Biblical Hebrew Forum

["stoneyb" <stoneyb AT touchwood.net>]

Karl Randolph writes:
If Linear B tablets could be shown to have been written at the same time
as Aristotle, then the languages of Linear B and Aristotle would be
cognates. But because there is no question from historical and
archeological sources that Linear B long predated Aristotle, the
languages reflected in those writings are considered stages in the
development of Greek language. This example is why dating is important
in historical linguistics. How can you study historical/comparative
linguistics without understanding this?


I respond:
1) "Cognates" are languages descended from a common ancestor. There is
no requirement that cognates be contemporaneous. Schwyzertuetsch, Middle
English and Gothic are cognates. None is ancestral to any of the others.
That is historical linguistics. No amount of historical data embedded in
Layamon's Brut can be taken to indicate that Middle English antecedes
Gothic. 

2) Last I heard the best scholarly guess was that the language recorded
in Linear B was not directly ancestral to the Attic Greek of Aristotle
and thus cannot be called a "stage in the development of Greek language"
except in the sense that both are developments out of and away from a
presumptive proto-Greek. But I haven't followed that for a long time.

Stoney Breyer
Writer/Touchwood, Inc.