Indo-European Linguistics: Backwards

From: mkelkar2003
Message: 37703
Date: 2005-05-07

<http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~garrett/IEConvergence.pdf>

"I (Garret) will suggest that conventional models of IE phylogeny are
wrong."

"I will suggest an alternative model: the familiar branches arose not
by the differentiation of earlier higher order subgroups-from
"Italo-Celtic" to Italic and Celtic and so on-but by converegence
among neighbouring dialects in a continuum."

"Convergence together with loss of intermediate dialects in the
pre-historic continnum has created the historical mirage of a branchy
IE family its many distinctive subgroups."

A very strange article indeed. It seems like Garret is criticizing IEL
for constructing a proto-language and then imagining its hypothetical
speakers taking it all over the place while it branches into real
languages. The dialects come first; families later. If I understand
this correctly, the Nichols/Garret model requires much fewer
invasions/migrations than the traditional family tree model.

M. Kelkar