I said it and I said it deliberately in order to emphasise the technical
difference between a really extinct linguistic lineage (like, say, Sumerian
or Etruscan) and one that has produced extant descendants (like Latin or
PIE). There is an unbroken line of descent leading from PIE to Ukrainian,
Pashto or Norwegian. As Steve has pointed out it is precisely the fact that
PIE "lives on" in the daughter languages that allows us to reconstruct
(fragments of) its structure as it existed several thousand years ago. Every
language family has its unique ancestral language: that's where all the
histories of its individual languages intersect. If you ask a biologist,
there is a perfectly valid technical sense in which birds (or, to be more
precise, all members of the taxon he calls Aves) _are_ dinosaurs (by virtue
of belonging to a larger taxon called Dinosauria, derived from a unique
comon ancestor).
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
From: "george knysh" <gknysh@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2002 1:13 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: On Non-Linguistic IE Languages
To say that it
> > evolved and is still around today is shall we term
> > it "somewhat
> > disingenuous"?>>
> >
> > (Steve)Oh come on. I never said it did. But, hey,
> when
> > they promoted Jurassic Park,
> > they said that the dinosaur lives on in birds. So
> > who complained? What's
> > the point, anyway?
>
> *****GK: "Interpretatio benignior" Steve... I didn't
> say you did. Someone else did, and you should know who
> if you read cybalist posts as carefully as you
> should.******