Re: [tied] Ah, look at all the lonely languages

I do appreciate the time you have spent in answering my question.
How much evidence needs to be compiled to show a relationship, one
language to another. Or is this query also too abstract? When does
consensus occur, or is the process the mainstay of an academic.
Orphans are orphans because they have no immediate family yet they
are derived from the family of man. Thus orphans are both alone as
well as a part of a group. Again, the concept of "both" makes an
appearance.

Gerry

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "ehlsmith" <ehlsmith@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Gerry" <waluk@...> wrote:
> ....
> > About
> > Basque, how can a language that is supposedly isolated have so
many
> > new speakers?
>
> Gerry-
>
> Language isolate does not mean that the speakers of the language
are
> necessarily physically isolated from speakers of other languages.
For
> example, at one time most linguists considered Japanese a language
> isolate, even though there are over 100 million speakers of the
> language, freely participating in the world economy with speakers
of
> many other languages. Japanese was being influenced by many of
those,
> and in turn influencing them (think sushi, tsumami, kamikaze, etc.)
> Although perhaps not quite as many linguists now consider Japanese
an
> isolate, it has nothing to do with any of this mixing. It is merely
> that further research has lead some to believe they can detect
> ancient connections between Japanese and other language groups.
>
> Regarding your earlier comments about language isolates: being a
> language isolate does not mean that a language is ultimately
> unrelated to any other, it merely means that scholars to not have
> enough evidence to show how it is related, and to which particular
> languages it is most closely related. Nothing about the existence
of
> language isolates implies a contradiction of the monogenesis of
> language.
>
> As an analogy, consider an orphan, said to have no relatives in
this
> world. When people say that they don't literally mean he is
> completely unrelated to the rest of humanity; if you could go back
> through the preceding generationns with perfect genealogical
> knowledge, eventually you would find some distant cousins. So, when
> they say that the orphan is without relatives, they really mean
that
> he is without relatives close enough to be known. Similarly, when
> they say a language is an isolate, they only mean there is not
enough
> evidence to say how it relates to other languages, not that it is
> ultimately unrelated.
>
> Ned Smith