So I would hesitate to put the Uralic family with Basque. I'm not saying that Basque is a paleolitihc remnant, just that we don't know. This is not the case with Uralic.
Right. It's just unknown.
PU is not really any older than PIE, estimates for both families seem to be fairly close to each other, which is also corroborated by PIE loans in PU.
Ah, that reminds me-- I also meant to say earlier that there's a fair amount of comparative work on Uralic and IE suggesting some genetic relationship-- none of it is widely substantiated or accepted, but certainly it is at least as likely that PU and PIE are (possibly distantly) related as it is that Basque is related to either.
Isolate was probably the wrong word to use.
It's certainly the standard word for Basque (which I questioned above not at you in particular!). And I see what you mean about Hungarian for example-- in any basic sense it's about as obviously different from the rest of Europe as Basque, except that wide historical connections are known. On the surface, I'd be willing to accept Hungarian (and the others perhaps) as "isolates" though I don't know how much weight the term would (or
should) have anyway. It just seems to be a comment that we don't know much about a language, which isn't interesting except perhaps as a reason to study it more.
What I meant was a language that sticks out as being vastly different and historically unrelated to the languages surrounding it.
That's the problematic bias I was talking about (and you're not alone!). It sticks out based on modern happenstance. There's absolutely nothing inherent about Basque linguistically (or the Basques genetically) that should suggest that it's inherently an isolate or unique. I imagine they were ruling the region at some point before the Celts (and perhaps others) arrived. So Basque is no more special than Breton, or even English for that matter. It's an interesting scientific puzzle to try to figure out where Basque came from, certainly, but the
answer is no more interesting than any other linguistic relationship and therefore shouldn't be biased toward a special explanation (like the first Europeans) without other evidence. In the sense of "why not?" I probably would agree that it seems like Basque may be special, but perhaps I'm just biased too.
What I perceive to be pretty uncontroversial is that PIE came with the second migration of humans to Europe, and a lot of these - very different and historically unrelated to PIE languages - very likely have their roots in the migration of the first peoples.
What's the time depth?
As an arbitrary example question, would something like Nostratic or Eurasiatic (
some proto-language existed, whatever it was) have been spoken in Africa rather than in the regions for which they're named (after the modern descendents)?
Or is the time depth of the migrations perhaps irrelevant to PIE and PU, etc.? Has there been so much contact (consider the Americas!) that evidence of deeper history is hidden or gone?
I know we, as linguists, instantly want to jump away as far as possible from any claim that ties genetics to languages, because of the persistent misinformed arguments that arise where people try to tie them together.
I'm tentative but I find the questions interesting. The problem is that I just don't think the relationships are very reliable. Sometimes, perhaps often, linguistic and genetic backgrounds split.
However, sometimes it just makes perfect sense. I think a scientist/linguist/whatever who could see that there is exists (albeit alongside a lot of extinct languages) a modern society with a few languages that notably stick out in their environments as being very, very, very unlike their neighbours, alongside a genetic picture that places these exact same regions as belonging to a different historically migratory period. Ha, my sentence got a little too long so I will rephrase it. I think someone looking at that data would not be doing their job properly if their preconceptions of tying connections together clouded their judgement to investigate such a very real possibility.
I agree. But don't get too stuck in the
available evidence. There's no reason to assume it's representative. That's what I'm suggesting.
Freknu, are you saying Hungarian is not historically part of the Uralic family? I thought it was a pretty widely-accepted fact that it was, but I don't know a lot about the topic and I know being Finnish-speaking, you are in a much better position to clarify this point.
Not that I can speak for freknu, but I don't think he meant to suggest that:
Uralic is a large family with lots of subgroupings. Within that is Finno-Ugric containing Finnic (Finnish, Estonian, Sami, etc.) and Ugric (Hungarian). I'm not sure on all of the details, but I don't think that's disputed. But freknu was, I believe, discussing Finnic vs. Ugric within Uralic/Finno-Ugric, just like Germanic vs. Romance within IE.
Corroborated in what sense? Existence of loanwords in one language family to another wouldn't really provide any evidence for timing them as being of equal age, right? Even if PIE came along 20-30,000 years later, loanwords can enter, but I don't see how that corroborates any evidence.
There are two ways to use loanwords to date contact / development:
1. Assume (and defend) a historical relationship for the borrowing. A lot has been discussed for PIE about the word for "wheel" because it was presumably invented at a certain point. Same with words for horse, etc. But there can be other versions of this, such as if the word for some basic idea, like "fish", is borrowed, then it's probably orginal. Shared borrowing throughout the family is unlikely, so it probably goes back to the original language.
2. Via comparative reconstruction it is possible to determine the relative time depth of borrowing-- if a word did or did not go through certain sound changes, we know whether it was borrowed in a daughter or mother language within the family. For example, Spanish and English share many words, but we can separate them by how old they are based on their sounds-- compare
pie/foot and
cafetería/cafeteria-- obviously (and for more technical reasons) we can date the second pair as a later borrowing. This method, however, assumes relevant changes that make this apparent.
All of that is tentative, but it's possible to make some relatively strong arguments. I don't know about the PIE/PU evidence specifically, though.
I'm totally just spurring on a point of potential discussion here, please don't think I'm trying to argue a point against you guys.
No, not at all, and I'm not in a position to tell you that you're wrong anyway. It's an interesting topic. Speculation tends to lead the field of ancient comparative linguistics!