Evidence that most Indo-European Lexical reconstructions are artefacts
What if the
Indo-European language family does not exist? Do we have clear, well-founded
linguistic evidence? Would you ever think that the ‘Indo-European evidence’ is
deniable?
Angela
Marcantonio, professor in the University of Rome, Sapienza questions the
foundation of this language family in her work entitled Evidence that most Indo-European Lexical reconstructions are artefacts
of the linguistic method of analysis.
‘I shall argue
that the great majority of the conventionally stated I-E sound laws lack
statistical significance and that, as a consequence, most of the conventionally
established correspondences (within a chosen corpus) are, in fact, not
correspondences, but similarities, most probably ‘chance resemblances’.’ The
Author does not claim that Indo-European languages are not related (as some
criticisms drew such a conclusion), she only claims in this article that the
method of analysis is wrong. However, clearly we cannot even be sure what the
Indo-European languages are if the method of analysis is wrong.
Why is it wrong?
Because according to her, the Indo-European theory is based on an assumption,
specifically called the circular issue. It means that the conclusion depends on
the original assumption. The languages to compare are often chosen by
subjective assessments. The whole problem starts with the wrong method: the
so-called comparative method. She would not throw it out completely. She says
that method would be useful after a language family has been already
established, and not to establish it.
She adds a very interesting
statement: ‘there are linguistic areas
for which we ‘know’ that the languages are related, but whose relatedness
cannot be demonstrated by using the logic of the comparative method’. I wholly
agree with her about the methodical issue. Why do not we even assume the
possibility that there are methods which can work for certain languages or
language families while we may apply different methods for other languages or
language families?
It is an extremely interesting article
about the Indo-European linguistic evidence and the method of analysis!