IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Robert Whiting]

On Wed, 23 Feb, Hans Holm <Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de> wrote:

>RW>has been dropped in the last 10 years and replaced with
>RW>something like 'related languages are those that have some
>RW>features in common or are somehow connected', or 'there is no
>RW>such thing as genetically related languages'.

>French and Rumanian have Latin as one common ancestor language.

>Only in this sense they are said to be genealogically related
>and named Romance languages.

And in historical linguistics this is the only sense that
'related' has.

>Anttila shows that not in all cases it is clear which language
>should be called the "mother language" insofar as we prefer
>lexical versus grammatical & morphological features as criterion.
>Take Albanian with a rest of 10% (!) of original lexemes (cf.
>Anttila 89:172), but nobody hesitates to name it an /IE
>language/.

All of which is quite true, and all of which is quite beside the
point (irrelevant).  The degree of difficulty of establishing
relatedness is not part of the definition of 'related'.  If
'related' is defined (as it is in historical linguistics) as
"sprung from some common source", then 'non-related' languages are
not "not sprung from some common source" and that is the end of
the matter.  The ease or difficulty of demonstrating relatedness,
or even the impossibility of demonstrating unrelatedness, simply
does not affect the definition.

In human beings it is sometimes difficult to determine if an
individual is male or female by normal criteria.  But this does
not affect the general division of human beings into male and
female.

Relatedness is an absolute (by definition).  Languages are either
related or they are not (by definition).  The difficulty of
establishing relatedness does not change this.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi