🚀 go-pugleaf

I apologize for waiting so long to reply to this.  I am using a new newsreader
(or rather, I've corrected some posting problems in my preferred one) and
wanted to be sure that postings got out correctly before spending a lot of time
on something that might get lost.

In article <300ts4$77t@csi0.csi.uottawa.ca> misrael@csi.uottawa.ca
(Mark Israel) writes:

>In article <aldersonCssywn.Gsq@netcom.com>, Richard M. Alderson III
><alderson@netcom.com> writes:

>>>>They have all, *by definition*, diverged to the same extent."

>>[...] When I say something is true "by definition," I mean that in a rigorous
>>sense; [...]  You note [...] my e-mail clarification to your query about
>>definition; you fail to note your return e-mail [...] regarding the
>>distinction [...] between "divergence" and "diversity" [...]

>O.K., I misunderstood you.  When you said "by definition", I thought you meant
>"by definition of 'diverged'".  From my query about "divergence" vs
>"diversity", I thought you would have gathered that this was what I thought
>you meant.  It now seems that you meant "by definition of 'reconstructed
>protolanguage'", yes?

And I you, as I found your query most puzzling at the time.  Now we both know
we were talking about different things.

>>First, the notion of closeness, or distance, from a reconstructed
>>protolanguage has nothing to do with the rate of language change.

>*Nothing* to do with it?  If a set of contemporaneously observed languages are
>all equidistant from a reconstructed protolonguage, then either each of them
>has changed at the same average rate, or the reconstructed protolonguage can't
>possibly match the real protolanguage, right?

First, a picky technical point.  Really picky, OK?  A protolanguage is a
construct, a product of the comparative method.  It models, but does not match
exactly, the real language hypothesized to be ancestral to the languages being
compared.  So I understand your question to mean

	"...or the reconstructed protolanguage can't possibly match the real
	ancestral language, right?"

Keep in mind that a protolanguage is essentially timeless, that is, it is
indeed unlikely that at any one time the ancestor looked and sounded exactly
like our reconstruction.  The purpose of a reconstruction is to provide our-
selves with a convenient short-hand for a set of correspondences; it functions
not unlike symbolic constants in abstract algebra and similar intellectual
exercises, in which the data would get in the way of making further generaliza-
tions that are perfectly clear in the abstracted form.

Now, one of the things we can do with a reconstruction is to attempt to ground
it in a timeframe.  This cannot be done in a vacuum; we need the data from real
language families to give us impressionistic values for interpretation.  In
this, historical linguistics is very much an historical study:  We can't go
back and try again, and we can't even be certain we know how everything that
happened happened.

We do find ourselves in this situation with languages written only within
recent history, such as the aboriginal languages of the Americas.  Haas wrote
that the Muskogean languages appeared to her to have diverged from Proto-Musko-
gean about as much as the Romance languages from Vulgar Latin; Callahan opined
that the Miwok languages were about like the Germanic family in that respect.

I haven't yet answered your question, I suppose because it is difficult.  Yes,
in your scenario each language has changed at the same *average* rate, but that
doesn't mean that that rate is the same as for another family, or even for the
same family if more data becomes available.

Further, in Indo-European studies at least we aren't in this situation.  We
work with the oldest materials we can find from each language, weighting the
contributions of each by our theoretical biases, with an eye to improving the
generalizations of the model we call Proto-Indo-European.  We still have as the
end product of all this work a timeless entity from which each language that
went into it diverges.  John Koontz' posting on the issues of age and degree-
of-divergence speaks to the frequent conflation of these concepts.

>>I am a linguist,

>By the way, Rich, how can I verify someone's claim to be a linguist?  My first
>thought was to look in _LInguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts_, but I
>couldn't find you there.

It can be difficult, especially if the linguist in question is very little
published.  I only have one published paper on my CV, in experimental phonetics
of all things (co-authored with Judith Maxwell--a Mayanist--in the 1978 Chicago
Linguistics Society Proceedings); everyone should have a hobby.

One way, though not infallible, is whether other linguists accept the claimant.
On the net, though, it's hard to be sure who even the acceptors are.

