******
I agree with George. For example, the tree diagram view of Indo-
European drawn by HH Hock (Out of India? The Linguistic Evidence, in:
J Bronkhorst and Madhav M. Deshpande, 1999, Aryan and Non-Aryan in
South Asia, p. 14) is sought to be elaborated with isoglosses while
arguing the reasonableness of a hypothesis:' A priori, there is a
possible alternative to Misra's failed attempt to identify Vedic
Sanskrit with Proto-Indo-European and in so doing to establish that
the Indo-Aryan did not migrate to India from the outside. This
alternative would consist in claiming that Proto-Indo-European -- as
mostly reconstructed and thus distinct from Vedic Sanskrit -- was
originally spoken in India; that the speakers of Indo-Aryan remained
in India, and that the speakers of all other Indo-European languages
migrated out of India..." Now how does Hock go about testing the
reasonableness of this hypothesis? He uses the principles of
simplicity and plausibility, very subjective criteria indeed. He also
tries to advance non-linguistic, flimsy arguments such as the
narrowness of the Khyber pass.
This is the crux of the problem with the methodologies in comparative
studies, particularly while relating linguistic evidence to non-
linguistic, say, archaeological evidence. To my very limited
knowledge about linguistics as a science, there is no methodological
framework in linguistics to match an archaeological artefact, say, a
furnace found in excavations, with the 'word' as spoken by the
builders or users of that furnace, say in 3300 BCE at Harappa (which
is of great interest to me as a student of the civilization). Very
often, the archaeological reports try to report the findings
in 'English' using present day jargon such as 'furnace', 'forge',
alloy with little attempt to present possible words of the parole, as
used by the smith. PIE is a fine construct but then the semantic-
phonetic-lexical distance between PIE and parole at a particular
point in time (or a period range of say a hundred years) should be
measurable.
Has there been any attempt to merge general semantics and linguistics?