IE as a paradigm case

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Alexis writes:
 
> Note 4: IE is not a very good standard by which to judge
> language families; nor has it been unchallenged in modern
> times (see Trubetzkoy and his followers again). Uto-aztecan
> is a far better standard and the one I always use.
 
I agree with the first statement, though not for all of the same
reasons, and I hope to submit a posting on this when I get some time.
 
However, I must comment on Trubetzkoy's so-called challenge.
Trubetzkoy, Uhlenbeck and Tovar (at least) have all challenged the
received view that PIE existed and that the IE languages are descended
from it.  All of them argued for a quite different view: the IE
languages arose out of some kind of mixing process involving two or
more quite distinct languages or families, hence PIE never existed,
and hence our reconstruction of it is a phantasm.  This is a version
of what has more recently been dubbed the "rhizotic" model of
linguistic descent.
 
Now I have read some (not all) of this work, and I have to say it
strikes me as totally crazy.  It is not that rhizotic languages cannot
exist: the recent work on mixed languages has demonstrated that they
can and do exist.  However, whatever one may think of the frequency or
rarity of rhizotic languages, the ones we know about look nothing at
all like any IE language.  The very fact that we have been so
successful in reconstructing PIE, both in phonology and in morphology,
surely puts paid to any suggestion that it never existed.
 
Even Bob Dixon, who has recently been querying the reality of
proto-languages generally -- including that of Proto-Pama-Nyungan, to
which he himself has contributed a good deal of reconstructive work --
has not gone so far as to deny the reality of PIE.
 
I would suggest, therefore, that the efforts of Trubetzkoy and others
to challenge the reality of IE and of PIE cannot be taken seriously.
The rhizotic idea itself is not *a priori* crazy, but its application
to IE surely is.
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk