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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Language origins...
In-Reply-To: markrose@spss.com's message of 8 Apr 1996 19:41:38 GMT
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In article <4kbq5i$6lc@netsrv2.spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
writes:

>A number of Indian and European languages, including Latin, Greek, Sanskrit,
>English, and Russian, all derive from "Proto-Indo-European", which we have no
>direct records of, but reconstruct by detailed comparison of the daughter
>languages.

I just wanted to clarify the language of this sentence a bit.

A large body of evidence exists which compels us to posit that many of the
languages of Europe and India are descended by simple historical processes from
a single ancestor, which we call Indo-European.

It is possible, using well-defined methodologies, to reconstruct large portions
of the sound system, morphology & syntax ("the grammar"), and semantic usages
which the speakers of this language employed.  We call this reconstructed model
(which is by necessity incomplete) Proto-Indo-European.

It is thus mildly inaccurate, though maybe not really incorrect, to phrase the
historical situation as our friend Mark has done.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
