Accuracy vs."Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic"

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/8/99 4:06:14 AM, Sean Crist wrote:
<<Let me recap the discussion.... I said that this couldn't happen because no
living language is static; a parent language can't co-exist with its
daughter.>>

This is incorrect. And inaccurate.

This discussion began with Larry Trask's statement:
<<No.  An ancestral language cannot co-exist with its own descendant.>>

In a message  Mon, 30 Aug 1999, Rick Mc Callister argued with the quote:
<<No.  An ancestral language cannot co-exist with its own descendant.>>

In a message dated 8/31/99 10:40:36 PM, you finally began your message by
quoting Rick Mc Callister: <<No.  An ancestral language cannot co-exist with
its own descendant.>>

My response on this issue was was: <<Obviously there's nothing logically that
keeps speakers of a parent tongue from continuing to speak the parent tongue
the day after some distant dialect officially becomes a different
"language.">>  Still seems to make pretty darn good sense.

I don't see any place where you said "a parent language can't co-exist with
its daughter" before Trask said it.

In fact you brought up a completely difference issue in your response.
What you wrote was:  <<You're starting with a premise which contradicts all
of our experience; it just doesn't ever happen that a language is static.
All living languages, it seems, are in prepetual change.>>

I explained that experience was no barrier to taking an hypothetical extreme
case to test the technique.  We've never experienced absolute zero Kelvin,
but scientists have no problem using it as hypothetical base point for
measuring absolute temperatures.  There are a hundred other examples.

The main objection to using these kinds of hypotheses are from those whose
systems are too weak to withstand the test.

More importantly, our whole discussion was about the "innovations" being used
in the Stammbaum.

It really doesn't matter if my hypothetical language innovated like crazy.
The REAL POINT is that it DID NOT ADOPT any of the innovations assigned to
the descending branches in the Stammbaum.  My hypothetical language could
have been very innovative.  It just did not share the innovations you
identify with the branching of Anatolian, Tocharian, Italo-Gallic, etc.

That language B-T-W actually comes right out of the Stammbaum.  It is the
"narrow PIE" or proto-language that keeps hanging around while the various
nodes branch-off with innovations.

Finally, I am not stupid enough to argue that a language can exist for any
period of time without innovating.  Neither am I stupid enough to try to
prove that a language must always innovate in every direction all the time.
But both ideas are really VERY irrelevant to what we're talking about here.

Regards,
Steve