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In article <1992Dec30.211917.2524@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson) writes:

>There is quite some doubt that they are related.  And with Turkic specialists
>denying any relationship with Mongolian, though that is easily demonstrable, I
>don't think that further research will be forthcoming until that whole mess is
> cleared up.
> -- 
> Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take

I keep wondering how it is that people can make assertions about
relatedness of languages based on what I perceive to be a rather
narrow definition of 'relatedness'.

It would seem to me that over along period of time languages
diverge from one another. The closest languages share lots
of words. But that in itself cannot be the measure of relationship
since words can be borrowed. We look for 'regularity' and we 
try to show that the words that two languages share were not
in fact borrowed. This is a recursive process since we don't
know, a priori, which words belong to which language group.

This implies that, in addition to sharing words, languages
must also share other characteristics. In other words, finding
lots of words in common, say between Farsi and Turkish, is
no proof of relatedness since something else in these languages
--something much more important and something at a more
primitive level (fundamental)--is different. What are the characteristics
of these primitive measures ? Is it morphology ? Is it synax ?

Let's say two languages A and B which share a common ancestor
diverged over 8,000-20,000 years ago. It would be rather
difficult to find any words in common in the descendants of
these two languages. The phrase 'words in common' includes
cognates or words that can be derived from each other by
using regular transition rules. What aspects of language
change least over long periods of time ? Words themselves ?
Unlikely ? Would the morphology of the languages change/diverge
as rapidly as the words themselves ? 

Would two modern languages say P and Q which seem to share
morphological typology (i.e. patterns) but don't share any
words be judged more closely related than if one of the
languages say P, happens to share some words with another
language, say Z (which belongs to another language group) ?

To make it more concrete, say P=Finnish, and Q=Tamil.
Let's say there are no words in common and neither can
any words be constructed which can resemble each other
via regular correspondances (even partially). On the
other hand we find that Finnish shares X words with
Swedish. But we find that Finnish morphology has more
in common with Tamil. Say that they are both agglutanitive.
Let's say that the both have two regular sets of vowels, long
and short. Let's say that both Finnish and Tamil don't have
certain phonemes (consonants) like /f/ and /l/. Let's
say that both Finnish and Tamil use a morpheme (in verbs)that
includes /mina/min/mi for 1st person singular, /sina/sin/si
for 2nd person sing. etc etc.

Which of these observations (morphological vs word-matching)
is more important. Is P than more closely related to Q or
the language with which it shares more words?

PS. The use if statistical/scientific method is implicit.
That's what 'regular correspondance' means. The use of
statistical methods includes correlation-regression, 
autocorrelation, clustering analysis etc etc...
-- 

	mark	

   hubey@amiga.montclair.edu         hubey@apollo.montclair.edu
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