Questions and Comments from 1/16 class

• Michael D found some of the exercises in the chapter confusing.
• I won't disagree, but they are helpful and good for lots of reasons. What I expect is that you give it "the old college try": assume that it's an intelligent question and try to say something intelligent in response, based closely on the chapter.
• Andrea A looks forward to more correspondence sets like the 1-10 set.
• There will be some. I'd like to look at that one more, however: the point was not to identify what languages they were (that's pretty much fun but irrelevant to the exercise), but rather to try to come up with specific hypotheses/observations/questions that might lead to reconstructing the proto-numerals.
• Eggy G asks whether chance coincidences like pniu- meaning 'breath' in Klamath and pneu- meaning 'breath' in Ancient Greek make learning the languages easier or are they just one-time instances?
• Ones like that are just one-time instances.
• When languages belong to the same family, however, usually the vocabulary, the morphology, and the syntax are similar, so knowing one makes learning the next easier.
• Jon T asks what other languages Tocharian is similar to, if any? Abbie is also curious about it.
  
• Well, there are two Tocharian languages. Who the people were who spoke them, where they came from, and what other indo-european languages they are closest to, is all debated and unclear.
• Rather than copy what is in the book, I'll just tell you to take 15 minutes and peruse the chapter in our book about Tocharian! You all should have your books very soon, I hope.
• Briggs found the Tocharian and Greek similar and wonders about the relation.
• They are both Indo-European. As I understand it, however, there is a lot of controversy as to which branch of Indo-European Tocharian is closest to. Colton knows more than I do about this, having attended a seminar on Tocharian in Leiden. Let's ask Colton!
  
• Annaliese H asks about the extent of Indo-European languages.
• As you point out, they reach from Tocharian in the east to the Spanish peninsula in the west (is Iceland with its Old Icelandic further west? in any case...). That's the extent we've discovered so far: there are undeciphered languages out there, and perhaps archaeological troves will be found for new languages, so maybe, just maybe, the reach will be extended, but for now, that's the extent of it.
• There are, just in case some of you don't know it, hundreds of language families in the world. IE is just one of them. The imperial/colonialist/industrial age spread some branches of IE radically, but that spread is quite different from the pre-historic spread of languages.
• Alexandra J asks if there is still historical linguistic work to be done?
• Yes. Very much so. I don't think it will ever be complete. It's not quite like etymology, which typically gets done as far as one can go for a language, and then once all the low lying fruit is plucked, there's only a few things left.
• That's because it's so much more than mere vocab items. It's also the morphology and the phonology and the syntax, and then there are all the sociological, anthropological, historical, geographical, etc tie-ins.
• Thomas W notes that the numeral exercise was difficult because the environments of the various sounds/letters was hard to determine.
  
• Yes, that's true. That correspondence set would not satisfy an expert: it was meant just to get our mental juices flowing in a comparative linguistic way, not to provide anything even approaching the state-of-the-art theories about how those words relate to each other.
  
• AJ suggests that we should all become familiar with where sounds are made in our mouths and the linguistic names for them.
• Yes, very true. This is not a course in phonology, but getting some of the basics down will be very helpful. I'll try to make sure we explain such things as we go. I'm not sure it would be helpful to go through it in a data-dump way, however, so I plan to just explain as needed. I hope that those of you who have considerable phonological expertise will not be frustrated but rather will help the rest of us.
• Eloise P asks how linguists can surmise when a language split from PIE?
• That's a great question.
• Rates of linguistic change are not, as far as I know, at all reliably predictable, and so we can't just project into the past some sort of idea as to how different language X is from the reconstructed proto-language and get a figure. But people try anyway, and they can be more wrong or less wrong. I've heard the idea that PIE split up about 4500 BCE. I'm not wedded to that date, but it's a sort of consensus. We'll see some guesses in Fortson as we read on. Treat them with caution, as Fortson does.
• Chaz K asks if Russian is Indo-European.
• Yes, it's a "Balto-Slavic" language of the SLavic subfamily and East Slavic more specifically. It's in the chart in Fortson's intro.
• Corynne S asks if linguists were sceptical at first of the claim that sub-continental Indian languages were related to European ones? and whether that was because of racial stereotypes?
• I have not run across resistance to Sanskrit being related to Greek and Latin specifically because of racist/nationalist ideas: I would bet it is there and I just don't recall it or haven't run across it.
  
• Overall, when I skimmed the annals of the Royal Asiatick (sic) Society in which Sir William Jones made his famous remarks, I didn't find resistance to these ideas on that basis, but what I did find are colonialist, nationalist, chauvinist, etc. attitudes. 
  
• Many scholars of the past have held views that are repugnant and they have let that affect their scholarship. It is part of not just history generally, but the history of historical studies of the past.