The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The NeolithicHypothesis]

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl
Mon Apr 5 15:00:59 UTC 1999


X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>Two other factors are worth consideration.  One is the possible removal of
>early "branches" that could affect the accuracy of reconstruction.  The other
>is the convergence that occurred when later dialects were standardized or
>heavily borrowed from.

>For example in a message dated 3/15/99 5:21:05 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote with
>regard to early PIE dialects:
><< ...any initial dialect gradients that came into being have been
>destroyed by later language spreads.  Celtic has been largely
>swallowed up by Romance and Germanic, the Slavic and Hungarian
>spreads have replaced whatever gradients there were in Eastern
>Europe with new dialect gradients.  Etcetera.>>  This kind of "swallowing up"
>might lead us to accept the trait of an intermediate language as the trait of
>an earlier ancestor.

Of course loss of data is by definition a bad thing for
reconstruction.  And history is lossy.  There is always a real
possibility that we might mistake later innovations for
"proto-stuff" (because only the branches carrying the innovation
survived) and miss things that *were* in the proto-language
because the branches that retained them have died out.
But as long as not all the branches have been ripped off, it
should still be possible for us to recognize the "tree", if there
is one.

>It makes sense that such convergences, if mistakenly seen as commonalities
>resulting from a common ancestor or PIE itself, could skew reconstruction
>away from a true triangulation.  This would be especially true in large
>wholesale characterizations such as centum/satem, where convergences of later
>diffused terms of trade or uniformity might give a false impression of early
>ancestry.  Given the massive amount of words involved however it would seem
>that numbers alone favor the reliability of reconstruction in general.

Indeed.  The point is that PIE may well have been a "mixture" of
languages, but if so (and it ain't necessarily so), it was a
mixture of languages that were closely related to begin with
(like Latin and Romance, OCS and Russian, Anglian and Saxon).  We
still have a tree, just a very bushy one.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam



More information about the Indo-european mailing list