Re: another language reconstruction question

>From: Florian Rivoal <florian@...>
>
>         It seems that the language diversity of the world was far greater
>long ago that it is now. Territories having language unity today had often
>much more languages before, as atested by regions we know well, like
>europe, or USA, or to what we can see when we look at the languages people
>use primitive civilisations (aborigens for example).
There was greater language diversity until the Age of Exploration began,
about 1500 AD. Since then there has been decimation of the languages of
hunter-gatherer type peoples, such as the Native Americans, Australian
Aborigines, Siberians.

By contrast, the native languages of peoples in the colonised world who were
somewhat more advanced than hunter-gatherer level have flourished. Nahuatl
(Aztec), Quechua (Inca), the Siberian Turkic language of Yakut, the
languages of India, South-East Asia and many of Africa have gained in
numbers of speakers.

There was not greater language diversity the further back you go before
1500. As far as can be worked out, there were generally fewer languages the
further back you go, because there were fewer people, not so many divided
clans, tribes and nations, had been less migration and mixing, and language
was simpler (in at least e.g. vocabulary) because there were fewer things to
name and because societal change happened more slowly.

>         So what is the meaning in finding the common root of IE words as
>they were spoken in proto IE, since proto IE was probably a collection of
>hundred times more languages than the IE family has today. I dont
>understand how the accurate reconstruction of "the original PIE root", can
>be accurate at all, since it probably refers to hundred or thousands of
>maybe related, yet different words.
No, the whole idea of proto-IE is the idea of *one* language. I don't know
where you get the idea of PIE being a collection of hundreds of languages
from.

>         PIE is not so far back in time and it already seems strange to me,
>but what about attemps on reconstructing languages much older, like
>Nostratic, or Eurasiatic? It seems nonsense to me.
The Nostratic, Eurasian and Proto-World projects are certainly
controversial, but given what I have said above they are much more
reasonable than you are making out, because it certainly seems as tho the
many languages of today come from relatively few sources.

Mat


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