--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mwwalder" <martin.walder@...> wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Kishore patnaik"
> <kishorepatnaik09@> wrote:
> > This becomes particularly important, when the existence of PIE itself
> > is yet to be conclusively established.
> 'Existence of PIE is yet to be conclusively established' - I'm
> sorry??? The existence of PIE and the fact that Latin, Greek, Sankrit,
> Old High German, Gothic and Lithuanian (and of course the less
> conservative languages as well) derive from a common ancestor has been
> proven beyond reasonable doubt for maybe 150 years.
I'll hazard a guess at what the reasonable doubts are based on, though
I think they're largely nit-picking.
1. The reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European is comparable in
principle to the reconstruction of Proto-Romance. However, some of
the words reconstructed seem distinctly late, such as the word for
'bishop'.
2. It may well be that Indo-European languages derive form
recombinations of dialects, and that there is no single ancestral
dialect that could be identified as 'PIE'.
3. PIE may well have had more phonemes than we reconstruct, because
some phonemes have merged identically in all dialects. Again, going
back to Proto-Romance, is it historically correct to say that it
lacked a contrast between /a/ and /a:/? The only trace left is accent
placement, and that may be ascribed to Pre-Proto-Romance.
4. We don't actually know the sounds of PIE phonemes! The
identification of the 'voiced aspirates' as such may actually be a
hangover from the old view that Sanskrit was particularly close to PIE.
I don't buy Trubetskoy's concept of 'mutual Indo-Europeanisation'
beyond the possibility that some Indo-European features may have
arisen and spread after the initial divergence - especially in the
crown clade of extant IE languages. Terms for chariot terminology
(should that be wagon terminology?) are a particularly awkward issue,
as the meanings may well not have existed until after the initial
divergence.
> Now that Hittite
> has been accepted as Indo-European, I don't think there is even any
> controversy over which languages are or are not Indo-European.
I'll happily accept Hittite as Indo-Hittite. Whether or not it is
Indo-European is a terminological convention. That brings us to a
fifth niggle over PIE - many roots are identified as going back to PIE
even though there is no evidence that they go back to Proto-Indo-Hittite.
While there is indeed general agreement over what is Indo-European,
there are disagreements of varying degrees of apparent crankiness.
Etruscan is sometimes claimed as Indo-European, though that is a
minority view that probably depends on the definition of Indo-European
rather than just the possibly irretrievable facts of its ancestry.
It's also claimed that one of the Ossetian languages is actually
Turkic - I think that's just a chauvinistic claim.
Some claims are just plain wrong - Estonian often gets listed as an
Indo-European language!
For some languages only known from fragments, there is genuine doubt.
Pictish immediately comes to mind. That, however, comes from the
poorness of our knowledge of Pictish, rather than from any lack of
understanding of Indo-European.
However, are there not some genuinely doubtful members of the family?
(You may fairly regard this as nit-picking.) Are Tok Pisin and
Sranan Germanic languages? I presume Afrikaans is a pukka Germanic
language.
Richard.