From: Jörg Rhiemeier
Message: 70234
Date: 2012-10-22
On Saturday 20 October 2012 22:01:08 Tavi wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
>
> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Not only "earlier" (in diachronical terms) but also "diverse" (in
> diatopical terms). Thus we've got (al least) two different "PIE"s. In my
> own model, the IE family is the result of the superimposition of several
> (proto-)languages due to contact and replacement processes over
> millenia. The classical genealogical tree model is simply inadequate.
Would you mind giving evidence for that? There are well-established
regular sound correspondences linking the various Indo-European
languages with each other, and the best way of accounting for them
is to posit a common ancestor language that gradually diversified
and broke apart. If Indo-European was actually the outcome of
"contact and replacement processes", one would expect this to show
in numerous inconsistencies in the sound correspondences. Where
are they? Granted, there are a few words which look "wrong" and
are probably loanwords from other IE languages, but if Indo-European
was a convergence area, such irregularities would have to be far
more numerous, especially in the derivational and inflectional
morphologies of the IE languages.
Nobody denies that most Indo-European languages contain a large
number of lexemes that do not have reliable PIE etymologies and are
thus likely to be loanwords from substratum languages, but that
still does not make Indo-European a convergence area. (The same
picture is seen e.g. in Romance languages which contain numerous
loanwords from Celtic, Basque, Germanic, Etruscan and God knows
what else was spoken in the Roman Empire besides Latin, but still
overwhelmingly consist of material inherited from Latin, especially
in their grammatical structure.) It is also possible that some of
these pre-IE substratum languages were related to PIE, but even that
does not invalidate the standard model.
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