h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Surely it's simple. Unless we assume that certain people and their languages were dropped by flying saucer from elsewhere in the galaxy, we have to conclude that languages become isolates when the speakers who would provide the links to other groups die out or adopt other tongues (physical coercion and commercial pressure might have something to do wih it).

Basque is definitely a good one. But the relationships between Finnish and Hungarian force you to construct a historical case.

Well, I don't see that, necessarily. That accounts for some isolates, like Ket and possibly Basque, but there's no reason not to see other isolates as sort of separate language families of their own, which for some reason or other never split into dialects like proto-Indo-European and proto-Sino-Tibetan and proto-Na dene et al did. Probably because they never spread over a wide enough area - Japanese is a good example.

And anyway, I don't want to rule out flying saucers. That might prove to be a mistake - when aliens invade, I don't want to be tortured brutally because I was blind to the truth about linguistic isolates in my youth.

Well, you know, how far do you want to go to define something as an isolate? There can't be any isolates if you're going to go back to the very very core of language. We've had to have been using language since we nearly first evolved. A few people went off to the Basque area and evolved Basque. Another few went to the Proto-Indo-European base, wherever that was, and started lots of fun languages, which eventually grew around to geographically close Basque in. Proto-Indo-European is the best, because it spawned Celtic languages, Latin (romance) languages, German languages, Sanskrit, among so many other things... it's so great. Definitely my favourite. Then you have the whole sino-tibetan thing, and a bunch of others. There must have been a point where everyone was speaking the same language. Everyone who spoke Proto-Indo-European, however, except those confusing Indians who made up Sanskrit, very definitely had what we'd consider to be European or Caucasian physical features. Those Sino-Tibetans had their Asian features for some reason or another... well, any which way, I'm not really sure what I'm talking about, I'm getting tired here.

Goodnight.

~Sirona, princess of sleep.