🚀 go-pugleaf

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?

> 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?

> 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.

> 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.

(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.

(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.

> [...] 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?

> 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.

misrael@csi.uottawa.ca			Mark Israel