IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com> wrote:

>(a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, creoles.

But creolization has nothing to do per se with language mixing.

>It has
>even been suggested that the entire Germanic branch of IE is in fact a
>creole.

Give me one good reason.  Sounds like linguistics by fashion.

>Genetically (in your terms), English is equally
>related to both French and Italian.   I find it more helpful to accept a
>wider use of "related" in such a way that it allows me to indicate that
>plural forms and a range of other stuff in English actually are "related" to
>French but not "related" to Italian, and that therefore English has a
>different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical one

There's a range of other stuff allright, but no plurals.

>(b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of daughter
>languages is widely disputed.   Some people accept the idea that a
>collection of interrelated languages might never have had a single ancestor,
>but as far back as you care to go were simply a collection of inter-related
>languages.  The language/dialect issue comes up here.   We talk of IE
>"dialects" within PIE, but this is simply terminology.   The point is that
>there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified PIE
>language.

Nevertheless, there certainly was a PIE.  Now define "single" and "unified".

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl