IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[petegray]

> No.  Relationship is an absolute.  ....
>Genetically related languages were once the same language.

Sorry, Bob, I can't agree, and I suspect you're in a minority these days
(though I may be wrong!).

(a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, creoles.  It has
even been suggested that the entire Germanic branch of IE is in fact a
creole.   I think it is unhelpful to restrict our understanding of
relationship to a yes-no either/or.   You might have trouble describing a
creole without distorting facts to fit your definition.

It is ultimately only a matter of which method of description we prefer, but
I do believe it is unhelpful to restrict the term "related" to mean
"genetically related".   Genetically (in your terms), English is equally
related to both French and Italian.   I find it more helpful to accept a
wider use of "related" in such a way that it allows me to indicate that
plural forms and a range of other stuff in English actually are "related" to
French but not "related" to Italian, and that therefore English has a
different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical one

(b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of daughter
languages is widely disputed.   Some people accept the idea that a
collection of interrelated languages might never have had a single ancestor,
but as far back as you care to go were simply a collection of inter-related
languages.  The language/dialect issue comes up here.   We talk of IE
"dialects" within PIE, but this is simply terminology.   The point is that
there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified PIE
language.

Peter