Re: [tied] On Non-Linguistic IE Languages

----- Original Message -----
From: "george knysh" <gknysh@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2002 4:06 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] On Non-Linguistic IE Languages


*****GK: I don't believe anyone could have better stated the difference between the world of the elite and that of the hoi polloi. I still think that a language is primarily a method of communicating meaning to someone else and find the exclusion of the "mutual intelligibility" factor troublesome to say the least.*****

Did I say that it was _generally_ irrelevant? That would be troublesome indeed. It is irrelevant for this particular purpose. Genetic taxonomy is about shared descent, not about communication. If you want to calculate the kinetic energy of a falling body you must know its mass but you may ignore its colour (which may be relevant in a thousand other situations).

*****GK (new) While I find the emergence of Ukrainian as "exciting" an event as you (probably, hopefully) find that of Polish, I don't consider either of these occcurrences to be important watersheds in the history of Indo-European languages systems.*****

Your modesty is laudable but you push it too far. It's the cumulative evidence of all the branches that counts, not that of any "favourite daughter". Slavic is actually quite an important source of comparative data. At least it shows that a sizeable branch can grow in a matter of fifteen centuries.

*****GK All right then, let's put it differently for your elite benefit. When did the last congeries of languages you would consider to be a "family" constitute itself (and don't say "Romance" because you will never get me to accept that Latin is not a part of THAT family)*****

What you clearly need is a lesson in taxonomy. Any Romance language (and linguists do call Romance a branch!) is at the same time Italic, just as any rodent is a mammal. As regards the accepted technical terminology, a language family is the _maximal_ reconstructible taxon containing a given language. Thus, IE is a family, but Germanic is not, because it is contained in a larger valid taxon. If we agree to speak less formally, "family" and "taxon" can be regarded as synonymous, but then any group of related languages or even dialects can be established as a "family".

Some of the smaller taxa within a family are traditionally called "branches" if they are monophyletic (i.e. derived from a single ancestor), complete (containing the ancestral langauge plus all its descendants) and sufficiently distinct from other such units. Nothing is assumed about the structure of the family tree between its root and the roots of the individual branches. We use the notion of "branch" for pragmatic reasons (so that the family tree can be cut up into smaller trees that may be arbitrary in many respects but are at any rate mutually disjoint and can be studied separately) and we don't define it formally, hence minor problems like one-member branches or having to refer to Albanian, Slavic or Indo-Iranian as taxonomic units of the same rank (while they are hardly comparable in terms of size, age etc.). Hence also pseudo-problems like "Is Indo-Iranian one branch or two?" (Answer: "It depends.")

A branch is any taxon that we agree to call a branch. It is an artefact of our modern perspective and of our convenience, not a historical given. A "mature" branch should be either large enough or distinct enough to be generally recognised as such, so it can't be too young. A depth of, say, 2000 years may or may not be enough, depending on the position of the prospective branch in the overall family tree.

Piotr