Re: Piat an isolate?

A Rosta wrote:

> I have been wondering what the evidence is for Piat being an isolate.
> I imagine that there is tons of superstrate influence,
Absolutely, particularly from (Austrian) High German and Court-Gothic,
but also from Slova^cko, Vloxi (the Mud dialect), and even Romany.

> and that native
> linguistic material is rather reduced. Further, I'd have thought that
> there are an awful lot of candidates for a genetic relationship to be
> ruled out before we can take "seems to be an isolate" to mean
> more than "noone has done the research yet" or "noone who
> publishes in English has done the research yet".
Quite likely.  The most usual countertheory is that Piat, like
Japanese and Korean, constitutes a separate and independent branch
of Altaic, but the absence of vowel harmony and the reductionist
phonology makes this view disfavored.

> Also, how much
> do we know of the origins of the Piat? Do we know when they
> entered Central Europe, and where they came from?
They were probably dragged along as slaves during a Voelkerwanderung.

> On a slightly different topic, do we know anything of how the Piat
> fit into the larger society of the nations that they live in? Are they
> peasants? Farmers and pastoralists in areas too meagre for
> anyone else to bother farming? Disenfranchised latecomers
> periodically persecuted and barely surviving as an ethnos past
> 1945?
Yes to all three, except that since 1945 they have been independent,
as a side effect of the post-1945 de facto settlement.  Until 1989
they had a Communist government; since then they have had little
or no government.

--
        John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan      cowan@ccil.org
Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! / Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau / Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.
                        -- Coleridge / Politzer