Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic

[Sean Crist]

Let me recap the discussion.  Steve Long discussed a hypothetical case in
which the Indo-European proto-language remained wholly unchanged over many
centuries, with a daughter occasionally branching off from it and
innovating. I said that this couldn't happen because no living language is
static; a parent language can't co-exist with its daughter.

Several on the list have brought up cases such as Latin, Sanskrit, and
Arabic as counterexamples to that last assertion.  Part of the problem is
in defining what we mean by a "living language".  If you want to take it
to include languages used for scholarly/liturgical purposes and
artificially kept static by a conscious, prescriptivist, scholarly effort,
then I'll concede that these languages are counterexamples to my claim.
However, there are some important qualifications.

First, Steve Long's hypothetical case was one which was placed in
prehistory.  I strongly suspect that literacy is a necessary prerequisite
for artificially keeping a language static over many centuries.  In
principle, this a is falsifiable claim: if we find a modern, pre-literate
culture in which there are "high" and "low" registers of the language, and
if we conduct comparative and/or internal reconstruction on the "low"
variety and end up with a reconstruction which is essentially identical to
the "high" variety (at least as close as Classical Latin is to
reconstructed Proto-Romance), then it would look like a counterexample to
what I've just asserted.  I don't know that such cases exist.

Second, the main point in Steve Long's hypothetical case was not merely
that a language could remain unchanged over time, but that daughter
languages could periodically branch off from it and innovate.  It doesn't
appear that artificially preserved literary languages are able to continue
branching in this manner; for example, after the initial branching of
Romance into Spanish, Italian, etc., there is no later, novel 12th century
branching from literary Latin to some innovative daughter language.

So for the purposes of answering Steve Long's earlier post, I stick by my
original claim that the hypothetical situation he posed could not
have happened.  I do concede that Latin, Sanskrit, and Arabic are
problematic for a strong version of the claim that no language can
co-exist with its daughter.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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