Question about comparatitive linguistics

[CRSP]

Does the reconstruction of languages, such as proto-Indo European, serve any practical use, or is it purely academic? Is it possible to work backwards from known related languages, to a protolanguage like PIE, then work forward again to some mystery language and infer that it is in the IE language family, for instance?

(I suppose that there's an implicit subquestion here: are there any languages whose familial status is currently unknown, or in doubt?)

[Indistinguishable]

I think the answer is yes to both questions, though I'm a little unsure what you mean by both. For the first, it's not like people knew right off the bat that the IE language family was all derived from one common source, and the exact details of that family tree, and so on; this all had to be discovered, and the comparative method was/is the way to do so. The history of the Indo-European hypothesis and subsequent studies in that direction is actually quite interesting; it's amazing, in retrospect, how relatively late many connections were discovered.

As for the second, it seems you're talking about either language isolates, of which examples include Basque and Korean, or just unclassified languages.

[Muffin]

It can help establish migraton routes and settlment patterns over time, which is useful when studying cultural anthropology.

[Hostile Dialect]

(I suppose that there's an implicit subquestion here: are there any languages whose familial status is currently unknown, or in doubt?)

I can answer this one. The ancestry of the Japanese language is very much in doubt, with a couple handfuls of theories about how it could be connected to other languages. All we know so far is that it's in the "Japonic" language family with one other, much more obscure language, also spoken chiefly in Japan.

[Exy]

(I suppose that there's an implicit subquestion here: are there any languages whose familial status is currently unknown, or in doubt?)

I can answer this one. The ancestry of the Japanese language is very much in doubt, with a couple handfuls of theories about how it could be connected to other languages. All we know so far is that it's in the "Japonic" language family with one other, much more obscure language, also spoken chiefly in Japan.

Interestingly, its neighbor, Korean, is also of unknown origin. Korean and Japanese are similar enough in many ways that people have tried to demonstrate a relationship between them for decades but nothing convincing has been found.

But yeah, there are lots of languages of unknown affiliation -- famously, Basque, which is spoken in northern Spain and parts of France, which has been spoken there for as long as historical documentation exists, certainly preceding the arrival of the Romans, and despite efforts to compare it to every language family that exists, nothing has been found. Languages whose affiliations aren't known are called language isolates, and there's a large number of them.

[Hostile Dialect]

But is Japanese really a "language isolate"? It's paired with one other language, isn't it? Can the Japonic family be considered an isolate? That sounds like something that only applies to terminals, to bastardize the syntax term. (Forgive me, I'm an undergrad.)

[liberty3701]

There is a fair amount of debates about languages that have been classified. I've seen at least three different versions of the Indo-European family tree, with different relationships established between languages. So we may know that languages are related, but there is still disagreements about just how they're related.

As to the point, as Muffin noted, it can give clues as to how people have migrated in the past. Plus, it gives us a good idea of how languages change and how they interact when in contact with each other.

[Johanna]

Does the reconstruction of languages, such as proto-Indo European, serve any practical use, or is it purely academic?

Might as well ask does historical linguistics have any practical application? For that matter, does history itself have any practical application?

Honestly, it's never occurred to me to ask that question. I study historical linguistics because it's fascinating. It's proven a very powerful tool for getting a grasp of how languages are related to each other, which in turn makes acquisition of new languages that much easier. My skill at learning languages has proven profitable to my employers and won me much esteem among my colleagues. So— yeah.

Is it possible to work backwards from known related languages, to a protolanguage like PIE, then work forward again to some mystery language and infer that it is in the IE language family, for instance?

If I understand the question, yes, that happened many times in the course of Indo-European studies. For example, once the basic framework of the IE family had been established (building on William Jones's comparison of Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Gothic, and Celtic), linguists then had the basis to fit in further languages that fit that framework. In this way, starting from the beginning of the 19th century, Baltic, Slavic, and Albanian were soon recognized and added.

Each new addition brought in further data to help complete the picture. Armenian took a little longer to recognize as a branch of IE in its own right, because it had absorbed so many Persian loanwords, at first it was mistaken for a dialect of Persian. Once Armenian was fit into its proper place in the IE scheme and its peculiarities analyzed correctly, it contributed further data and attempts at reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European followed by the mid-19th century. Those early attempts are now known to have been way off because not enough data had come in yet.

(As an aside: Joseph Greenberg, who used a controversial mass-comparison method to identify hitherto unrecognized language families, was heavily criticized by the linguistics community because he wasn't working from reconstructed protolanguages. But Greenberg answered them by pointing out that Indo-European itself had been established as a definite family simply through comparison of daughter languages, long before Proto-Indo-European was reconstructed. The same was true of Uralic and Austronesian, both first recognized as families in the 18th century.)

In the late 19th century, the field of Indo-European linguistics was revolutionized by the discovery and decipherment of cuneiform tablets from Bo?azköy, revealing a language that was recognized as a relative of Indo-European, but which had branched off from the main trunk long before any of the others. This was Hittite, and its data finally allowed accurate reconstruction of PIE, because it had preserved phonemic features called laryngeals from the protolanguage that had been lost everywhere else, but were needed to explain certain developments across the IE family.

Finally in the early 20th century, manuscripts of the extinct Tocharian languages were discovered in Xinjiang and recognized as an branch of Indo-European with an interesting geographical anomaly. Now, the whole IE linguistic area has been mapped out so thoroughly, I doubt any further languages could be discovered and added to it.

(I suppose that there's an implicit subquestion here: are there any languages whose familial status is currently unknown, or in doubt?)

Lots! Some are isolates-- because although their possible familial relationships have been investigated, none have been found for certain. Some are unclassified simply because they haven't been studied enough yet, or because data is lacking.

[Johanna]

(I suppose that there's an implicit subquestion here: are there any languages whose familial status is currently unknown, or in doubt?)

I can answer this one. The ancestry of the Japanese language is very much in doubt, with a couple handfuls of theories about how it could be connected to other languages. All we know so far is that it's in the "Japonic" language family with one other, much more obscure language, also spoken chiefly in Japan.

I used to think that Ryukyuan was the only other Japonic language. I was surprised the other day, reading about Ryukyuan on Wikipedia, to learn that it's actually a whole group of related languages which are not mutually intelligible. Even Okinawan, on that little island, is distinct from the other Ryukyuan languages and has several of its own dialects.

[CRSP]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding PIE, but how well developed is it? I've seen reconstructed words, but are there reconstructed grammar rules, too?

[Johanna]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding PIE, but how well developed is it? I've seen reconstructed words, but are there reconstructed grammar rules, too?

Yes, the noun declensions and verb conjugations have been reconstructed. The stress patterns in PIE words have been reconstructed too.

As early as 1868, enough PIE grammar had been reconstructed that August Schleicher wrote a whole "fable" in PIE. This was before the discovery of Hittite and the laryngeals, as well as before much more sophisticated work had been done on reconstruction, so Schleicher's attempt at writing a PIE text is now understood to be far off the mark. In those days Indo-Europeanists relied too heavily on Sanskrit, so that Schleicher's original text came out rather similar to Sanskrit. It has since been reworked several times using more up-to-date reconstructions.