--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...> wrote:
> Q: How can the IEL then determine chronology based on the genetic tree
> model if the assumption of genetic descent is itself based on
chronology?
If this is not mere rhetoric, it is a slightly confused question.
Were Indo-European merely something that arose from convergence, then
the question would be, 'What can a date for PIE mean?'. A more
serious question would be, 'What does a date for PIE mean if
Indo-European expanded from a stable group of closely related
dialects?'. I suspect that a stable group of closely related dialects
would typically be glottochronologically dated as having diverged a
few hundred years ago. For examply, my idiolect seems to have
diverged from the idiolect of the Swadesh word lists about a century
ago. The answer would then be that the coherence of the PIE dialects
broke down a few centuries after the deduced divergence date.
However, absolute linguistic chronology is highly suspect.
> "But if scholars had only several semi-Romance languages like Albanian
> at their disposal and applied to them the comparative method as it is
> practiced in Indo-European studies, they would be obliged to
> reconstruct a protolanguage for the semi-Romance group as well. In
> doing so they would either have to leave the non-Romance elements
> unexplained or have to explain them by means of some clever artificial
> provisions in the reconstruction of the "proto-language."
These 'artificial provisions' might be akin to the identification of
Indo-European substrata in Greek. However, there would be a big
difference - these substrata would contain much of the core vocabulary.
Disentangling mixtures is nothing new - Armenian may well be the best
example. There are also Austronesian mixtures and Tai-Kadai mixtures.
The contributions are teased apart by noting their correspondence
patterns. (In the Tai-Kadai example, Laha, Ostapirat identified the
Tai loans by their tonal correspondences.)
Richard.