the Wheel and Dating PIE

[Richard M. Alderson III]

Roz Frank wrote:

> Then does the IE model posit that PIE, understood here as an actual unified
> linguistic system, was a linguistic isolate? It would seem that the model
> would have to do this.

Not so much "posit" as "treat":  With very few exceptions, the first 175 years
or so of Indo-European linguistics held as a tenet that while PIE probably had
relatives, we didn't know enough about PIE (yet) to give the question further
consideration.

> And even if PIE were posited as an isolate, would one not have to propose
> that, nonetheless, the proto-language, too, would have had the full
> characteristics of a human language, with the likelihood of suppletions,
> irregularities and substrata.

Of course.  We have always recognized (i. e., I was taught as an undergrad ;-)
that our information about PIE will always be incomplete, since methods such as
internal reconstruction smooth away irregularities, as do natural processes
like paradigmatic re-modeling (which can get rid of suppletions altogether).
We know that there were suppletive verb paradigms in the language--some have
survived into modern languages like English and Spanish.

All of these teachings assume that nothing like Nostratic will ever be workably
reconstructed to the degree that PIE has been, and tacitly urge that until such
material *is* available, we needn't look at it at all.

> How does the model guarantee that the ultimate origin of the "common
> vocabulary" should not be traced back, for example, to the substrata that
> PIE, if understood as a natural language, must have had?

The model does not even address this question:  PIE is defined as what we can
reconstruct by the comparative method alone.  Anything else, whether achieved
by internal reconstruction or lexical inspection, is assigned to a nebulous
past by calling it "pre-(P)IE", or is assigned to borrowing from a known
external source.

> ... are we to understand PIE as a convenient shorthand for a set of sharted
> characteristics or as a term standing for a reified linguistic system spoken
> in prehistory? And if it is understood as the second, according to the model,
> how long did it just tread water? Stated differently, if one chooses the
> second version, then one must ask how long the unified (undifferentiated)
> linguistic system, as portrayed by the reconstructions, go unchanged.
> Languages do change. Are we to assume that PIE was different?

Coming out of the comparative method, it's "a convenient shorthand".  Viewing
it as "a reified linguistic system spoken in prehistory" is an interpretation
of that shorthand, and an ill-advised one at that.  We can assign some relative
timelines to our reconstructions (e. g., "thematic stem formations are late"),
but we should not allow ourselves to believe everything we can reconstruct from
the data in the daughter languages, or by internal reconstruction on those
results, ever formed a single coherent language at a single point in time.

NB:  I certainly am not denying that such a language existed, as some have been
led to do (like Trubetzkoy and Boas), only that what we reconstruct represents
accurately and completely any single stage thereof.

								Rich Alderson