Reply to Ghiselin (long)

[Ghiselin, Michael]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
          Dear Dr. Trask:
               Thank you for your long, thoughtful, and very useful
          response to my query about the attitude of linguists with
          respect to what might be called "chrono-languages" and
          "cladistic" language concepts.  Michael Ross and Isidore
          Dyen have also responded and I hope that others will too.
               Your response about putting one's foot in the same
          river twice is right on target.  When Heraclitus said that
          one cannot put one's foot in the same river twice, he was
          treating an individual river as the set of its components.
          At different times it consists of different water, therefore
          it is not the same set.  You and I consist of molecules,
          and in fact are largely water, so when we drink or excrete,
          we are not the same set.  Likewise with species: they are
          not the same as soon as one of the "set" dies or another is
          born.  And with languages, dropping out or adding an
          idiolect makes it a different language.
               One solution for such an exercise is to try to make
          each river, organism, species, or language, be an
          intensionally-defined class.  If we grant that, then there
          must be some defining property for the group of molecules,
          organisms, idiolects, or whatever.  This seems wierd for
          Styx, or Larry Trask, but for many people meets their
          intuitions about Homo sapiens or English.
               The other solution is to treat all the aformentioned
          entities as individuals.  Individuals have no defining
          properties, and they can change a great deal yet remain the
          same thing.  When there are stages of development of an
          organism, we do not say treat a child and an adult as
          different organisms, but as the same organism that has come
          to differ.  When we find cells dividing, we usually say that
          we have two new cells, except when they bud, and then we
          suppose that the original one continued to exist and the bud
          only is new.  The analogies with languages are pretty
          straight forward and obvious, as well as frustrating.
               What you say suggests that linguists like the family
          tree model, but realize that there are all sorts of problems
          and puzzles with it, which, however, can be dealt with
          adequately.  That is pretty much the position of zoologists
          with respect to the genealogical nexus that interests them.
               You mention pidgins and creoles.  This is particularly
          interesting because it suggests something that biologists
          once considered a possibility: origin of unrelated species
          by spontaneous generation.  Non-genetic languages of another
          kind would be ones with two or more direct ancestors.  In
          fact we have these in biology.  Allopolyploids are organisms
          with two diploid sets of chromosomes from different species.
           The famous Raphanobrassica is a cross between the cabbage
          and the radish; it has the root of a cabbage and the leaves
          of a radish.  Such dual ancestry is however fully compatable
          with the view that the species are the lineages and that
          they can evolve indefinitely yet still remain the same
          thing.  Likewise with languages.
               I was also very interested by your remarks about the
          political aspect of what a language is.  There may not be
          much of a connection here.  However, the decision that one
          dialect is a "standard" leading to intermediates going
          extinct suggests something like a model for sympatric
          speciation.
               Again, thank you very much.
          Sincerely,
          Micael Ghiselin