Re: Limitations of the compartive method

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 51911
Date: 2008-01-27

On 2008-01-27 04:27, mkelkar2003 wrote:

> Try 31 and 54.

Did you pick (31) because it's the only diagram in the handout with
Indo-Iranian somewhere near the centre? There are others where it's
position is more peripheral ;)

>> 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.

So Latin originated in France and Catalonia? This is even more
revolutionary than your Out-of-India stuff!

All right, in case you don't know, the homeland of Latin was the ancient
region of Latium, with Rome in the centre, which is why the folks who
originally spoke are called the Romans. Rome is still there, it's the
capital of Italy.

> Indo-Iranian territory would have done that for PIE dialects. Since we
> know that Avesthan is later than Rg Vedic Sanskrit, that means India.

Indeed. India is the cradle of IE the way Barcelona is the cradle of
Romance.

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

Yes, you are. The evidence for a large genetic grouping may be more
robust than that for its subdivisions. For example, it's clear that the
Germanic languages form a very well-defined genetic grouping. But the
subdivisions of Germanic into smaller units (like e.g. East vs.
Northwest or West vs. Northeast) are less secure for a variety of good
reasons. This does not in the least invalidate the status of Germanic as
a unit. Likewise in biology: taxonomists have a zillion competing
hypotheses about how to divide the birds (Aves) into smaller units and
how those units are related to one another, but any ornithologist
questioning the validity of Aves as a genetic unit (clade) would rightly
be considered a lunatic. There's A LOT of incontrovertible support for
such a unit, more that for any particular bird order or family.

Piotr