isolates

[Scott DeLancey]

On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Sarah G. Thomason wrote:
 
> But what evidence
> have we, for any language that we all agree is an isolate and that
> has no attested former relatives, that it used to have some
> relatives?  It's easy enough to imagine a situation in which no
> split will occur, ever: just situate your hypothetical language in
> a remote mountain valley (say), in a small area that only supports
> a small cohesive population -- a single speech community in which (roughly)
> everyone talks to everyone else -- and leave everyone there permanently.
> No split.  A belief that there are no real-life cases of this general
> sort (it doesn't have to be a mountain valley, etc.) is a  matter of
> faith, not science.
 
But this population must have arrived in its mountain valley from
somewhere else (H. Sapiens didn't evolve in mountain valleys), and
unless you believe that some isolated populations of H. Sap
reinvented language ex nihilo, the language spoken by this population
had relatives somewhere else.  Those may have died out, leaving an
isolate, but unless this population created a new language rather
than bringing one with them, the language didn't start out as an
isolate.
 
To take a concrete example:  Burushashki now has no demonstrable
relatives.  But it *can not possibly* have always been an isolate,
unless you want to believe that it has developed separately and
independently since the beginnings of human language (which, for
even this to be a conceivable scenario, must have been efflorescently
polygenetic).
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html