On dailykos.com alevei continued:
In my previous post, I wrote about coming to terms with the metaphorical nature of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), which may or may not ever have existed as an actual language spoken by actual people at an actual moment in time but that is posited to be the common ancestor of most of the languages of Europe and many in western and central Asia.
To recap, the gist of that post is that the Indo-European hypothesis is large and contains multitudes and that the options seem to be to accept the astonishing inexactness of the metaphors or submit to the paralyzing mind-blowingness of what we use them to try to explain. I suggested that the latter option could be inconvenient if you're trying to discuss historical linguistics and language relatedness in a class that meets for an hour and fifty minutes twice a week for 15 weeks.
Anyway, continuing on the topic of the metaphors that we use to try to create some kind of manageable order out of the chaos that is the story of human language and how it got this way, we turn now to a fellow name of August Schleicher (1821-1868), a German linguist by training and profession who specialized in classical and Slavic languages. Schleicher, who may have had some of the same concerns that I have about how we can possibly even try to conceptualize an unattested 5,000 to 7,000-year-old super-ancestor Ur-language that might not even have actually existed, decided that it was time someone got around to the task of trying to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European.
....
....Anyway, in 1861, Schleicher published his reconstruction of PIE in a book called Compendium der Vergleichenden Grammatik der Indogermanischen Sprachen, known in English (and available in translation here) as A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages. Revisions and reissues appeared well into the 1870s, although Schleicher himself died in 1868 at age 47.
"What does all this have to do with metaphors?" you might be thinking. Everything. It has everything to do with metaphors. For one thing, even as Schleicher published his reconstruction of a 5- to 7,000-year-old dead language that might not have existed in the first place, he also made it clear that he knew all along that he was dealing in metaphors, and particularly in a big PIE-shaped metaphor, one that made it possible for him to reconstruct what was quite possibly a mythical language. As he wrote in the Compendium in 1861 (although of course he actually wrote it in German):
"A form traced back to the sound-grade of the Indo-European original language, we call a fundamental form. When we bring forward these fundamental forms, we do not assert that they really were once in existence." (Emphasis added.)
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CIP · 625 weeks ago
macgupta 81p · 625 weeks ago
CIP · 625 weeks ago
dwc · 625 weeks ago
Guest · 625 weeks ago
CIP · 625 weeks ago
What we do see is a pattern of systematic divergence over space and time. This closely mimics the behavior of languages in the historical era and other situations (see my comment to Arun) where point type origins can be clearly identified.
Aside from the fact that the "metaphor" argument seems to misuse the word, it feels like another political scheme to make linguistic history fit an improbable hypothesis.
Guest · 625 weeks ago
CIP · 625 weeks ago
Guess · 625 weeks ago
"Familial relationship" is pop biology and nonsense. Similarities do not necessarily indicate "familial relationship"
You are saying that the shark and the whale are related. Nice try.
dwc · 625 weeks ago
When it comes to language speeds, you can always find similarities. One can always derive word X from word Y with some ingenuity. For instance, one can use "fronting, backing, lowering, highering" to transform any vowel to any other vowel. Similarly, one use fronting and backing for consonants. Then one can use a quasi-lowering to change a stop consonant to an approximant, then to fricative.
The problem is not so much about hypothesis. Every human can form any hypothesis. What is the explanatory power, whetehr it is adhoc or etc. Maybe, CIP can chime in the latter aspects instead of saying that it is a hypothesis.
CIP · 624 weeks ago
Of course the whale and shark are related, and rather closely at that. Of course not so closely as the whale and the trout, much less as closely as the whale and the hippo.
Similarites can arise from several causes, and the large superficial similarities of shark and whale arise from adaptation to an environment where there is a big premium on streamlining. Other similarities, like those between the reproductive system of whale and baboon, for example, arise from common ancestry.
There is little evidence of the kind of environmental constraint that produce streamlining in ocean denizens in language, so when similarities vastly exceed statistical plausibility, common ancestry is the go to hypothesis. As I have noted elsewhere, there is ample confirmatory evidence in the internals of language and the history of human migrations.
macgupta 81p · 624 weeks ago
CIP · 624 weeks ago
sadhana · 625 weeks ago
In other words, the subset of 'common ancestor language elements and characteristics' which are labelled 'common ancestor language' are only symbolic representation of the 'common ancestor language' and not real.
This does not imply such a common ancestor language did not exist - it just means we probably cannot recreate it using its linguistic descendants.
macgupta 81p · 625 weeks ago
In a particular case, that of ancient Greek, the P.I.E. type reconstruction leads to something that demonstrably did not exist (as demonstrable as possible given the nature of the records we have) - and this took place in a limited geography and a smaller time depth.
Therefore, just as the sea of grief in which he drowned is metaphorical, so is P.I.E.
sadhana · 625 weeks ago
Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’
macgupta 81p · 625 weeks ago
CIP · 624 weeks ago
The biggest clues are likely to come from widespread sequencing of genetic types, which will clarify the movement of peoples.
macgupta 81p · 624 weeks ago