Re: Determining genetic descent among languages

> >
> >
> > >There are other possibilities.
> >
> > Than what?
>
> "Thus a language family can be the product of divergence,
> convergence or a combination of the two (with emphasis on either).
> There are virtually no criteria that would indicate unambiguously
> to which of the two modes of development a family owes its
> existence. When we are dealing with languages so closely related
> that almost all the elements of vocabulary and morphology of each
> are present in all or most of the other members (allowing for sound
> correspondences), it is more natural to assume convergence than
> divergence (Trubetskoy 2001, p. 89)."

It is difficult to comment on something that begins with 'thus'.
One thing speaks in favour of some type of borrowing process: it is
in the regular and late class of thematics (presumably the 'open'
category, into which loans were taken) that Sanskrit has the highest
number of nominal roots with cognates in other IE languages.

> "The position I (Lincoln) urge is the following. First, we accept
> as established the existence of a language family that included
> Tocharian, Indic, Iranian, Armenian, Anatolian, Greek, Italic,
> Phrygian, Thracian, Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic. Second,
> we acknowledge that the relations among these languages can be
> described in several fashions. Of the available hypotheses, the
> Stammbaum model is the most popular, but by no means the only one.
> It ought not to be accepted as long as others exists, and we ought
> not discard these others unless there is compelling reason to do
> so. In the absence of such compelling reason, we can remain
> agnostic, recognizing the existence of multiple hypotheses and
> maintaining a particularly skeptical posture toward those with
> histories of subtexts of racism. Third, we recognize that the
> existence of a language family does not necessarily imply the
> existence of a protolanguage. Still less the existence of a
> protopeople, protomyths, protoideology, or protohomeland (Lincoln
> 1999, p. 216)."

Professor Fawlty tries not to mention the war.
Once you introduce extraneous considerations like political
associations into the question of how to assess a theory, you're
back at Gallilei and the Catholic church. Mr. Lincoln may remain
agnostic for all I care, I won't.
Other than that, it is interesting that apart from Indo-Iranian,
Balto-Slavic and the largely discarded Italo-Celtic there is no
branching in the accepted model of IE; the Stammbaum is a
Stammbusch.


Torsten