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In article <2vno1s$eg4@csi0.csi.uottawa.ca> misrael@csi.uottawa.ca
(Mark Israel) writes:

>In article <199407062210.PAA17283@netcom12.netcom.com>, Karen Kay
><karenk@NETCOM.COM> writes:

>>In article <2vf6b3$sqo@csi0.csi.uottawa.ca>, misrael@csi.uottawa.ca
>>(Mark Israel) writes:

>>> "The rate of change of a language is a constant"...)
>>
>> Where did you get this from?
>
>   From Rich Alderson (an apparent expert on historical linguistics 
>who posts frequently to sci.lang and to alt.usage.english).  I had 
>written, "What I recall reading in the book _In Search of the Indo-
>Europeans_ is that among recorded ancient languages, Sanskrit and 
>Latin were closest to the reconstructed original; and that among 
>modern languages, Lithuanian is closest."  He responded, "Point of 
>order.  They have all, *by definition*, diverged to the same 
>extent."  In e-mail, he clarified that he was not nit-picking about
>a definition; by "by definition", he really means "by dogma".

To quote a fairly well known television character:

	Whoa!  Back! up! the! truck!!!!

Your (apparently willful) misunderstanding of two issues, compounded by a
mistaken belief that I support that misunderstanding, must be cleared up right
now.

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

Second, do not put your notions into my mouth.  I am a linguist, a member of
that group whom you find so distateful, and as a linguist I seek, occasionally,
to clarify misinterpretations of the theoretical bases of linguistics, most
expecially of historical and comparative linguistics, by non-linguists.  When I
say something is true "by definition," I mean that in a rigourous sense; I most
certainly do *not* mean to say "by dogma."  I am perfectly capable of distin-
guishing between the two, and have nothing to gain by intentional obfuscation.

You note that my e-mail clarification to your query about definition; you fail
to note your return e-mail, to which I have not yet replied because I haven't
arrived at a sufficient response, regarding the distinction made by a biologist
between "divergence" and "diversity" and the possibility of this distinction in
linguistics.

You also fail to note that in my e-mail I stated a belief that you had seen
something in Mallory that was not there, that rather you had interpreted state-
ments as you wished to understand them.

Let me then outline the issues of protolanguages and attested languages, and of
determining rates of linguistic change of different types.

We define a _prototypical model of an unattested language based upon the recon-
struction, comparative or internal, of lexical items (words, bound morphemes,
etc.)_ (or, for brevity, a _protolanguage_) to be a timeless construct derived
by the negation of hypothesized changes from a near-"Platonic ideal" state.
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.

This is the first sense in which each language in a family can be said, *by
definition*, to have diverged from its reconstructed ancestor to the same
extent as any other.  It is, however, the less interesting of the two.

Let us examine for a moment the things which can change in the history of a
language.  Obviously, phonetics change vary greatly over time; this is even
true in time frames amenable to experimentation, as for example the work done
by Labov and other sociolinguists.  Such phonetic variability leads us on to
phonemic variation, among speakers of different dialects across time; again,
this is amenable to examination by a single generation of linguists.

Next, we can turn to various forms of lexical change.  It is possible to detect
acquisition and deletion of lexical items, reassignment of lexical semantics
(as, for example, specialization or generalization), and so on.  (NB: In this
context, _lexical_ is to be understood as "meaning assignable to individual
morphemes, free or bound.")  This is more difficult to study in a short time
frame, though not impossible; more certain results are probably to be found in
the long term.

Finally, we can turn to change in syntactic structures.  This is the most
difficult area of historical study, more because the synchronic basis has been
in flux for so long than through lack of data or interest.

Having taken note of the things that can change in the history of a language,
let us try to state what it would mean for any member of a language family to
"be closer" to the ancestral state than another:  We somehow have to provide a
metric for weighting changes against one another, even if it is as simple as
counting changes in different (sub)systems and comparing the raw scores.  The
final outcome of any reasonable metric, I would claim, is that any group of
changes which suffice to make one language distinct from another also suffice
to distinguish it from the ancestor.

Now that we have gone over that notion, let us examine briefly the question of
rates of change in language.

First, the question must be raised:  What kind of change?  The lexicostatisti-
cians and glottochronologists work with lexical replacement, change in a list
of supposed lexical items which resist this; they do not take into account
differences in phonology or phonetics as long as a case can be made for two
words somehow being "the same over time."  On this basis, the amount of change
can vary from nil (Old Icelandic to modern Icelandic) to roughly 60% (Inuit);
one must accept either widely varying rates of change or a much longer timeline
for Inuit than is currently held likely.

If we are to talk of phonetic or phonemic variation, we can note that in New
York City social dialects seem to have gone through three changes of rhotic vs.
non-rhotic (with hypercorrections) in the last 70 years, while the canonical
Vermonter has seemingly not changed in 200.

Similarly, to contrast changes in syntax, 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; and
Indo-Aryan languages are still mostly SOV but in many cases have an ergative
rather than an accusative marking (so that we should talk of Agent-Patient-Verb
instead), but this too can be seen in historical times.

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