[INDOLOGY] Heggarty et al. 2023, "Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages" - reactions?

[Madhav Deshpande]

I completely agree with the statement of Thomas Burrow that Dominik
reported. A completely unified language without variation is an illusion,
often created by the standardized "official" versions. In Marathi, there is
a proverb that says that language changes after every 12 Kos [Skt. Krośa =
2 miles?]. As Kiparsky brought out vividly, Pāṇini's Sanskrit also has a
great deal of variation, and one can indeed think of various local dialects
or varieties of Sanskrit.

Madhav

Madhav M. Deshpande
Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit ane Linguistics
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies
Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India

[Residence: Campbell, California, USA]


On Thu, Aug 24, 2023 at 7:47 AM Dominik via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> This is just an anecdote, but when I was an undergraduate, my teacher
> Prof. Thomas Burrow told us that the earliest possible historical
> reconstruction of PIE still looked like a "loosely connected set of
> dialects," not a single language.
>
> Best,
> Dominik
>
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