Re: Determining genetic descent among languages

> > > 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.

How does that follow?

> So the comparativist reconstruction *assumes* a chronology to begin
> with.

No. It considers the question of relatedness as settled. From that
follows that there must be a chronology.

> 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.

How so? Besides, Iranian, Hittite and Greek are attested earlier.

> The same model has been then applied to the entire "Indo-European"
> family.

Which model?

>There are other possibilities.

Than what?

> "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.

Theories shouldn't have purposes beyond their subject field. Period.
That includes Crevatin's.

> 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).""

If Zimmer's position is intended as a rebuke of racist theories, how
come he calls the speakers of PIE 'filthy'?

> > 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.

If PIE did not exist, how could it have been spoken 'for finite
purposes'?

> 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.

Non sequitur. The date of their attestation has no relevance for the
question of whether a group of languges have a common ancestor.


Torsten