🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Jan.12.02.44.16.1993.26312@pilot.njin.net> hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey) writes:
>
>What is it?  It has to do with being able to give some general 
>indication of the time scale on which certain phenomenon occur.
>For example, searching my memory--(I think) some Indo-chinese
>languages (Burmese, Cambodian ?) were found to be tonal and
>dumped in the Chinese category. Then some other smart fellow
>comes along and says; No, they share some features with Hindi (I
>think.)

Well, I'm not sure how productive most of this discussion has been or
will be, but let's at least try to get the examples right.  Chinese,
the Tai languages (Thai and Lao and their relatives), Vietnamese, and
the Hmong-Mien (or Miao-Yao) languages are typologically almost
identical.  They have the same phonological structure, tones, the
same syntax, the same lack of morphology.  They also have a fair amount
of recognizably common vocabulary.  When all this was first noticed it
seemed obvious that they were part of the same family.
	Turns out they're not.  The major clue was the observation 
that the vocabulary they have in common was all "culture items"--
words for technological processes and devices, agricultural practices,
etc.  This is the kind of vocabulary that is often borrowed, along
with the process or whatever that it names.  "Basic" vocabulary, which
is less often borrowed--i.e. words for body parts, universal aspects
of the physical world, family relationships, etc.--shows no cognates
across any of these languages.  In fact these languages represent at
least three different families--Chinese is Sino-Tibetan, Vietnamese
is Austroasiatic, Tai possibly related to Austronesian, and people
are still arguing about whether Hmong-Mien is Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Tai,
or none of the above.  (None of these, nor any other Southeast Asian
language, has anything in common with Hindi).

>What to do ? Well, based on all the intuition and knowledge that
>years of study gave you (impersonal you) try to come up with
>some plausible arguments as to which kind of phenomenon persists
>over longer time periods and is more resistant to disturbance. This
>is the relaxation/correlation time idea. If tonality is a
>more persistent phenomena than word order or propensity to pick
>up affixation, then it must have been originally more like Chinese.
>If it's the other way around, then somehow it picked up tonality
>from Chinese at a later date.

Wrong.  What you do is try and figure out whether the common vocabulary
represents common inheritance or borrowing.  We *know* that neither
tone nor word order is stable enough to be of any use here at all.
(And none of the languages in question has even the slightest
"propensity to pick up affixation").



-- 
Scott DeLancey			delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA