IE versus *PIE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 5/13/01 10:12:32 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
colkitto at sprint.ca writes:

> and linguists may have to discuss family trees in the same way that
> cartographers discuss Mercator's Projection (even Peter's may not entirely
> free of such problems.

-- this is, I think, a good analogy.

It would also be useful to think of language (as indeed culture in general)
as following a Lamarkian rather than Darwinian model of genetic descent.
That is, acquired cultural traits can be "inherited".

Any widespread language is always full of incipient daughter languages, as
dialects spontaneously form and then merge back into the main stem in most
cases; in fact, some quite divergent forms can be re-assimilated, as in the
case of Gullah or Lallans, both of which in their different ways had
almost, but not quite, reached the status of full-blown daughter languages.
 If Scotland had continued to be an independent political entity with its
own standard 'court' form, today it might well be as distinct from Standard
English as Norwegian is from Danish.

For that matter, without modern communications, English would probably be
in the process of splitting into a language-family analagous to Romance
right now, given the very broad geographical spread over the past 500 years
and the existance of numerous, and quite sharply distinct, dialects.