Re: Determining genetic descent among languages

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" <richard@...> wrote:

>
> --- 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.

Since there are very large time gaps among the first dates when each
of the languages were first attested in writing, it is impossible to
tell whether a branch like Germanic descended from the same
protolanguage as others or is completely a result of borrowing. So the
comparativist reconstruction *assumes* a chronology to begin with. I
remember reading somewhere that if there was no Rig Veda the various
languages of the "Indo-Aryan" familiy would be be quite difficulty to
classify as such. The early attestation of Latin has helped the IE
studies tremendously. The same model has been then applied to the
entire "Indo-European" family. There are other possibilities.

"Thus Franco Crevatin suggested that Swahili—an artificial lingua
franca, spoken across vast portions of Africa as an instrument to
facilitate long distance trade—may be a better analogue than Latin for
theorizing Proto-Indo-European. His desire, like Trubetzkoy's, seems
to be to imagine a more irenic, more diverse past as a means to guard
against scholarly narratives that encode racism and bellicosity. In
Crevatin's view there was a Proto-Indo-European language and there
were people who spoke it for certain finite purposes, but no community
of Proto-Indo-Europeans. Similar is Stefan Zimmer's position,
intended as a rebuke of racist theories, hypothesizing a protolanguage
spoken not be an ethnically pristine Urvolk but by a shifting, nomadic
colluvies gentium, a "filthy confluence of peoples," (Lincoln 1999,
pp. 212-213).""

Lincoln, Bruce (1999), Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and
Scholarship, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

> Were Indo-European merely something that arose from convergence, then
> the question would be, 'What can a date for PIE mean?'.

If the IE family structure did arise from convergence would there be a
need for PIE? I think not.



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.

Agree. Even relative chronology makes *chronological* assumptions.
Its assumed that there was infact a proto-Germanic even though though
Germanic languages have been known to history much later compared to
Greek, Latin and Sanskrit.

>
> > "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

The ability to disentangle depends on what history has put on the
comparativists' plate. Genius comes next, chance comes first.

M. Kelkar

> 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.
>