Re: Determining genetic descent among languages

> > Are you wondering if it is a hybrid of different branches?
> > I think the notion of a long-lasting dialect cluster, like
> > Romance, is highly relevant.

Romance had an ancestor, late Latin.

> > > So the
> > > comparativist reconstruction *assumes* a chronology to begin
> > > with.
> >
> > Do you mean it assumes a lack of inter-branch borrowing?
>
> Yes. The pefect phylogentic tree does assume that all the branches
> went their separate ways after the intial breakup. Warnow et. al.
> have shown that not to be the case.
>
> See Fig 12 (p. 22) and section 6 (p. 22) of the link below
>
> <http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/Papers/81.2nakhleh.pdf>
>
> and section 7.7 (p. 52) of the following study.
>
> http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/CPHL/RWT02.pdf

Which show that Germanic is a special case.

> > Do you mean it assumes that all branches are equally valid as
> > evidence for the parent?
>
> 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. So pater became fadder etc. A
> Bangala speaker pronunces Douglas as Doglas.

But the way a language changes by being borrowed is no less regular
that way it changes over time in one population. What's your point
here? Judging from genetics, the majority of the IE-speaking
communities of the world have adopted it as a foreign language.

> This could have happend just centuries before the Germanic family
> became known to history (about 1000 years ago?).

Caesar was the first to mention them. Make that 2000 years.

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

The fact that Germanic was adopted by non-IE speakers does not make
it different from those other languages since they were too,
so obviously he can.

> 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.

In that case it's not very interesting to use it, since we know the
result already.

> This is not the case across the board in all the families.

Fortunately. That means we can use the comparative method to
reconstruct proto-languages.


Torsten