I have undergraduate and graduate degrees in linguistics from accredited
universities.  I have spent the last 15 years in computers, as an applications
and systems programmer, systems and facilities manager, and the like; for years
I was embarassed not to be "doing linguistics" other than for my own enjoyment.
When I attended the Chicago Linguistics Society meeting last year (the first
time in 11 years), old friends pointed out to me that I could pay my own way
and not worry about grant proposals and the like, which freed me to do the kind
of linguistics I liked rather than the kind that (not quite) paid the bills.

As with most students, there was a time when the last thing I read was the most
likely thing to be "right" in my opinion; that's part of being a student.  I've
noticed that recently the notes I scribble in margins are more likely to be
critical of things I think are "wrong" than agreements with things I think are
"right."  I suppose that means that my opinions have either matured or ossified
(or both).

>>Each language in the family contributes to the reconstruction, ideally with
>>the same weight though this has not always been entirely true in the past.

>Why "ideally with the same weight"?  I can immediately think of three reasons
>why equal weighting would not be ideal.

>(1) Our earliest records of the various languages are not contemporaneous.
>Since we have Latin, we can give zero weight to French and Italian.  Since we
>don't have a 2000-year-old ancestor of Lithuanian, we have to use modern
>Lithuanian, but we should give it a lesser weight than Latin, since it makes
>sense that older languages would be tend to be closer to the original.

There are things in the Romance languages that let us know that classical Latin
was somewhat idealized, even showing hypercorrections that conflict with what
we would expect given cognates in other language families.  Similar things can
be said regarding Sanskrit (both Vedic and Classical) and the Prakrits.  Thus,
we dare *not* give zero weight to any language.

Let's return to the original point of contention for a moment.  Old Lithuanian
(from the Lutheran catechism in the mid-16th century) shows the following (I
will use Neogrammarian terms so as to avoid controversy):

a) the PIE voiced plain and voiced aspirate stops have merged as voiced plain

b) short *o and *a have merged as /o/; a new short /a/ arises from a shortening
   process

c) the accent has gone from a centralized to a peripheral model (to use terms
   from Kiparsky 1973)

d) in comparison to Sanskrit, one case (the ablative?  I'll have to check) is
   gone and several new ones similar to those of Finnish have arisen

e) the verb is much simpler in comparison to Sanskrit and Greek; in the modern
   language third person singular and plural merge to a single form.

f) the adjective has developed a definite/indefinite set of endings based on a
   relative pronoun

These are just the first few things to be said about the language, some of
which are pretty far ranging.  If we go to a so-called glottalic model of PIE,
then it's even further gone in the phonology.

>(2) We know that geographical displacement correlates negatively with language
>change:  U.S. English and Quebec French are more archaic than British English
>and French French.  Hence we should give greater weight to languages whose
>speakers must have migrated.

You may know that; I don't.

>(3) Some changes are intrinsically more likely to have gone in one direction
>than in the other (or don't you believe this)?  We should give greater weight
>to languages with forms that are intrinsically likely to be earlier.

Which language do you give greater weight, the one that has palatalized velars
before front vowels, or the one that has affricated dentals before front
vowels?  The one that has undergone massive phonological change but still shows
syntactic phenomena that otherwise appear only in ancient languages across the
world, or the one which has completely different syntax but clear traces of a
morphology which easily underlies that of the old languages?

>>[...] the Germanic languages moved from the reconstructed SOV main clause
>>order of Proto-Indo-European to SVO before our earliest documents; the
>>Romance languages made the same change much later;

>But doesn't that mean that the reconstruction gives greater weight to the
>Romance languages than the Germanic, and (according to your "equal weight"
>dogma) should be shifted?

I don't understand how this follows at all.

>>So, I invite you to retract the claim that I told you that linguistic change
>>occurred at a constant rate.

>O.K., you don't believe that language changes at a constant rate.  But you do
>seem to believe that a reconstruction which assumes it does is "ideal".
>That's a pretty good example of a dogma.

You are reading a value judgment into the word "ideal" that is not there.  I
use it in the senses of "relating to or constituting mental images, ideas, or
conceptions" and of "an ultimate object or aim of endeavor" (taken respectively
from the first and second sets of definitions of "ideal" from the _webster_
program on our DEC-20).  It doesn't mean "beautiful" or "good" or "desirable"
or whatever it is to which you object; it simply means that we as linguists
do our job as deliberately, as purposively, as any other scientists.
--
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_