Re: Limitations of the compartive method

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> On 2008-01-27 01:14, mkelkar2003 wrote:
>
> > So PIE must have been a real spoken language then.
>
> What else could it be? With the obvious reservation: _reconstructed_

PIE

> is a set of hypotheses about a "real spoken language". It's obvious

that

> the reconstruction is neither complete nor perfect. You may compare

that

> to the museum reconstruction of a dinosaur. It gives you a general idea
> of what the actual animal was like, but it doesn't breathe of run

about,

> and if it has spots or stripes, their shape and colour are part of the
> artist's vision, not warranted by anything we can deduce from

fossilised

> bones.
>
> > I have two diffrent responses for this:
> >
> > 1. Buying into your argument that PIE must have existed "Just as there
> > was a language called Latin."
> >
> > sorry for the long link
> >
> >

<http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/~pah1003/loe/Eng/Papers/06_12_07_DataShow_PaulHeggarty_TreesOrWebsSplitsOrWaves.pdf>

> >
> > Slide 31: The heartland where we know Latin was spoken or written i.e.
> > Italy or France historically are the "homeland."
> >
> > and slide 53: where "Indo-Iranian" occupies that position hence India
> > is the homeland of this single language.
>
> I suspect you've got the numbers wrong. I can't see any analogy between
> (31) and (53).

Try 31 and 54.

Anyway, diagrams like (31) are hardly useful in

> pinpointing the homeland.

Why? The place where "Paris" or "Barcelona" varieties are spoken is
the homeland for Latin. These places would have provided the
necessary masses of people to generate the dialect continuum.
Indo-Iranian territory would have done that for PIE dialects. Since we
know that Avesthan is later than Rg Vedic Sanskrit, that means India.
M. Kelkar

> > 2. Not buying into your argument that PIE must have existed "Just as
> > there was a language called Latin." Refer to slide 50 the green line
> > on top of the Romance languages has a 100% posteror probablilty but
> > the higher node immediately prceeding that has only 46% and 2 nodes
> > before that only 44%.
> >
> > I am going with position 2!
>
> [Sigh] It only means that the (Romance + Germanic) and (Romance +
> Germanic + Celtic) clades are weakly supported by this particular
> analysis (which everybody realises anyway). The support for Romance and
> Germanic in isolation is 100 (which is again common knowledge). That's
> why it's perfectly legitimate to speak of Proto-Germanic, Proto-Celtic
> and Proto-Romance, but substantially less legitimate to speak of
> "Proto-Italo-Celto-Germanic".

And even less legitimate to speak of Proto
Indo-Iranian-Hittite-Celto-Germanic-Tocharian! Am I missing something
here?

M. Kelkar

The validity of Romance is obvious,

> especially as the parent language is directly attested. The validity of
> IE as a genetic unit may be less evident, but has nevertheless been
> soundly established and everything we have learnt for the last 150

years

> or so has only strengthened this validity.
>