Re: Why the Proto-Indoeuropean numerals are not motivated within IE?

At 8:49:52 AM on Thursday, May 31, 2012, Tavi wrote:

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

>>> All these people (Greenberg, Ruhlen, Bengtson) belong to
>>> what I call the "Sapir-Swadesh school", whose main
>>> representants are Edward Sapir and Morris Swadesh and
>>> which sees Comparative Linguistics as a branch of
>>> Anthropology. By contrast, modern IE studies, founded by
>>> 19th century's Neogrammarians, are a branch of Classical
>>> Phylology

>> I doubt that there are many modern historical linguists
>> who see historical linguistics as anything but a
>> historical science in its own right, with roots in
>> anthropology *and* philology (among other things).

>>> Buit the thing is, how much do mainstream IE studies
>>> actually share with historical linguistics?

>> It takes either great ignorance or great prejudice (to
>> the point of effectively being ignorance) to ask that
>> question.

> Actually it was a *rethoric* one, with an ironic purpose.

As I suspected: prejudice to the point of effectively being
ignorance.

>> Mainstream IE linguistics is a major area of historical
>> linguistics.

> Yes, precisely. For the most part, historical linguistics
> is the same thing that IE linguistics.

Bollocks. There's an enormous amount of historical
linguistics that has been done and is being done on other
families. Two of the best introductory texts -- those by
Larry Trask and Lyle Campbell, especially the latter -- use
many non-IE examples.

> Anecdotally, I've got Franco Fanciullo's book
> "Introduzione alla linguistica storica" which for the most
> part is actually an introduction to IE linguistics with
> only a little bit of non-IE languages such as Etruscan.

Pædagogically speaking, IE linguistics isn't a bad place to
start, especially for speakers of IE languages. If you
think hard, you might even see why. (Hint: There's more
than one reason.)(

> But if you read carefully my above post you'll see I wrote
> COMPARATIVE linguistics.

The comparative method is simply one tool of historical
linguistics. Anyone doing comparison is doing either
historical linguistics or linguistic taxonomy of some sort.
Linguistic taxonomy is either directly concerned with
establishing historical relationships, in which case it's
part of historical linguistics, or rather pointless.