Whimemsz wrote: ↑Tue Sep 10, 2019 10:47 pm
There just don't seem to be many readily identifiable cognates (unless you go Proulx's route and cheat). If all we had access to were modern Romance languages (with no attestations from before 1500 and limited attestations of most of the languages until the late 19th century), plus Armenian, plus Albanian (and also Armenian and Albanian are now both dead and all the documentation we have of them is three-four books written by linguists of varying quality, some texts, and some audio recordings, all from the 20th century [also none of the three branches share any loanwords with one another, and Albanian and Armenian lack any particularly distinctive dialects]) -- which I think is a better analog for what we have in terms of Algic languages -- I think it would be virtually impossible to reconstruct very much of PIE.
Really? I think we'd work it out. Well no - I think a lot of the grammar might be completely unrecoverable, but I think the basic sound system and much of the core vocabulary could be...
*looks at Albanian and Armenian Swadesh list...*
...OK no, you're probably right. And a lot of the cognates we'd find between Italian and Albanian would actually be loanwords from Latin...
Although it does seem a bit suspicious that we happen to only have the Armenian and Albanian of the family...
Peter Denny, the archaeologist mentioned in the blog post, who links the pre-Proto-Algonquian speakers on the Columbia Plateau with the Western Idaho Archaic burial complex, also suggests two older burial sites in the area as representing Proto-Algic speakers, namely the Cascade Phase burials (ca. 4800 BC) and DeMoss burial site (ca. 4000 BC), which supposedly share a number of features with Western Idaho Archaic (and were identified by a previous author as the antecedents of Western Idaho Archaic).
I'm a bit suspicious, though - I suspect that if you pick a time period, you'll be able to find a candidate culture...
What I think is far more significant, though, is just that some of these languages seem to be ridiculously more conservative than others, for reasons we can only speculate about. The given Proto-Algic reconstructions can perfectly account for not only PA, but also the Wiyot and Yurok forms, so there's no reason to think that, say, Wiyot and Yurok split off from an older language that later gave rise to PA -- the available evidence simply indicates that PA was extremely conservative, at lease phonologically
See, this makes me wonder whether part of the problem is with the reconstructions rigging the game more substantially.
Just because a given form is able to account for all the descendents doesn't mean it was the actual parent form. In particular, what I worry might have happened here is that this 'Proto-Algic' may actually be a form of Early Proto-Algonquian from which the sound values of Proto-Algic are still more or less "recoverable", such that it's possible to falsely derive Ritwan from it. Since many of these changes seem weird to begin with, it's hard to be certain of the direction of change in some cases. Particularly if all the daughter languages underwent similar chages.
But maybe that doesn't make sense.
Then there are some daughter languages of PA that are phonologically ridiculously conservative (Meskwaki, at least as spoken up to the beginning of the 20th century, is definitely the most conservative [and yes, the circumflex marks vowel length], but this category also includes languages like Ojibwe and western Cree), others that show a moderate degree of change like we would expect of a 2,000-3,000 year old family (e.g., Menominee and Massachusett), a few that show rather more dramatic but not insane changes (Mi'kmaq [Mi'kmaq is both fairly phonologically innovative and very lexically and grammatically innovative] and East Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi), and some (Blackfoot, Arapahoan, Cheyenne) that show a batshit level of innovation. Some of the batshit ones still retain a large amount of native Algonquian vocabulary (Arapahoan, Cheyenne), while Blackfoot has very few cognates with other Algonquian languages, and as noted, Mi'kmaq, though less batshit in terms of phonological innovation, has also had very significant lexical turnover.
I suppose my point again, to put it another way, is: there's an infinite number of possible parent languages that could explain all daughters in a family. Linguists pick the most 'likely' on the basis of aesthetic taste, citing subjective ideas like parsimony. But the most parsimonious from a given data set isn't necessarily the right one. In particular, I suspect that people are systematically biased toward older-established members of families and more numerous subgroupings.
So, in your PIE what-if, I suspect linguists, given only Romance, Albanian and Armenian, would reconstruct PIE as looking very like Latin, but with a few small changes to allow the other languages to be derived - leaving Romance looking very conservative indeed, and Albanian and Armenian looking as insane as it was possible to be while still being plausibly derivable.
[I mean, obviously, Albanian IS insane, and Armenian is half-insane and has a split personality due to overwhelming borrowing... but my point is that in this scenario we'd probably reconstruct them as looking insane even if they weren't...]
Having said that, obviously it IS possible for a language not to undergo major soundchanges - or, perhaps more accurately, not to undergo sound changes that become cumulative...
Maybe I just think that perhaps more expansive speculation may be justified when we know that we don't have much information and that something's odd somewhere. For instance, in IE, something like Cheyenne giving too completely different reflexes of *p might indeed be best shrugged off as a single-language oddity - after all, if there were an additional stop series or some weak cluster-forming spirant or whatever, surely it would be seen outside just one branch? But if you know that only a few branches have survived, and that Cheyenne is indeed relatively basal, AND that the crown languages otherwise seem bizarrely conservative, then maybe it's OK to be more adventurous in suggesting that Cheyenne preserves something tht the other languages have lost. Particularly when it comes to finding and explaining related languages, since positing proto-languages that are more generous is more likely to let you see links to other cousin-languages, or to explain the links you find, rather than by assuming the most parsimonious reconstruction at each stage...
Anyway, sorry for the ignorant questions and ramblings. The material you shared really is fascinating, thank you!
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One small question: proto-Algonquian only had one stop series, I gather? Wikipedia says 'Ojobwe' has two, and that 'Algonquin', which may just be a dialect of Ojibwe, has three. Is Wikipedia talking nonsense, and if not, do you know where the additional series come from?