Linguists like to argue!?
Salikoko S. Mufwene
mufw at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU
Fri May 24 11:44:44 UTC 2002
James Landau proposes a position once advocated by Nikolai Trubezkoy in 1939: "Gedanken über Indogermanenproblem" in Acta Linguistica 1.81-89. I am not sure that anything similar to the creole lifecycle, for which I maintain that there is no compelling empirical evidence, played a role in the process. But I too believe strongly that language contact was an important factor in the speciation of an already variable proto-IE group of languages or language varieties. History has always suggested such a thing.
Sali.
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Salikoko S. Mufwene
University of Chicago
Department of Linguistics
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Tph: (773)702-8531; Fax: (773)834-0924
s-mufwene at uchicago.edu
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mufwene
ON LEAVE till September 2002 but still receiving e-mail
sent to this Chicago address.
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