isoltes

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

Mark Hale <hale1 at ALCOR.CONCORDIA.CA> wrote:
 
>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?"
 
You are confusing "relatedness" with "reconstruction", something which
Merritt Ruhlen just loves to denounce.  You don't need a reconstructed
proto-language to know whether two languages are related or not. 
 
A case in point is Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic), considered a valid
grouping for over a century, where only now we are seeing serious
attempts at reconstruction (and they differ enough among themselves to
cast doubts on whether they are all equally "plausible").
 
The reconstruction of PIE has not changed the membership of the family
one bit [although it has shown for instance that Armenian is in fact
not an Iranian language], which was obvious from the start [Hittite
and Tocharian were discovered later].  What reconstruction *can* do,
is to show relationships that were not quite so obvious previously,
and, most importantly, it can show that relationships which were
thought possible (but not obvious) previously are in fact false.  I
would imagine, for instance, that the work done on reconstructing Old
Chinese has been crucial in dismissing any close genetic relationship
between Chinese and Thai or Vietnamese.
 
 
==
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal                     ~ ~
Amsterdam                   _____________  ~ ~
mcv at pi.net                 |_____________|||
 
========================== Ce .sig n'est pas une .cig