Q: the 'only six' argument

[Hans-Werner Hatting]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Sun, 3 Sep 2000 10:19:19 EDT, J. E. Rasmussen wrote:
>I have occasionally shocked my students by insisting that ONE *probative*
>example is enough to prove the point for which it is probative. The
>statement, of course, is tautological: If the examples did NOT prove its
>point, it would not be probative, for that's what the word probative
>means.
>    The consequence is that, e.g., in Indo-European, certain disputed
>groupings MUST be accepted unless we are willing to swallow very awkward
>camels: If the Celtic superlative in *-isamo- and the Italic one in
>*-is(s)amo- cannot be imagined to me parallel developments (from *-mHo-
>[whence Ital./Celt *-amo-] with deictic vs. *-isto- with other
>adjectives), and one cannot be assumed to have been borrowed from the
>other (would you borrow a new form of the superlative, if your language
>has a perfectly good one already?), then there WAS an Italo-Celtic node in
>the splitting-up of the IE unity.  Similar arguments could be set up for
>some of the points uniting Baltic and Slavic which look strong enough in
>themselves to carry the burden of proof even if they were not supported by
>others.

Languages don4t only borrow words or formations because they don4t have an
adequate expression for a concept. Simply imitating a formation seen as more
expressive or the usage of a language which is seen as more prestigious also
plays a role. A good example from modern German is the borrowing of the
English way of expressing the year in which an event happened. The
traditional way in German is to say "Es geschah 1999.", but now quite often
one can find "Es geschah in 1999.", which is a clear calque on English. The
reason behind this is, of course, the big prestige of the English language,
its far-spread knowledge, and also that this formation is more expressive
than the traditional German one. A superlative formation seems to be a good
candidate for borrowing on grounds of expressiveness.
I don4t want to say that the superlative formation quoted cannot serve as
proof for Italo-Celtic unity. But if there is only one example (in this
case, of course, there are more than one, but the evidence is still
inconclusive), one can never exclude borrowing. The only thing it proves is
that the speakers of Proto-Celtic and Proto-Italic have been living close
enough to borrow from one another.
I would like to add the following to the general discussion:
1.) No quantity of matches can ever prove genetic relationship. One can
probably find thousands of matches between, e.g., French and English or
Latin and Albanian, without Albanian or English being Romance languages.
2.) There is, as far as I knoe, some sort of communis opinio on that certain
matches (from basic vocabulary, grammatical morphemes) are more important
for proving genetical relationship than others.
3.) I would recommend that if one has collected one4s matches, one should
try a reconstruction. If the results are a decent basic vocabulary, and a
basic common grammar, the languages examined are most probably genetically
interrelated. There4s of course the question how to define "decent basic
vocabulary" and "basic common grammar", and that4s (besides the
questionableness of many matches) the main problem for wide-range
reconstructions like Nostratic, Proto-World etc. Anyone interested in
formulating some minimalist criteria?
4.) Always look at the history behind the matches. Are their historical
links between the carriers of the respective languages, and of which kind
are they? This is of course impossible if the history is not known, and if
one wants to use language to reconstruct history.
--
Essentially, I think a numerical approach does not take us very far. The
most important question seems to me, can we reconstruct a system based on
the matches, and what does it look like? If we get a basic grammar and basic
vocabulary, there are strong reasons to suspect genetical relationship; if
we get (say) a group of religious words, we can assume borrowing based on
religious influences, and so on. Here, of course, numbers play a role - one
simply needs a sufficient number of matches to constitute a system. But if
we have to small a number of matches to form a convincing system, only
historical evidence can help.

Best regards,
Hans-Werner Hatting, mag. phil.



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