Re: Introducing myself to the list

Nik Taylor wrote:

> "Thomas R. Wier" wrote:
> > A lot of the arguing going on in the PIE community about PIE's
> > obstruent series seems to center around whether to admit typological
> > evidence like that.
>
> I don't understand why that's controversial - if you have two possible
> proto-langs for a group of languages, shouldn't you consider the one
> that's more typologically common to be the more probable of the two?  A
> linguistic application of Occam's Razor.
Of course.  But the hard-core PIE-traditionalists who take their gospel
from 19th philologists don't see it that way:  they say that it isn't a choice
between two theories which explain the data with the same explanatory
force, but rather between one (the traditional one) that can be shown to
have attested phonological reflexes in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, and
one (e.g., glottalic PIE) which has none in any language, except in
Armenian where they write off a glottalic series of stop consonants as
Sprachbund-influenced.  That is, at any rate, an oversimplification of
the debate;  for a fuller description, see _The Glottalic Theory:  Survey
and Synthesis_ by Joseph C. Salmons.

Personally, I think it's silly not to take typological data into account *somehow*,
but I reserve judgement on how exactly that data should be put to use in this
debate.

======================================
Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: trwier
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
======================================