On 2008-01-26 09:47, Kishore patnaik wrote:
> what are this group's beliefs on existence of a super language family?
> This becomes particularly important, when the existence of PIE itself
> is yet to be conclusively established.
Fear not, the existence of PIE is a logical necessity. There is no other
way of explaining the nature of the relationships connecting Albanian,
Armenian, Greek, Sanskrit, Avestan, Latin, Irish, Hittite etc. But there
is nothing mystical about a linguistic family. It isn't the ultimate
genetic grouping, but merely the largest one that can be established
given the current state of our knowledge. Actually, the IE family has
grown since its discovery. According to many linguists (an emerging
consensus, it seems), not only the Anatolian languages but also
Tocharian are outliers against the remaining branches (this "core" could
be called Crown IE, CIE [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_group ]).
In other words, it has been demonstrated that two more recently
discovered groups of languages not belonging to the IE family as
originally defined are related to it, and so a more encompassing
definition became necessary.
It stands to reason that at least some of the world's numerous language
families must be related to one another. It's even possible, though
hardly certain, that all languages go back to a single common ancestor
(not to be confused with the common language of the first humans -- a
very unlikely entity, IMO). The problem is that in order to establish a
plausible "superfamily" you need solid evidence of the usual kind,
ruling out chance similarity and areal convergence: systematic sound
correspondences, a successful partial reconstruction of the
protolanguage, etc.
Comparative reconstruction is very much like doing a big cryptic
crossword puzzle. When you have solved most of the clues and the
solutions tie up together without any contradictions, you know "beyond
reasonable doubt" you're doing fine. But if you have filled in some 10%
of the diagram and the words written across and down only occasionally
intersect, this "partial success" can still be illusory, as any
crossword enthusiast knows too well. Hence even some of the widely
accepted "families" (like Afroasiatic) are in fact tentative superfamily
constructs which, as Larry Trask put it in one of his postings, are
"barely detectable but beyond demonstration" (why not call them BD/BD
groupings?), i.e. based on suggestive but not very solid evidence.
Piotr