Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Stoney:

You're right about the definition of cognate. I overstated my case,
and only after posting realized that the nit-pickers (bless them, they
keep us honest) would get on my case.

On 3/15/07, stoneyb <stoneyb AT touchwood.net> wrote:
> 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.
As I repeatedly claim, it is not the content, but the authorship date,
that is important in the study of historical linguistics.

Within Tanakh, there are references that Moses wrote Torah. That is
the historically claimed authorship date. If you disagree with that
historical claim, you need to have a pretty good reason, more than
just a theory based on a faith.

> 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.
What I was taught, oh so many years ago in history class, is that
after Linear B was written, Greece was invaded by another
Indo-European tribe, so that the Attic Greek of Aristotle was an
amalgamation of the two languages spoken, much as modern English is an
amalgamation of Anglo-Saxon and the Norse French of William the
Conqueror. That makes Linear B a direct ancestor, but not the only
one.

But this is getting off topic.

> Stoney Breyer
> Writer/Touchwood, Inc.

Karl W. Randolph.