----- Original Message -----From: mkelkar2003Sent: Sunday, January 27, 2008 12:20 AMSubject: [Courrier indésirable] Re: [tied] Limitations of the compartive methodIn defense of the comparative method, it has workd well in the "hunky
dory case of Austronesia" (Haggerty 2007)============(Tsalam? t?ob)What about Bloomfield's work on Algonkian : He came to hypothesize phonemes that were later on discovered in another language he had not taken into account.===============and also Greenberg's family
of Native American langauges, though he is not using the classical
method.============LoLNothing is to be kept from Greenberg's classification.I'm not even sure his *famous* classification of African languages is ok.=============="3.3 POSSIBLE SPLITS AND SUB-GROUPS WITHIN ROMANCE?
East vs. West Romance
(Romanian vs. the rest; OR Romanian + Italian vs. the rest)
But plural marking: Italian sides with Romanian.
Iberian sub-branch
(Spanish and Portuguese).
But what about Catalan, is it Iberian or not? Intermediate.
No agreement on a classification, not even on the primary branch.
Why? There just never was a primary `branch' in the first place."
===========Catalan is obviously part of southern French occitan.People speaking Central occitan (like in Aveyron) have no problem to understand Catalan speakers without any "learning".Catalan has drifted toward Iberian because it's closer to it than to Occitan.==================
So there was never a prot-Romance language to start with. Latin is
proto Romance.========School-book Latin (from Ciceron) is not proto-Romance,it's the upper-class sociolect.Proto-Romance was the average latin-speaker language.============How could there be a proto-Indo-European language then?
M. Kelkar=========You mean Greek does not exist because it has four dialects ?Arnaud===========.