Tropylium wrote:Most language families so far have been put together by "transitive obviousness". English is obviously related to Old English is obviously related to Gothic is obviously related to Latin is obviously related to Greek is obviously related to Sanskrit is obviously related to Middle Indo-Aryan is obviously related to Hindi, though English is not obviously related to Hindi; even Old English probably not to MIA. But there are major counterexamples as well. Within IE that's cases like Armenian and Albanian on one hand (requires unraveling layers of loanwords and extensive sound changes); Tocharian and Anatolian on the other (only really clear by comparison primarily with the proto-language).
Yes. It is hard to see that Hindi and English are related; we know because there are the intermediate "stepping stones" you mentioned. Without such "stepping stones", a relationship is much harder to demonstrate! For instance, Lydian and Lycian were known
before Hittite was discovered, but until Hrozný showed that Hittite was IE, these languages were not understood, and nobody had an idea where to put them - some scholars
suspected an IE connection already, but the matter was controversial, and others suspected a relationship to Etruscan, Semitic or whatever. Only after Hittite provided the "missing link", it could be shown that Lycian and Lydian were IE languages, belonging to the same branch as Hittite. (Neither is a direct descendant of Hittite, though; while it is generally agreed that Lycian descended from Luwian, a sister language of Hittite, the exact position of Lydian within Anatolian is still controversial: some scholars consider it another descendant of Luwian, while others opine that it descends from an unattested fourth (besides Hittite, Luwian and Palaic) Bronze Age Anatolian language.)
And there is no consensus yet on what's sufficient evidence for establishing non-obvious relatedness. If you ask Africanists, Niger-Congo "is obvious" already based on just a single typological feature, i.e. class prefixes; if you ask people working with languages in Eurasia 150 years ago, they would also think that a grouping like Uralo-Altaic "is obvious" per multiple similar kinds of evidence (vowel harmony, front rounded vowels, possessive suffixes, local cases…); and yet people working with these languages today would think it's not, and that either they're mostly still not demonstrated related. (The one exception that's been settled since then is that Samoyedic belongs in Uralic, which took similar work as the cases of Tocharian and Anatolian.) And if you ask anthropologists, they may think that genetics + the rarity of primogenesis is a slam-dunk argument that already proves that Amerind exists, Proto-Australian exists etc.
Africanists are much more inclined towards macro-relationship than today's Eurasianists, it seems, though the support for Nilo-Saharan seems to be waning lately, and Khoisan has pretty much been abandoned. I feel that the relationship between, say, Semitic and Cushitic is probably almost as deep as that between IE and Uralic, making Afroasiatic a macrogroup like Mitian (note that there is no consensus on Proto-Afroasiatic reconstruction; I have heard of two reconstruction attempts, one by Ehret and one by Orel and Stolbova, which use
different sound correspondences and reconstruct
different proto-systems and proto-vocabularies; they cannot both be right, so they are probably both wrong), and Niger-Congo probably is a similar thing. Yet, I am no Africanist and cannot judge these matters properly.
Amerind, as you all know, is rejected by almost every Americanist, partly because of the poor method and poor evidence, but partly certainly because of its uselessness in language classification. What use is a "classification" which includes, within the domain of indigenous American languages,
everything except two families? It is pointless. Australianists, I have heard, have recently grown sceptical about a "Proto-Australian", and distinguish 28 (or so) language families. Again, I know too little about these matters to arrive at a valid opinion.
To an extent this is more of a disagreement about what "relatedness" means thank about the actual strength of evidence. The whole typological area of noun-class prefixes in Africa, or vowel harmony in northern Eurasia, or dental-alveolar-retroflex-palatal consonat systems in Australia, does have to have a single main source, it cannot have happened just by accident. But we know by now that typological realignment or independent geographically adjacent innovation, while rare, can happen. Therefore this type of argument doesn't show that the entire area belongs in a single language family, only that some substantial parts probably do, and we need more fine-grained research to figure out which exactly.
If a bunch of neighbouring languages are typologically similar but lack cognate lexicon or morphology (or the lexical correspondences are phonologically so trivial that they reveal borrowing), one is probably dealing with convergence. South Asia is a case in point. We
know that the substantial typological resemblances between Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and other languages of the region are
not due to a common ancestor showing these features because we know that Indo-Aryan descends from something (PIE) that doesn't show them. But that doesn't mean that Indo-Aryan borrowed these features from Dravidian, either - we do not know for how long Dravidian, which unlike Indo-Aryan has no known external relatives, had them. Some are also indeed from Indo-Aryan, e.g., the breathy-voiced stops, a feature already in place in Vedic, and according to the current majority opinion - which has been questioned, see the discussion in the Great PIE Thread - inherited from PIE, which have found their way into various non-Indo-Aryan languages of India through learned borrowings from Sanskrit.
Linguistic reconstruction deeper than the level of currently established families would probably benefit from more application of Fortescue's concept of "meshes": areas where we can assume a common typological profile and common lexical parallels to have existed even if we cannot yet say what parts of it are due to contact and what parts due to common descent. Altaic is obviously one mesh, so is Indo-European / Caucasus / Semitic, so is the Pacific Northwest, so are probably e.g. parts of Nilo-Saharan. But we don't seem to have a whole lot of reliably reconstructed meshes around. Even Fortescue's own Uralo-Siberian mesh doesn't really stand up to scrutiny: he has since then relinquished his attempts at including Chukotko-Kamchatkan by extensive internal reconstruction, and his treatment of Yukaghir has some similar issues (partly originating from attempts at proving Uralo-Yukaghir).
The "mesh" is a useful notion. Altaic is perhaps the paragon example of a mesh - a set of three (some say, five or even six) language families which show resemblances which are hard to decide whether they are due to inheritance from a Proto-Altaic or to convergence. The lexical resemblances between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic look more like borrowings; the typological similarities (all three families consist of agglutinating SOV languages with converbs) are too general to ascribe them to a common ancestor; the resemblances in some morphology, especially the pronouns, are perhaps best explained by a common ancestor, but in this case, some "clearly" non-Altaic languages, most relevantly IE and Uralic, show similar items - hence the notion of the macrofamily variously called "Nostratic", "Eurasiatic", "Mitian", "Steppe" or some other names, which this thread is all about.
Fortescue's "Uralo-Siberian" is a difficult case. Fortescue himself has grown sceptical about the inclusion of Chuktoko-Kamchatkan, which he now prefers to connect with Nivkh, and the inclusion of Yukaghir seems to hinge on the tacit assumption that it was related to Uralic, but the lexical similarites between Yukaghir and Uralic rather look like borrowings from a Samoyedic or "Para-Samoyedic" language, and the morphologies, apart from the "Mitian" pronouns, do not resemble each other much. This would reduce "Uralo-Siberian" to a binary relationship between Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut, which has been proposed much earlier (Rask already commented on morphological similarities between these two families in his
Undersøgelse in 1814!). And I feel that the seeming closeness of Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut within Mitian is merely due to conservativism of these two families.
And what regards PIE, to me it looks like a Mitian language drawn into a prehistoric West Asian Sprachbund with the three Causasian families, Semitic and perhaps a few lost ones.