reality of PIE

[Larry Trask]

Pete Gray writes:

[quoting]

>  > No.  Relationship is an absolute.  ....
>  >Genetically related languages were once the same language.

>  Sorry, Bob, I can't agree, and I suspect you're in a minority these days
>  (though I may be wrong!).

You are, I'm afraid.  The statement above is true not just because all
linguists believe it: it is true by definition.  Languages which do not
descend from a common ancestor are not genetically related.

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

Yes, but this observation is not a counterexample to the statement above.

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

Perhaps it has, but Proto-Germanic, with its stunningly complex nominal
and adjectival morphology, looks nothing like a creole.  But it looks for
all the world like a daughter of PIE.

>  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.

Not true, I'm afraid.

>  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".

And I'd say that extending the label 'related' to any and all languages
between which we can find any kind of connection whatsoever would be a very
bad idea.  To do so would be to replace clear and important distinctions with
an absence of distinctions.

>  Genetically (in your terms), English is equally
>  related to both French and Italian.

"Genetically", in *everybody's* terms.

>  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,

Sorry.  I don't think the English plural is historically cognate with the
French plural, but I don't have my IE notes handy.  Can an IEist confirm
or deny this?

And what range of other stuff?  Apart from borrowed vocabulary, I mean.

>  and that therefore English has a
>  different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical one

We already have a perfectly adequate vocabulary to describe this state of
affairs: English has borrowed a lot more words from French than from Italian.
Or, to put it more formally, the influence of French upon the English
lexicon has been vastly greater than that of Italian.

This statement is both fully adequate and completely explicit.  What is the
point of inventing non-existent "relationships", and confusing these with
genetic links?

>  (b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of daughter
>  languages is widely disputed.

Really?  By whom?

>  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.

OK; let's have some specifics.  Who has proposed this, and for what languages,
and on the basis of what evidence?

>  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.

Yes, there is.  Without a tolerably unified PIE we cannot account for the
observed data in the daughter languages.

The IE languages do not merely exhibit miscellaneous and unsystematic
collections of broadly shared features.  They all derive from a largely
reconstructible common ancestor in a highly orderly manner.  And this
is simply not consistent with the non-existence of PIE.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk