Zompist Bboard Again

(although I still think "language change looks tree-like on large scales" is undeniably true). On this point, you just need to look at the difficulties with subgrouping in families like PIE. Some people say, for instance, that Greek forms a distinctive subgroup with Indo-Aryan; others hav...

It is the same with Indo-European, on a larger scale. Yes, there have been expansion and diffusion processes, with massive amounts of loaning. But that does not change the fact that we can reconstruct a single Proto-Indo-European language from which the basic grammar and lexicon has descended. OK. ...

I think you missed the bit where he denied the existence of a single common ancestor (or at least sounded like he denied it, as usual he’s never straight with his answers): If the classical genealogical tree model is inadequate for the IE family, it follows there's no single common ancestor for IE ...

The difficulty of subgrouping in IE is due to the rapid expansion of the family in the 3rd millennium BC. In 3000 BC, it is limited to the Pontic Steppe (already a rather large area - it is about 2,000 km from the Danube to the Ural - so there will have been different dialects); 1000 years later, i...

I have two questions: 1. How did they all stay protolanguages for that long? (also, how did they stay distinct enough to be recognizable as different protolanguages?) Surely, I didn't mean these protolanguages lasted for so long, but the whole process which ultimately lead to the historical IE lang...

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Jun 04, 2024 3:38 pmIn fact the tree model is pretty bad, in general. François has a nice preprint which goes into considerable detail about why and how. I strongly recommend that Talskubilos read it, in order to understand how historical linguistics actually works.

Thank you for the reference!

So this and what other arguments do you have to defend your hypothesis, as opposed to aaall the arguments in favor of the tree model? As regarding to the +2000 items in IE lexicon (morphology has to be studied separately), I've found some internal correspondences among them, pointing to an origin f...

From my own research, I've found out the classical genealogical tree isn't an adequate model for the IE family, If only there were hundreds years worth of linguistic research - done by dozens of linguists - which establishes and ascertains the tree model for the IE family. Truth doesn't depend on a...

Not so much ‘unconvincing’ as ‘refusing to give a straight answer’. I remember him ‘answering’ in almost precisely the same words when I asked him the same question, a while back. (And I never have seen him give any straight answer since then.) From my own research, I've found out the classical gen...

Zju wrote: ↑Tue Jun 04, 2024 11:52 am It looks uncovincing to me.

I was about to say that but you got to it first. Inherited words are obvious because they obey regular sound change in most cases, and when words are borrowed they typically don't follow regular sound change s . That's right. Also notice "in most cases" and "typically" means PIE...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Jun 04, 2024 10:44 amAgreed. It is pretty much useless to argue with him.

Not really. Simply, I don't believe in some dogmas of mainstream/academical linguistics, that's all.

Zju wrote: ↑Tue Jun 04, 2024 10:36 amTalskubilos, do you think Indoeuropean languages originated from a single protolanguage or not?

In the sense of the classical genealogical tree model, definitely not.

Every historical linguist keeps in mind that our reconstruction of PIE is an amalgam reflecting multiple dialects spoken during different time periods. How does this add anything to the discussion? That's right. My own view is that the IE family is the result of a series (often complex) of expansio...

Well, it seems as if Talskubilos questions the entire language family model. If I have understood him correctly, he thinks that there never was a common ancestor language of all IE languages, with dialectal divisions and time stages or without, but the IE languages converged towards each other by e...

That's a dubious distinction. If you zoom in on any language it disappears - the way I speak isn't the same as the way my mother speaks, the way they speak in London isn't the same as the way they speak in Manchester, the way we speak in the UK isn't the same as the way they speak in Oregon, but we...

Likewise, Talskubilos's notion that the mainstream Indo-Europeanists think of PIE as a pristine language without either a prehistory or contact with neighbouring languages is a strawman. Not really. My point is what mainstream Indo-Europeanists call "PIE" is far from being one single lang...

Indeed, there are various theories about the origin of the nominative singular suffix *-s , but they do not really impact the mainstream opinion about s-mobile. Fact is, PIE had this suffix, for which reason ever, so it may have left its mark on following words, especially considering that an overt...

This is something I personally favor in proto-language discussions. Just because a language is reconstructed as we know it does not mean that it as a language spoken by real people in the past is any different from any other language. PIE-speakers were real human beings just like any of us, not jus...

It looks uncovincing to me. Processes like that exist. Look at the history of Englis adder , or older English nuncle as a by-form of uncle , where the final /n/ of the indefinite article and / or possessive pronouns mine, thine caused the deletion in one case and the accretion in another case of an...