Re: Conlangs in History

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:

> On Sun, 20 Aug 2000, John Cowan wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> > > That's pretty much  what I do with Korean.  :-/  French and German aren't
> > > *that* similar, but from the perspective of Korean (isolate or grouped
> > > with Japanese or Altaic, depending on whom you believe--I haven't heard
> > > any definite answer on what family it belongs to!),
> >
> > You aren't going to, either.  Short of discovering some kind of
> > monument of proto-Korean, we just aren't going to be able to nail down
> > whether Japanese and Korean are part of Altaic or not.  Some people
> > claim that Altaic isn't a real family either, just the result of
> > a lot of borrowing by Mongolian (at the center) from Turkic and
> > by Tungus from Mongolian.
>
> Pity.  It's frustrating not knowing where they come from, just because of
> personal curiosity...
Well, some people say that they don't actually descend lineally from any
language family.  These people's theory is that Japanese (at least) is the result
of creolization that occurred deep in antiquity when invaders speaking perhaps
a language like Korean eventually mixed with the substrate-speaking population,
perhaps Ainu or related.  The theory is, IMHO, so full of assumptions it ends up
being useless as far as genuine historical linguistic research is concerned.

> OTOH, there are Basque and others (is that right?).
Yep.  There are a couple tens of languages which, though studied in some
detail, cannot be provably related to any other.  Basque in particular gains
great attention from cranks who use it for their theories, like Saharan:

<http://www.islandnet.com/~edonon/saharan.htm>

(This is actually probably beneficial for Basque, since it thus attracts non-nut
linguists seeking to disprove the nuts' claims)

There are also plenty of languages which have not been shown to be related
to other groups simply because they've been meagrely studied, or not at all.
This is the case with a lot of Papuan and Amazonian languages.  (Not surprisingly,
because who wants to be eaten or have their head-shrunk?  This *does* go
on still.)

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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