Re: Determining genetic descent among languages

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...> wrote:

> Yes again. Say a group of people later to become Germanic speaking,
> decided to adopt an existing IE langauge becuase it was an important
> language of the time, just like English is today. But they adopted it
> with their existing accent. ... This could have happend just
> centuries before the Germanic family became known to history (about
> 1000 years ago?).

Sounds rather like the Fennic accent many have tried to ascribe to
Germanic - initial stresss, vowel assimilation.

> So comparativist can't simply through Latin,
> Sanskrit, Greek and Germanic into a kitchen sink and then try to trace
> a point of origin.

I see no problem here. Comparativists used to assume substrate
effects were omnipresent.

> The comparative method is no doubt useful to trace the history of
> Indo-Aryan or Romance langauges because there exists a Rig Veda or an
> early Church literature in Latin. This is not the case across the
> board in all the families.

As has been found when trying to use Gothic for Germanic or Old Church
Slavonic for Slavic. But then we now know that Sanskrit is not
ancestral to all Indo-Aryan languages, which gets a bit awkward when
trying to assign a single language of origin to an Indic loanword in
Thai, where a lot of the loanwords seem to be Sanskritised Pali. It
gets worse when the Sanskrit word looks like a borrowing from Pali, as
in Sanskrit cakrava:(.)la 'universe' from Pali cakkava:.la.

In many families you have to grit your teeth and make do without such
cheats like these. However, I understood that the comparative method
has been used to determine vowel lengths in Latin.

Richard.