From: Jörg Rhiemeier
Message: 70226
Date: 2012-10-20
On Friday 19 October 2012 22:52:00 Rick McCallister wrote:
> Keep in mind that in English, shiv means "knife." But if he just read
> Wikipedia to start with, follow its sources, he might arrive at a
> linguistic understanding of the history of languages. Knowing a language
> as a native speaker doe not give one any special insight into its origins.
Indeed not. For instance, I long assumed that German _Sommer_
'summer' was derived from _Sonne_ 'sun' - but consulting an
etymological dictionary told me that that was just a folk etymology
(unless there is indeed a connection deep in Pre-PIE, of course).
> Among items that I offered, Shiv doesn't tell why retroflexed consonant
> sets do not show up in IE languages that are not from the subcontinent. He
> doesn't tell us why we have no loanwords in IE from Munda, Burushaski,
> Language X of Harappa, Sino-Tebetan, BMAC, etc. If Sanskrit were native to
> India, we would have such traces. BUT WE DON'T.
Well, those are just puny facts that get in the way of the
ideology, and "discovered" by linguists who weren't born in
India and who weren't raised with Hindu wisdom, and thus cannot
be expected to understand these matters properly ;)
Sanskrit is one of the most conservative IE languages to be sure,
but its conservatism should not be overrated, and the history of
the standard model of PIE is a history of emancipation from the
Sanskrit model - more and more features of Sanskrit were recognized
as innovations of the Indic branch. And now it turns out that we
have to posit a quite different Early PIE to account for the
divergent features of Anatolian.
Also, the most conservative member of a family is not necessarily
the language that is spoken in the original homeland! It may be
an outlier spoken far away from the Urheimat. Germanic, for
instance, did not originate in Iceland where the most conservative
Germanic language is spoken today.
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