Re: The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe

On Jan 9, 9:37 pm, Jack Campin - bogus address
<bo...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Mark Liberman persuaded Don Ringe to guest-post to the Language Log on
The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe:
<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=980#more-980>.

It's a long and readable overview of what can be supposed, referring in
particular to Johanna Nicholls, Benjamin Fortson and David Anthony, but
followed by an extensive bibliography. The following discussion is
interesting, too, at least before the predictable accusations of
political agenda.

One kind of argument that didn't feature as much as I would have
expected was looking at relict features that might have been derived
from substrate languages.  E.g. there are some iffy arguments that
some of the syntax of English might be of Celtic origin,

What is iffy about it? Some syntactic constructions in English are
definitely more similar to attested Celtic languages than to
continental Germanic languages. Of course, it is rather simplistic to
say that an areal feature originated in some language and spread to
neighbouring languages. I would tend to think that areal similarities
might be due to parallel developments and mutual influences due to
widespread bilingualism.

and a perhaps
even more iffy suggestion that the vowel system of Spanish derives in
part from Basque.  

Vowel system? I thought it was about consonants.

.

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