Concerning WALS - Butterflies and broken harmony

[Danielle E. Cyr]

Marginally speaking, I recently watched a science program on TV, most probably
NOVA (I don't quite remember), talking about a notion in physics, which was new
to me, i.e. «broken harmony». This notion explains why there is less antimatter
than matter in our universe. As much as I can remember, it seems that
immediately after the initial Big Bang the quantity of matter and antimatter
were even but, for some mysterious reason, that balance was as soon disrupted,
therefrom the notion of broken/disrupted harmony. And, the narrator went on to
say, this very fact of broken harmony is precisely what allowed/triggered the
entire process of evolution leading to us among other things.

It really struck me as a principle that applies to language as well.

Isn't the tendency to break/disrupt the established grammatical harmony in order
to produce eloquence at the basis of grammaticalisation? That was my reflection
to my graduate students in a seminar on the evolution of French grammar. From
which I went on to quote Gustave Guillaume who claimed that language itself is
the first theory of the Universe since language is the first and most
fundamental way mankind gave to itself while aiming at finding a way to 
see/put some order in an apparently fuzzy/unordered  universe.

And, subsequently, it made me realize that the notion of broken harmony could be
the golden thread, sought by so many of us trough time and continents, that
could reunite physics, chemistry and social sciences: everything is the way it
is because of broken harmony. The only tremendously awsome  question remaining
would then be: «What causes (local) harmony to break apart?

Something to think about?

Danielle Cyr

Quoting Tom Givon <tgivon at uoregon.edu>:

>
>
>
> Well, Martin, I wonder why you are impelled to make such sweeping
> statements, one's that are bound to shoot way beyond the mark. Do you
> really mean that WALS is what will put us on sound empirical
> foundations? At long last? Gets one to wonder what myself and my
> associates (let alone your guru Greenberg) have been doing  with our
> finite earthly time all those pre-WALS years; now don't it?
>
> Now, since you invoke Aristotle, I had better go an record  saying that
> he is the acknowledged founder of biology--not only empirical biology
> with his pioneering classification (according to an ascending degree of
> complexity--practically begging an evolutionary interpretation...), but
> also adaptive-functional--thus THEORETICAL--biology. It took Linaues and
> many before him another 2,000 years to complete Aristotle's
> classification; and it took Darwin another 200 years to find the
> theoretical explanation for the form-function isomorphisms identified by
> Aristotle. But to lump Aristotle (in Biology) as "speculative", like
> Plato, suggests a pretty careless reading of (at least) three of his
> books: De Partibus Animalium, De Generationem Animalium, and Historiae
> Animalium. If you want to delve into the history of scientific
> (observation-based AND theoretical) biology, these books are the place
> to start.
>
> As to how far we are in linguistics from the Darwinian stage: It seems
> to me that you are implying something that for me translates as follows:
> Darwin was hopelessly premature in delving into a theoretical
> explanation of variation in Biology, because in his time many species
> and sub-species of butterflies had not yet been described, let alone
> discovered. Well, here is what I bet you Darwin would have said to that:
> "I had my finches, and apparently they were enough, I didn't need all
> those the extra butterflies to come up with the theory of evolution by
> natural (adaptive) selection".
>
> If  the good folks of WALS  want to make a serious  claim that it is
> premature to do theoretical (explanatory)  linguistics, and thus to
> justify the time & money poured into their admirable enterprise, well,
> all they have to do is convince those of us who know just a bit about
> cross-language diversity (and also about the major source of such
> diversity--diachrony) that they are finding new types of variants, types
> that are so surprising and earthshaking that they manifestly falsify our
> current theoretical understanding (I hate to call what we do "theory",
> but it is definitely "theoretical"). All I can say is, from my remote
> corner, is that most of what I see of the endless compilation of more
> and more descriptions, is a lot of familiar types and sub-types. In
> other words, more and more species and subspecies of butterflies
> described in more and more minute detail. And like Darwin (or, like
> Watson and Crick), I'm inlined to say that the finches we already have
> in hand are enough to at least start building a theoretical, explanatory
> account of language. So all y'all have to do is falsify our predictions.
>
> Best,  TG
>
> ==========
>
>
>
> Martin Haspelmath wrote:
> > If you want to compare Chomsky with someone, I think the best analogy
> > is Socrates -- he asked a number of new questions in a very serious
> > way, without providing answers (Socrates also had clashes with
> > authority, rather fatal ones).
> >
> > Comparative biology became an empirically-based science long before
> > Darwin, but it was extremely difficult to make sense of the variation
> > until a new way of thinking became possible. Maybe that is the case
> > with comparative linguistics, too. It seems that we are still very far
> > from the Keplerian, Galilean or Darwinian stage.
> >
> > The World Atlas of Language Structures is primarily an attempt to put
> > comparative linguistics on an empirical foundation. Until recently, it
> > was often based on Platonic or Aristotelian speculation, like medieval
> > biology.
> >
> > Martin
> >> At 10:48 PM -0500 9/11/08, Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
> >> snip..
> >>
> >>>  we need a Copernicus, not a Chomsky or a Greenberg.
> >>
> >> A reminder that it was Kepler who formulated the planetary laws, and
> >> a comment that Chomsky has in common with Galileo a
> >> discipline-changing body of work (subsequently elevated into a theory
> >> of everything). Both also had clashes with authority although of a
> >> rather different kind. Maybe we haven't yet had our Darwin or
> >> Einstein but to be a Galileo is not to be sniffed at.
>
>


"The only hope we have as human beings is to learn each other's languages.  Only
then can we truly hope to understand one another."

Professor Danielle E. Cyr
Department of French Studies
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada, M3J 1P3
Tel. 1.416.736.2100 #310180
FAX. 1.416.736.5924
dcyr at yorku.ca