IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Ante Aikio]

On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, petegray wrote:

> (a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, creoles.  It has
> even been suggested that the entire Germanic branch of IE is in fact a
> creole.   I think it is unhelpful to restrict our understanding of
> relationship to a yes-no either/or.   You might have trouble describing a
> creole without distorting facts to fit your definition.

Creoles are a well-known exception. Some maintain that creoles have
multiple genetic ancestors, but it can be argued that creoles are not in
fact "genetically" related to any language (this view is taken by
e.g. Thomason & Kaufmann in their book Language Contact, Creolization, and
Genetic Linguistics). And because of this the comparative method is not
applicable to creoles. Since the comparative method is applicable to
Germanic, Germanic is not a creole - and note that if it was, it wouldn't
even be an IE language branch in the first place.

> It is ultimately only a matter of which method of description we prefer, but
> I do believe it is unhelpful to restrict the term "related" to mean
> "genetically related".   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

This is not really a matter of preferration. It is the basic assumption
of historical linguistics that there is a qualitative difference between
borrowing and inheritance. Even extensive borrowing has no implication on
genetic connections (if it did, e.g. Saami and Finnish would rather
be Indo-European than Uralic). This assumption is also the basis of the
comparative method - if it is rejected, the method is inapplicable and
there is no way to study historical linguistics.

 Ante Aikio