Re: Stacking up on standard works

At 4:25:24 PM on Sunday, April 1, 2012, Tavi wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <bm.brian@...> wrote:

>>> The problem is that a the lexicon of a given language is
>>> typically made up of several strata (multi-layer) due to
>>> language replacement and contact processes, and it isn't
>>> always easy to tell which is the "inherited" part.

>> This is a commonplace. It's also of limited relevance to
>> reconstruction of proto-languages. If F is a linguistic
>> taxon, proto-F is simply the most recent common ancestor
>> of F; its own history is largely irrelevant to its
>> comparative reconstruction from F. For that history we
>> must resort to internal reconstruction, and perhaps
>> eventually to comparative reconstruction of a bigger
>> taxon at a deeper historical level.

> This is a description of the classical geneaological tree
> model,

No, it isn't. It's the standard definition of proto-F for
any family F.

> which IMHO is fairly inadequate to represent the IE
> family, which is a rather exceptional case, because it
> combines a very long time of evolution since the Upper
> Palaeolithic with a quick dialectal fragmentation into the
> historical attested languages in the Bronze Age.

You really just don't get it, do you? PIE is by definition
the stage immediately prior to that fragmentation. Anything
earlier is not PIE. Anything ancestral to that stage is
something else.

> Quoted from F. Villar et al.: Lenguas, genes y culturas en
> la prehistoria de Europa y Asia suroccidental
> <http://books.google.es/books?id=BAwzUADajUwC&printsec=frontcover&hl=es&\
> source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> .
> Universidad de Salamanca, 2011., chapter 3 (my own
> translation):

> The history related to us by the languages of Europe and
> SW Asia, both today's and the ones spoken in their
> territory of which there exists written attestations,
> doesn't reach to a deep chronology.

Which is a straightforward acknowledgement that PIE is not
extremely old.

[...]

> In contrast with the interest in the genealogical trees
> intented for explaining the dialectal processes between
> common IE and the historical languages [see for example
> the one by F. Rodríguez Adrados
> <http://tech.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/files/Adrados%20PIE.jpg>
> in Nuevos estudios de linguística indoeuropea. CSIC, 1988,
> p. 38], the IE-ists never have been interested the
> ancestor genealogical tree of which this common language
> was only a branch coming from an older common phylum.

Say rather that they've generally recognized that there's
not much that can be said about it, at least until (a) some
likely other branches have been identified, and (b) adequate
reconstruction has been done in these branches, including
IE. And obviously the first order of business for any
sensible Indo-Europeanist is to work on setting his own
house in order.

Similarly, it's entirely to be expected that a Germanist
will be concerned primarily with the Germanic branch; the
difference is that in this case we actually know what the
sister families are and something about how they're related
and how they descend from PIE, their nearest common
ancestor. Despite some conjectures, some of them even quite
plausible, we *don't* know what IE's sister families are,
let alone what their common ancestor looked like.

> Any ortodox IE-ist which make him/herself respect will
> consider any attempt to sail backwards from IE as leading
> to nothing more than speculations unworthy of being
> considered.

Exaggeration. Even in my fairly limited IE library I can
find some discussion of pre-PIE, e.g., in Meier-Brügger and
Sihler. And as a longtime reader of Cybalist I'm certainly
well aware that Jens Elmegård Rasmussen, for instance, has
done more than a bit of work on pre-PIE.

[...]

> In other words, [...] this indicates the reconstructed PIE
> wasn't an isolated language with no close relatives, [...]

I don't know of anyone who thinks otherwise.

Brian