IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Robert Whiting]

On Mon, 31 Jan 2000, Hans Holm wrote:

<snip>
> "Relationship" is _always and only_ a question of degrees and ways.

No.  Relationship is an absolute.  Either two (or more) languages are
related or they are not.  This is the basic hypothesis of historical
linguistics.  It is based on the observation that certain languages have
greater similarities than can be accounted for by chance or borrowing (=
convergence).  The hypothesis is that such languages were once one and the
same language.  Genetically related languages were once the same language.
There is no other way to define genetic relationships in historical
linguistics.  The "degrees and ways" are only a matter of how long the
languages have been separated, whether they have been completely isolated
from each other during that time, and how many and what kinds of changes
they have undergone since they separated.  But genetic relationship in
historical linguistics means "sprung from some common source."

> Just try to calculate the number of _unrelated_ ancestors for you or
> me before 10^n generations or years and your calculator will soon
> respond with 'overflow'.

This is totally irrelevant.  If one wants to adopt a biological model
for languages, it must be mitosis, not meiosis.  Languages do not need
a mommy language and a daddy language to have baby languages.  At the
point at which a language splits both (all) parts are identical.  As
the daughter languages exist in isolation they diverge more and more
over time (and yes, the parent is also a daughter -- when an amoeba
reproduces by mitosis there is no way to tell which is the original
and which is the offspring).  But two genetically related languages
have only one common ancestor, not the myriad unrelated ancestors that
biological entities that reproduce sexually require.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi