isoltes

[Mark Hale]

Alexander Vovin writes:
 
> Austric (as consisting of Austronesian and
> Austroasiatic, but not including Kadai) is accepted nowadays by all
> known to me leading scholars in both Austroneasian and
> Austroasiatic.
 
No, it isn't. Or rather, maybe it is, but this only indicates that
you don't know very many Austronesianists. An assertion that any such
family (Austric) has been demonstrated to exist by the normal canons
of the comparative method is absurd, given the published material
on the subject. Indeed, the reconstruction of Austroasiatic itself
is still very tentative -- if indeed it existed, which I personally
seriously doubt. [I.e., I doubt there is any family which has the
makeup of the currently declared makeup of Austroasiatic, though
doubtless many of the languages within that putative group are
related to one another.]
 
Can someone tell me why the question of "isolates" is of any
linguistic interest whatsoever? If we all accept, as I assume we
must, that the definition of "language" is a socio-political one,
then the question reduces to "why do we sometimes find groups of
speakers, sociopolitically defined to be speakers of 'one
language', who can't be demonstrated, given the limited nature
of our evidence, the small number of scholars who have invested
a small amount of time (seen from a human history perspective)
working on them, and the extremely limited number of plausibly
reconstructed language families which we could possibly relate
them to, to be related to another language?"  The answer is then,
of course, contained in the question. We don't have the right
kind of evidence (yet), for the reasons I've inserted into the
question, and we may never have the evidence. Without such evidence,
the languages will count as 'isolates'. But it isn't a property
of the language -- it's a property of the evidentiary record.
Sometimes it's good and allows reconstruction of an ancestor,
sometimes it isn't and doesn't. Is this surprising or interesting
in any way?
 
Mark