--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "ehlsmith" <ehlsmith@...> wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@> wrote:
> .............
> > "Thus a language family can be the product of divergence, convergence
> > or a combination of the two (with emphasis on either).
>
> There are historically attested cases of language families which are
> products of divergence. Can you provide any attested case of a family
> resulting from convergence?
How about the "Hellenic" family. Please see below.
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~garrett/BLS1999.pdf
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Egarrett/IEConvergence.pdf
Garrett's main point is the discovery of Mycenaean Greek should force
IEL to rethink their subgroupings of larger "families" such as Italic,
Celtic and Indo-Iranian. "On the one hand because Mycenaen Greek
shows innovations that are found only in some Greek dialects, it
cannot be viewed as proto Greek; it is just an early dialect. On the
other hand many innovations are found in every Greek dialect EXCEPT
Mycenaean (Garett 1999, p. 3, emphasis in the original).
These facts make the construction of a "proto-Greek" language
logically impossible. A chance discovery of the Linear B script has
lead to this realization. But what about the cases where such
written evidence does not exist and is never likely to be found; for
example "Indo-Iranian" According to Garrett what is known to be true
of Greek has also happened in other cases.
"If we apply what we learn from cases where there is evidence to the
cases where there is none, it follows that the Indo-European family
tree with a dozen independent, highly distinctive branches is nothing
more than a historical mirage (Garrett 1999, p.9)."
"If the formation of Greek was a local event facilitated by local
interaction patterns and ethnic identity, it is also relevant that IE
branches like Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Celtic, and even the poorly
attested Venetic show evidence of a collective ethnic identity. In
such cases as Nichols (1998, 240) puts it `a complext native theory of
ethnicity and a strong sense of ethnic identity can be reconstructed,
and both the theory and the identity were based on language,'"
(Garrett n.d., p.6)."
also,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_convergence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_merger
http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/SubjectAreas/LinguisticsEnglishLanguage/Research/ConvergenceProject/
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/LanguageMixing.htm
M. kelkar
>
>
> 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)."
>
> Why???
>
> Ned Smith
>