From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: typology of Esperanto
Organization: SPSS Inc.
Distribution: usa
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 19:51:42 GMT

In article <1992Aug26.175007.25317@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU 
(Rich Alderson) writes (quoting me):
>>Now, how does this apply to Esperanto and IE?  Well, it's clear that you
>>see IE as a clear-cut, binary-membership category.  You are certainly entitled
>>to do so.  I simply find your usage, though meaningful enough within 
>>historical linguistics, unsatisfactory when considering language in general.
>>I'd see "IE" languages as composed of a core class of languages (all good
>>examples) plus some more farfetched examples (the ostriches or bad examples):
>
>What you want to do is to take a precisely defined technical term from
>historical and comparative linguistics, "Indo-European language," and re-apply
>it to mean something else entirely.  Expect that I shall continue to object
>every time you do, because to do otherwise impairs the usefulness of the
>technical term.

I think you're mistaken as to who's redefining the term, here.  The term
"Indo-European" dates back at least to 1813, long before the proto-language 
was reconstructed.

We might also want to look at parallel words, such as names of other
language families.  Do you really maintain that historical and comparative
linguists define all language families as you define IE, resolutely refusing
to categorize languages at all until a proto-language can be reconstructed
from them?  I suspect that most language families are defined much more
informally than that-- based on the superficial similarities you label
"irrelevant" for IE, in fact.  And before pIE was reconstructed the term
must have been applied in a similar way.

You can define the term any way you want, of course.  Now, I want to see
if you're going to fight David Pesetsky over his definition of "Germanic"
on lexical grounds...

>So when we think about IE languages we'd tend to
>>have English or Sanskrit rather than Papiamentu or Haitian Creole in mind,
>>and we wouldn't tend to apply conclusions about Papiamentu or Esperanto
>>to IE languages in general.  
>
>Depends on the conclusions in question.  Those who claim that Indo-European was
>some kind of creole (or that Hittite was, for that matter) would be well-
>advised to examine Papiamentu.  (The same could not be said for Esperanto.)

Well, this sounds much more interesting than the classification of Esperanto
anyway.  Could you summarize the grounds on which this claim is made?

>>I think the prototype approach works very well here.  The prototypical 
>>example of a Germanic language would surely be German, not English.
>>Both are Germanic, but German is a better example of Germanic.
>
>I happen to think that English is just as good a Germanic language as German
>(pace David Pesetsky), since very nearly all the borrowed lexical items are
>inflected as if they were good Germanic words.  The fact that English
>morphology has leveled a good bit makes it no less Germanic than German.

Who said it was any *less* Germanic?  Prototype theory doesn't have to
assign gradations of membership.  Ostriches aren't 20% birds; they're all
bird-- just not very close to the prototypical bird.  Your own statement
points out why English might not be as good an example of a Germanic
language-- it has so many borrowed words.  So does your earlier question,
whether English was "Germanic" or "Romance" or whatever: the question
would hardly even be asked of German or Norwegian.  

>I expect that none of this will have any weight with you, but I am willing to
>go on arguing as long as you are.

No, you don't want to argue as long as all that.  Some time before the
assembled net.community starts begging us to stop would be more advisable.