LL-L: "Celtic connections" LOWLANDS-L, 26.OCT.1999 (03) [E]

Tue Oct 26 15:35:18 UTC 1999

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From: Ian James Parsley [parsley at highbury.fsnet.co.uk]
Subject: LL-L: "Celtic connections" LOWLANDS-L, 25.OCT.1999 (08) [E]

Ron,

Thanks for pointing out a bad lack of clarity in my original piece to Mark
and other new members.

When I referred to English splitting from French, I strictly speaking meant
the time Germanic split from Romance - i.e. that the time English split from
French was the same time German split from French and English split from
Italian etc. etc. I should have been clearer there - you should by no means
infer that English split from French any more than French split from
English.

The reason I used that particular example was I studied the Morrish/Lees
"lexicostatics" hypothesis last year, which in fact I disproved in my
undergraduate dissertation by applying to German strong verbs. It states,
according to agreements in the vocabulary of 100 core words, that English
and French could have split from each other no earlier than 1000BC, when the
accepted date is at least 500 years before that. (It also states,
incidentally, that German split up more recently from Danish than it did
from English, something we KNOW to be completely false!).

Best regards,
-------------------------------
Ian James Parsley
http://www.gcty.com/parsleyij
"JOY - Jesus, Others, You"

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From: Ronald Sheen [Ronald_Sheen at UQTR.UQuebec.CA]
Subject: LL-L: "Celtic connections" LOWLANDS-L, 25.OCT.1999 (08) [E]

Writing potted histories of anything is a risky business; it is
death-defying when it comes to a subject that has been the focus of such
intense academic scrutiny as has the field of IE languages.  Some of the
perils have already been mentioned by Reinhard and I may have another to
add.  However, before coming to that a word of praise to Ian for risking
his neck in presenting his own potted history and this because in doing so
it may well lead some of us to the reassessment of  past assumptions.  If
not Ian then maybe me.

Ian says:

PIE "split up into different dialects, which
>became unintelligible (i.e. incomprehensible) from each other, probably some
>time in the second millennium BCE, as tribes moved to new areas and came
>into contact with new things."

Now I'm no HEL expert but following various books, I teach that the IE
diaspora began about 5000 BC (though I do recall seeing one book which put
it at a much earlier date).  However, if we assume that both my 5000 and
Ian's 2000 are correct, does this not raise some queries.  During those
first three thousand years, were all those IE speakers mutually
comprehensible?  My own assumption is that given the nature of language
change and the movement of peoples some degree of incomprehensibility must
have been present much earlier than 2000 BC.

As I am here to be enlightened and not to enlighten, I'd appreciate any
clarification/discussion on this point.

Ron Sheen  U of Quebec in Trois Rivieres, Canada.

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From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Celtic connections

Dear Ian,

Thanks for your clarification above.  I most certainly don't want to come
across as nit-picking, and I would never dream of trying to give you a hard
time or anything like that.  However, I have to say that there is still
something in your wording (or is it your thinking?) that confuses me.

You wrote:

> When I referred to English splitting from French, I strictly speaking meant
> the time Germanic split from Romance - i.e. that the time English split from

> French was the same time German split from French and English split from
> Italian etc. etc. I should have been clearer there - you should by no means
> infer that English split from French any more than French split from
> English.

I have no horrendous quarrel with the "When I referred to English splitting
from French, I strictly speaking meant the time Germanic split from Romance
..." bit, although seeing Germanic specifically splitting from Romance may not
be factually based.  Is there any evidence to show that the two branches ever
constituted one branch that later got split?  Sure, they both belong to the
Indo-European family, but for all we know they may have split off from
separate proto branches.  Just because the two, and also Celtic, Slavic,
Baltic, to name only a few more, happen to have developed in Europe ought not
lead us to jump to the conclusion that all of their proto-forms made up one
European branch of IE.  Clearly, migration of IE speakers into Europe was a
very complex process with a number of waves and streams, not to mention
mingling with non-IE languages.  For all we know, separation may have occurred
elsewhere in various ways for each of the branches.

In fact, it is by some believed that the Romance branch and the Celtic branch
grew from a common "Celto-Italo-Tokharian" branch of IE, while the Germanic
and Balto-Slavic (> Baltic and Slavic) branches grew from a common
"Balto-Slavo-Germanic" branch of IE.  (See e.g.
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/6507/illustration122.jpg, but it is
flawed; e.g., "Flemish" branching off from "Low German" before "Dutch"did, and
"Afrikaans" is not even mentioned, nor is "Yiddish" shown to branch off "High
German").  This makes the genealogical relationship between Germanic and
Romance fairly distant.

I have a bit more of a quarrel with this part:

> that the time English split from
> French was the same time German split from French and English split from
> Italian etc. etc. I should have been clearer there - you should by no means
> infer that English split from French any more than French split from
> English.

This makes it sound as though individual Germanic languages parted ways with
individual Romance languages.  Surely it is more correct to say that first a
Germanic branch/proto-language and a Romance branch/proto-language came into
existence (descending from two separate branches, as explained earlier) and
*then* each gradually developed sub-branches and individual languages.  In
other words, English and French never parted ways.  They were cousins several
times removed who at some time came into contact with each other.

Yes, I entirely agree with Ronald's caution regarding "potted history."  (What
a fun way of putting it!)  I think we can sense the danger already in our
little attempts here.  Thanks for these valiant efforts, though.

Best regards,

Reinhard/Ron

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